Olajide Adediran, governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Lagos, says Nyesom Wike, governor of Rivers, tried to thwart his governorship ambition during the party’s primary election in Lagos.
Speaking on Wednesday during an interview with Channels Television, Adediran, better known as Jandor, said Wike worked against him during the primary.
On Tuesday, Wike, while speaking at a conference organised by the wives of Lagos state officials, said he is in support of Sanwo-Olu‘s administration because he is “doing well”.
Sanwo-Olu is currently seeking re-election as governor of Lagos on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), while Wike, a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), will complete his second term in office in 2023.
Speaking on the incident, Adediran said Wike had no reason to support Sanwo-Olu, since the latter has “nothing” to show in terms of execution of projects in his three years as governor of Lagos.
“During my primary, he did not buy my form. He was supporting somebody else in Lagos because he needed structure to win (PDP presidential primary). I don’t have that structure,” he said.
“They had done all the structures in the PDP before my coming and I said to him in the presence of governor Seyi Makinde that ‘your friend is not supporting me in Lagos’. I repeated it when I went to Port Harcourt.
“That was before primary. He said he was supporting somebody else and I understood why he was supporting someone else because I didn’t have anything at that time.
“But today, I picked that ticket with all his might within the PDP, and I’m the candidate of the party today. I don’t think I have done anything wrong for him to bring such treatment to Lagos, and I see how APC was jumping up and down because of that.
“If for anything, that brought a lot of sympathy, because you will never expect a party man, a governor of a state in our party for that matter, a national leader, will come and do that for any reason at all.
“This governor Wike that came to Lagos saying somebody has performed, let me ask him how many times has this governor invited him to come to Lagos to commission a project or any governor at all, the way he (Wike) is commissioning up and down.
“For the four years of the governor, he has never commissioned one single project. In Ambode’s tenure, three years, we saw Abule Egba flyover, Ajah flyover, airport international road and the bypass.
“This government — nothing to show for everything they have done. Yet, their budget in 2020, according to them, performed 88 percent; in 2021, performed 86 percent; and in 2022, for half of the year, it is on 77 percent — both revenue and expenditure.
“Yet, nothing to show for it. What are you celebrating? You just want to come to Lagos and do to that on nothing. If he had done his assignment very well, I don’t think he would have said that person was performing.”