Tinubu, Osun speaker disagree over 2003 elections

A former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and the Speaker of the Osun State House of Assembly, Chief Adejare Bello, on Sunday disagreed over the conduct of the 2003 governorship elections in Osun State.

Both personalities expressed varying views on the issue in Osogbo, the Osun State capital during the public presentation of the Osun State Governor’s Seal and Osun State Coat of Arms. Bello, who addressed the gathering earlier, said former Governor Bisi Akande, who ruled the state between 1999 and 2003, lost re-election because he retrenched civil servants.

Bello, who acknowledged that the Akande administration developed Osun State immensely through adherence to democratic ideals, said the sacking of public workers was a major blot in the achievements of the four-year administration.

But Tinubu, who spoke later, said he would begin his speech by correcting the alleged misnomer by Bello. He stressed that Akande lost his re-election bid to rigging by the Peoples Democratic Party, to which Bello belongs.

He said, “I want to correct the erroneous impression created by the speaker; it was not the reduction in the civil service force that removed Chief Bisi Akande but it was the massive rigging machinery of the ‘Poverty Development Party’ that removed Akande administration in 2003.


“The rigging in Osun State was monumental. The Akande administration was loved by the masses because of its achievements were monumental.”

Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, said his administration was ready to re-engineer and develop the concepts of integrity in the 20-year-old state.

He said, “As we have all seen, the state has gone very far in the wrong direction. We discovered that our projection to the world does not reflect who we really are.”