*APC Leaders Unconcerned
House of Representatives member representing Oluyole federal constituency of Oyo State, Hon. Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, was a pitiable sight at a meeting with the new executive officers (Exco) and leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Oluyole Local Government Area (LGA) of the state last Friday as she lamented the loss of majority of her supporters to another political party, Accord.
At the meeting, held at her instance, at Mount Pleasant Hotel, Podo, Ibadan, Akande-Sadipe confessed in a melancholic tone that the mainstream of the support she had been nurturing for over six years under the Community Relations Volunteers (CRV) that she ostensibly established to rival the APC structure in the federal constituency, had abandoned her.
Seeming virtually alone now, Hon. Akande-Sadipe , according to sources at the meeting, told the gathering of party stalwarts and some community leaders that she would not follow her supporters to Accord, insisting that she would stay put in APC.
But while the lawmaker grieved over her loss, the erstwhile Director General of Akande-Shadipe’s CRV, Hon. Samuel Oyewole Idowu was sighted dancing away at Muslim Grammar School, Odinjo in a flowing Accord attire as he was being received into Accord Party alongside a reasonable number of former supporters of Hon. Akande-Sadipe almost simultaneously same Friday.
The media had lately been awash with reports of Hon. Idowu leading the lawmaker’s supporters from APC to Accord preparatory to the legislator’s possible eventual resignation from APC to Accord by defection.
But as Hon. Akande-Sadipe spoke of the exodus of her former supporters, many of the leaders at the event reportedly muttered in private that the abandonment was a strategy gone awry.
A source at the meeting said: ‘’Her supporters abandoned her when they realised that she had not led them well. The leader, quoting one of Akande-Shadipe’s followers, said ‘We found all her boasting to secure the leadership of the party for only CRV members with her so-called enormous power in Abuja, always dropping the names of Mr President, the First Lady and top aides of the President, to be empty. She did it in 2023 when she got the party’s House of Representatives ticket without attending a single meeting of APC for the whole four years of her first term. She has made us lose face in the party’.”
