Ibrahim Oloriegbe, the Kwara Central Senatorial District candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has vowed to unseat the Senate president, Bukola Saraki.
Mr Saraki is contesting the seat under the flagship of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Mr Oloriegbe, while speaking at a press conference in Lagos recently, said Mr Saraki does not share the Islamic values of his people and hence should not be returned to the Senate.
He boasted that he would defeat Mr Saraki and end his political dynasty in Kwara State in the February 16 election, adding that the people of Kwara were tired of Mr Saraki and his hold over the state.
“In the past 16 years, our society has been in the grip of people who do not share our common values and heritage. They are dealers whose concerns are at variance with the people’s aspirations. They are leaders with (an) inordinate appetite for wealth acquisition.
“They are political voyagers and power merchants. They don’t share our Islamic values and culture of leadership,” he said.
“Our communities and indeed, Kwara State have been poorly represented at the federal level; poor representation and advocacy (have) deprived us of legitimate human, fiscal, economic and developmental entitlements,” Vanguard quoted him as saying.
The reason for Mr Oloriegebe’s allusion to the Islamic religion is not immediately clear given that the Senate president is a Muslim and at no time did he renounce his faith.
He, however, expressed confidence in defeating Mr Saraki given that the Senate president’s sister, Gbemisola Saraki, supports his aspiration, as well as having the full support of Kwara APC.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson to Mr Saraki, Yusuph Olaniyonu, dismissed the threat, describing Mr Oloriegbe as a seasonal politician.
Mr Olaniyonu said the candidate does not have the full support of APC as he claimed.
He dismissed the APC candidate as a joker, who, he claimed, addressed the press to cause a distraction for Mr Saraki’s leadership of the PDP campaign to unseat the APC federal administration.
“Dr. Ibrahim Oloriegbe is not a candidate in the senatorial election. Rather, he is the candidate of a faction in the APC, the Bolarinwa faction, which the court, in a subsisting and unchallenged judgement, rejected and rather, recognised the Balogun-Fulani faction. Okowa urges Nigerians to contribute Community Devt.
“Oloriegbe belongs to a group of people known in Kwara State as ‘seasonal or visiting’ politicians. The people do not see them. They don’t relate with the people. They don’t help the people and their community until six months to the election when they move in noxious money and they start printing posters.
“They have done this every election period. His present noise, as well as that of Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq, Lai Mohammed and the rest, is not different from what they have been doing since 2003. The result will also not be different,” he added.
“If he, like others, has the sole agenda to destroy that dynasty without promising the people any developmental agenda, then, he has failed. He never promised the people anything good or developmental in nature. They only target (is) Saraki. That ‘bring him down’ syndrome, empty envy, petty jealousy are unislamic and contradictory to the true values of an Ilorin man.”