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From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
All Progressives Congress (APC) has promised to do everything legally and humanly possible to ensure that the defeat to the ruling party in Osun State governorship election did not happen during the 2023 presidential poll.
The ruling party however blamed the loss to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on the sharp division among the party chieftains and stakeholders in the state.
APC Deputy National Organising Secretary, Nze Chidi Duru, who reacted to the defeat, assured that every logistic will be perfected to ensure that it did not repeat at the national election.
“The Osun State defeat is a lesson learnt for our party. It gives room for introspection. But, more importantly, INEC has proven again to be a credible institution by providing platform for free, fair election. We want to urge them to continue to build on it. It also shows that Nigeria’s vote is beginning to count,” he noted.
On whether the defeat will affect APC’s outing in 2023 presidential election, Nze Duru said: “Regardless of what happened in Osun, we are confident that it will not happen during the presidentialelection. We will certainly submit to the will of the people. It is better that it happened now than happening in 2023.
“What happened now will make us go back to the drawing boards to review the lessons learnt, where we did not do right and how we can correct it. We will be much more strategic. Our engagement across board will be intensify.
“Nothing will be left to chance because everybody is important in the political space. It is important that we all pull together in peace from inside than from outside. We have time to do all of these.
“Nobody would like to see the Osun experience in the larger scale of national election. That will be a disaster for the party. If it happens, it will mean that we don’t know how to manage victory at the national level if we exit after eight years. That is the lesson for all of us in the Osun State governorship election,” he said.
Asked where the APC got it wrong in the Osun election, the deputy organiser replied: “Like in all human endeavour, reconciliation did not happen as quick as we would have wished it happen in Osun. That was why the stakeholders were pulling from different sides. There were stakeholders in Osun that pulled differently which means that they did not work together.
“I am sure that if stakeholders engagement was successful and we had worked together, we would have seen positive result. Otherwise, every other thing that was supposed to be done were perfectly done. The campaign, the logistics, human and material resources were deployed. But since the stakeholders were pulling from different direction, we opened our flanks,” he opined.
