Osun Osogbo festival: APC condemns militarisation of non-state actors
By Ismail Azeez, Osogbo
The All Progressives Congress (APC), Osun State chapter has condemned the militarisation of the celebration of the grand finale of this year’s Osun Osogbo festival by the non-state actors which resulted in the killing of three persons.
The state chairman of the APC, Sooko Tajudeen Lawal, in a statement issued by the party’s Director of Media and Information, Chief Kola Olabisi, in Osogbo, over the weekend stated that it was unfortunate that this year’s Osun Osogbo festival was bedevilled with tragic incidents of loss of lives of the people.
“A fact-check on the situation that led to the killing of the three persons who were suspected cultists loyal to the state Governor Ademola Adeleke-led administration indicated that it was a supremacy battle between two rival cultist groups on the entourage of the governor that brewed the ghastly violent attack.
“It was also discovered by a credible source close to the centre of the event that two other persons got drowned during the celebration of the grand finale of the annual Osun Osogbo festival at the Osun River yesterday.
Lawal remarked that it was, however, strange that 24 hours after the killings of the suspected cultists and the drowning of two other devotees of the Osun River, the Governor Adeleke-led administration has not deemed it fit to issue an official statement on the unsavoury development.
The state APC chairman explained that he wasn’t surprised that the Adeleke administration is sanguinary and violence-laden as the governor himself relishes in moving with armed notorious thugs across the state, mainly those who are on the Wanted List of the police.
He observed that Adeleke could not condemn the brutal activities of the thugs as they were those who rigged the last series of elections for him and the other candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) where no fewer than 30 members of the APC were mowed down through the bullets of the PDP political hoodlums.
Lawal tasked the police authorities and other statutory sister security agencies in the state to investigate the killings at the grand finale of the celebration of the Osun Osogbo festival.
The state APC Chairman explained further that the Adeleke-led administration owed the people of the state an explanation why the government has refused to make any pronouncement on the untoward development which claimed the lives of five persons.
In Lawal’s words, “It has never been this bad in this state. That the cheapest item is avoidable death by political hoodlums who have taken the centre stage in the administration of Governor Adeleke. Each day, it is sorrow, tears and blood, courtesy the activities of their violent thugs.
“It is on record that such inhuman and calamitous incident was never, for once, witnessed during the administration of the immediate-past Governor Gboyega Oyetola,” the State APC Chairman recalled.
