The candidate of Progressive Peoples Alliance, PPA, for Anambra State governorship election, Chief Godwin Ezeemo, has vowed to defeat incumbent Governor Willy Obiano at the gubernatorial election stated for November 18, 2017.
Chief Ezeemo, who made the vow while speaking with newsmen on his emergence as the candidate of the his party, said he was ready to replicate the incident of the 2003 election when an incumbent seeking for re-election lost to an opposition candidate at the poll in the state.
Recall that the business magnet-turned politician was weekend declared winner after polling 358 votes out of the total 600 vote cast by delegates in a primary election of the party held in Awka, the Anambra State capital.
The vote cast by 360 delegates drawn from the 21 Local Government Areas of the state showed that one delegate voted against Ezeemo while other vote was invalidated because it was blank
The declaration of Ezeemo, who was the sole gubernatorial aspirant under the PPA as winner by its PPA National Secretary, Mr. Kehinde Edun, threw the crowd of supporters and delegates into blissful jubilation.
Ezeemo, who declared his resolved to win the election, said he was not deterred by the power of incumbency, adding, “Well, as far as Anambra State is concerned, the precedence we had here was that an incumbent governor has lost election in Anambra State in 2003.”
“If it happened again, I mean it is not anomaly. It is the right thing to do. As long as the particular person that is elected into an office has not done well, obviously, the people that make choice will choose who will go for them.
“They wouldn’t want a repeat of failure. It is natural thing. Forget about the money that is being spent by anybody. If people know what they want do, they will do exactly what they want to do”, he said.
Noting the stage is set for him to occupy the Government House come 2018, Ezeemo declared that, “Now I have won. I have gotten the ticket. Now I am the gubernatorial candidate chosen by the people, by the entire Progressive Peoples Alliance in Anambra State.
“I think the sky is my limit as per what I want to do to clinch the position at Aguoka. I will do a lot of things politically that is socially accepted towards clinching the position at Government House, Awka.
“My appeal to the electorate is for the electorate to start to look at candidates now from the point of view of their antecedence, from the point of view of what they have done in the past, from the point of view of who they are, what they have been able to do in the society at large.
“And even within their family. It shouldn’t be the business as usual, when the electorate will not have any opportunity of knowing whom they want to vote for rather they are voting for a particular political party because they have mentioned the name, no.
“The electorate should now choose their candidate, who they want to vote for according to who that candidate is and not according to what his political party is. Because we have followed this routine in the past and that is the reason why we are shucked, that is the reason why we are held up in the forest.”
Ezeemo, who unveiled strategies that would place him ahead of APGA and APC in terms of grassroot mobilisation, described himself a grassroot man and mobiliser of people, adding, he and his party have the capacity to mobilise grassroot people to win the election.
He added, “We have been in the grassroot. We have mobilised since 2013. We started running a political party in the proper way a political party should be run.
“We are not the political party that should come and buy anybody, because as soon as they buy the electorate, the electorate will have nothing to gain again as soon as the election is won.
“But in our own, we are not buying the electorate. We appeal to the conscience of the electorate for them to make a choice between us and some other persons that are in the race. So, they know that their association is not based on the money they have collected. Do you understand that?
“Their membership of PPA is not based on the amount of money given to them, rather, on the quality of political party, the ideology of the political party and the antecedence of what he political party has being doing.
“That is why they based their choice on not been given N1,000 or N2,000 which other political parties are doing today. We have never done that because we have a great followership.”
