Former All Progressives Congress (APC) National Chairman, Senator Adams Oshiomhole has explained what accounted for the re-election of Imo State Governor Hope Uzodimma in the November 11 off-cycle election.
He said the performance of the governor endeared him to the hearts of the electorate who returned at the poll.
“The people chose based on the performance of the governor in the last four years,” Oshiomhole told State House reporters in Abuja Tuesday after a meeting with Vice President Kashim Shettima.
According to him, most analysis of how the people made choices in the inner recesses of the states, especially in the media, were based on wrong indices, which did not represent the realities of the voters across the states.
Oshiomhole said: “Particularly for Imo State, there have been a lot of forces working to undermine security in the state, and they’ve resorted to measures that are adding tension in Imo and some people even want to plunge the state into darkness, believing that when it is dark, the people cannot vote.
“But, my take away from the Imo election is that these forgotten majority of people who are voiceless, who can’t even have access to you, have the power of the ballot.
“That it is not what sponsored commentators say on television or sponsored writers write in newspapers that will inform their judgment, their judgments will be formed by what they have seen the governor doing, and those aspect of what the governor is doing that touch them.
“For example, when the governor constructs a road to the village, a village that was not accessible before and you tell those villagers that the governor is bad. They’ll say ‘he may be bad for you o, but he’s good for me’.
“When I saw the governor commissioning a very modern hospital in a remote area and you go on television to say ‘that Governor Hope is a bad man, ’they’ll say ‘he’s bad to you, but he gave us hospital. We are going to give him our votes’.
“For me, that is the beauty of democracy and it also put on notice, commentators that they shouldn’t sit in the comfort of state capitals and comment almost with managerial confidence about the goings on in the state when they have never even visited that state.
“The worst mistake you can make is to rely on sampling people in Abuja whom we call ward 17. They don’t exist in the states but they are very vocal. They are the ones you will find being hosted by TV anchors, but those voiceless guys, they are potent.
“They are actually the ones that vote, while the commentators asking whether people have started fighting? I think that what has happened in Imo shows that this democracy cannot be arrested by urban elites.”