Lai Mohammed: Governor Abdulrazak Came in Broke, Spent Nothing on his Election
POLITICS DIGEST- The war of words between the Minister of Information and Culture,Lai Mohammed, and the governor of Kwara state, Abudlrahman Abdulrazaq, has continued to heat up with the former accusing the latter of deceiving the party hierarchy about his financial status and ended up spending nothing on the election that brought him to office in 2019.
Speaking in an interview with ThisDay, Mohammed said Abdulrazak had claimed to be wealthy and gave an impression that he had all the resources to support his election before getting the APC ticket, “but as soon as he got the ticket, we realised that he had no money at all and that was why it now dawned on me that I had to go out and raise funds.”
“This is because, in the first instance, he has contested elections several times in Kwara State. Let him tell us what results he had in 2011 and 2015. Now, I’m going to come back to that. I think he made heavy weather of campaign contributions.
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“Number one, I think it’s very reckless on the side of any mature politician to start talking about who gave what for an election. I think it shows a lot of recklessness, inexperience and desperation. Now, the truth of the matter was that the impression he gave the party leaders was that he was a very wealthy man. That was the dummy he sold to the party leaders.
“The party leaders bought it because at the time we went for elections in 2018/2019, Kwara state was in a very hopeless stage for the APC. Hopeless in the sense that all the electoral structures from governor to senator to house of reps members were all in the hands of the PDP.
“As a matter of fact, of the 24 members of the House of Assembly, only one was APC. All the commissioners were PDP, all the council chairmen were PDP, all the councillors were PDP. The task before the party was much. Saraki was going to roll out everything to make sure he won. So we would need somebody with a deep pocket as a candidate to match him. He sold that dummy to everybody.
“You know they say oja okun kun in Yoruba, we say it’s night market kind of, and he convinced them and they sold to us and we all bought it, but as soon as he got the ticket, we realised that he had no money at all and that’s why it now dawned on me that I had to go out and raise funds.
“He set up a 200-man campaign committee for his governorship election, which he sent to me, which I approved but he did not even give us one penny to run it. He didn’t fund it and this is a man who ran a governorship campaign. He had no office. He was using one of the aspirants’ office. That is the truth of the matter. Let him tell us the address of his office”. Mohammed said.
