APC Crisis: Oshiomhole will beg Obaseki — Crack team Naija boss

By NELSON DAFE, Benin City

Chairman of Crack Team Naija, Albert Obazee, has boasted that embattled National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, will face the humiliation of coming to beg the governor of the state, Godwin Obaseki, a man whom he has reportedly been keen on stopping from returning as governor for a second term.

Crack Team Naija is a group of Edo youths who are working actively for the re-election of Governor Obaseki and Obazee himself is a youth leader who is very close to the governor.

Speaking recently in Benin City, Obazee celebrated the South South APC political leaders meeting hosted by Obaseki in Abuja and hailed the decision of the meeting to push for the recognition of the present Victor Giadom as the acting chairman of the APC, noting that there is effectively “a new sheriff in town.”

Obazee said of the South-South APC leaders’ decision to replace Oshiomhole with Giadom: “Oshiomhole has failed to do what we in Edo sent him to Abuja for. So let him come back home.”

The Crack Team boss accused Oshiomhole, who on Monday got a reprieve by way of stay of execution of his suspension, of using his position as National Chairman of APC to destabilise the Obaseki administration and APC in Edo State by giving support to a splinter group within the party known as the Edo Peoples Movement (EPM), a group that accuses the Edo Governor of not giving them enough patronage despite what they claim to have been their support for the election of the governor.

Obazee said when it finally dawns on Oshiomhole that he has lost out completely in the power struggle with Obaseki, he will come to Edo State Government House to beg the Governor. He warned members of the EPM that the game is up and that Oshiomhole will desert them soon.

“In fact, some EPM members have been privately calling and seriously begging the Governor for forgiveness,” Obazee said.

The Crack Team Naija boss is of the opinion that most of the governors are backing Obaseki over Oshiomhole, including some who openly profess their support for the embattled APC Chairman.

He said: “Governors are very powerful. There are only 36 governors in a country of about 200 million people and these men wield a lot of political power. They are mostly backing Obaseki because they are not comfortable with the harassment he has got from Oshiomhole. Even some who are publicly backing Oshiomhole are not really with him in this fight. They would say privately, ‘I am just standing with him publicly because he worked for my election but do you know how much he took as bribe from me? We don’t want such a person as National Chairman of the party’.”

Obazee, who code-switches between Edo, Pidgin and English languages in his broadcasts, is a forceful speaker who is widely followed across different social media platforms. He has drawn many support and criticisms depending on the divide his followers are in the Obaseki and Oshiomhole feud.