As the face-off between Governor Adams Oshiomhole and the Patriarch of the Igbinedion family, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion, deepens, Edo State All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday, asked the former governor to defend allegations against him rather than stoking what it described as unnecessary sentiments.
The Edo APC in a statement signed by the APC State Publicity Secretary, Comrade Godwin Erhahon, alleged that the Benin Chief has continued to dish out falsehood to distort the facts of the Governor’s address in order to score cheap points.
The statement said: “We have watched with amusement, the desperate attempts by Chief Gabriel Igbinedion and his sympathisers to portray the Comrade Governor, Adams Oshiomhole as the villain.
“It would be recalled that Chief Igbinedion had, since 2012, deployed his radio and television stations to conduct incessant and undeserved campaign of calumny and falsehood against the person and office of the Comrade Governor until early this year.
“The Independent Radio and TV (ITV) had at a time publicly apologised, recanted their stories and the virulent attacks abated. From what we now know, the renewed onslaught against the Governor is directly attributable to the fact that he exposed the scandalous transfer of state land to the Chief in questionable circumstances during the tenure of his son Chief Lucky Igbinedion as Governor.
“There is also the issue of using Government facilities to train students in private institutions owned by Chief Gabriel Igbinedion at the expense of Edo tax payers while the chief smiles to the bank with hundreds of millions of naira.
"The Governor equally exposed how his son, former Governor Lucky Igbinedion, awarded the contract for the construction of Iguobazuwa-Okada road to his younger brother, Bright Igbinedion who diverted the contract sum to construct roads within Igbinedion University, leaving the people of Okada and the neighbourhood to continue to suffer and risk their lives on the bad road."