FORMER deputy governor of Edo State, Philip Shaibu, has declared his support for the opposition’s All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Monday Okpebholo, in Edo’s governorship election on September 21 2024.
According to Shaibu, the governorship race began with three homeboys: himself, Okpebholo, and Olumide Akpata of the Labour Party.
“I will support a homeboy. I came into politics to contest as the governor of Edo State because I need the government to return to homeboys – people who understand our plight, people who understand what the people are feeling. Even the United Nations talks about the need for assessment. We don’t want outsiders, we have experimented with outsiders and it’s not working. So, this time around, we want homeboy,” he said.
“Today, I came in as a homeboy. We have only two homeboys in the major political parties in Edo State. One is in labour, and one is in APC, and I choose to follow another homeboy in the APC. The man they are parading in the PDP is an outsider, and we have also agreed that no more godfatherism in Edo. So, the man the PDP is trying to portray in Edo now is the godson of Obaseki and there is no way godsons will now be governor of Edo.”
The former deputy governor was speaking on the sidelines of the 2024 Father’s Day celebrations at Saint Paul’s Catholic Church in Benin City, Edo State’s capital. He was one of the altar servers for the main Mass.
Shaibu stated that now that he had stepped out of the competition, he preferred the surviving homeboys in Okpebholo.
He pointed that Edo Governor Godwin Obaseki has stated that everyone is free to pick who to support in any election, which is why he has officially backed the APC governorship candidate in the race despite his PDP membership.
He emphasized that his opposition support is not anti-party, pointing out that Governor Obaseki was a PDP and Labour Party candidate in the previous election.
“The governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki says that everybody has the right to support whoever he wants to support, but he forgot also that he doesn’t have the right to stop anybody from whom he wants to support,” he said.
“But I take one part from what he said, we all have the right to support whom we want to support, so it’s my right to decide who I want to support.”
