By Wole Balogun, Ado Ekiti
EX-SPEAKER of the Ekiti State House of Assembly, Dele Olugbemi, who brokered peace between Governor Ayodele Fayose and his estranged godson, Dr. Temitope Aluko (aka TKO) during the March 8 dramatic truce meeting that dumbfounded the world in Lagos, yesterday opened more can of worms. Reacting to Aluko’s allegation of perfecting the June 21, 2015 governorship poll rigging in an hotel and alleged diversion of N5.2 billion refund from the Federal Government for the rigging, Olugbemi accused Aluko of peddling lies.
Olugbemi spoke on Ekiti FM 91.5 Radio station yesterday and challenged Aluko to present himself for a traditional oath taking to know who was saying the truth between both of them over the truce meeting.
He said he has realized that Aluko is a professional and unrepentant blackmailer who uses that to earn a living and only gullible minds would take anything he says serious.
“Once someone has turned himself into a parasite, scavenger and an unrepentant traitor, there is nothing he cannot deny just to get a pot of porridge. He is just like a chameleon. He would say yes in the morning, no in the afternoon and a combination of both yes and no in the evening,” the ex-Speaker said.
Olugbemi dropped a bombshell when he said that it was Aluko who initiated the failed impeachment plot against Governor Fayose during the G 19 debacle with the last session of the state Assembly.
His words: “When I was the Speaker of the Ekiti House of Assembly, TKO was the secretary of our party, PDP. I have never seen a traitor like him in my life. He was the one who initiated and facilitated an arrangement with the APC towards using the House to impeach Fayose. He took me to Osun and Lagos for the arrangement.
“ I refused to do this and that strained our relationship. But we resumed our relationship shortly after the end of my tenure as Speaker. When I discovered that he was always scheming against the governor and conniving with enemies to impeach him after about one and half years into this government, I decided to call him and advised him against his moves. I told him that in politics there cannot be permanent enemies but permanent interests. I told him that decamping to another party would not help, that as for me, I prefer to stay in PDP and demand for what is mine.
“ I am so surprised that he could come out to denounce and rubbish with lies, a peace meeting I brokered between him and Governor Fayose. The CCTV camera has the details of all that we discussed with the governor inside the Eko Hotels. As an Ekitiman, I am totally ashamed of him. He has defaced himself, not Ekiti.
“Politics aside, no Ekitiman will subscribe to what he is doing. Even the people he is working for have a limit they can tolerate him because, whether he likes it or not, he has destroyed himself. Soon, he would sink into oblivion
“But Aluko would deny all these because he has always been a Judas. As PDP secretary in Ekiti, he was working with APC for over a year and was working against his own party towards impeaching the governor. Only somebody like Aluko with no integrity can go to Adaba FM station to tell all those lies.
“Aluko, it was who had the ticket for the House of Representatives but sold it to his Action Congress of Nigeria opponent, Opeyemi Bamidele to make that one emerge a member of the House of Representatives then..TKO is just a political jobber. He once went to Accord Party to negotiate. I’ll still mention the names of those people if he continues saying those rubbish he’s saying. I call him an academic fraud because when he was lecturing at the Ekiti State University, he allegedly got admission for many candidates but they only discovered that he got fake admissions for them after four years when they were supposed to graduate. He has succeeded in destroying the lives of those people. He was asked to resign his appointment then.
“Those innocent military officers Aluko has implicated and made them to lose their jobs and career, do you think those ones would just fold their arms? He knows he is in big trouble and that is why he is running from pillar to post. He no longer has electoral value and cannot even win in his ward. If institutions were strong in this country, and if Aluko had been working against an APC governor and not Fayose, he would have been in detention by now.
Asked if it was fair for Fayose to ditch Aluko after using him to win election, Olugbemi said: “”if you were in Fayose’s shoes, and Aluko, who was the secretary of the PDP in the state where Fayose is the head of the party; and Aluko took the Speaker of the House in Fayose’s government to a secret meeting where there was a plot to impeach the governor and was also working for an opposition party plotting to unseat Fayose, would you still fulfill that promise and make Aluko your Chief of Staff?
Reacting last night, Aluko said “I have no issue with him. Olugbemi is doing the bidding of his master (Fayose) as part of efforts to sustain the propaganda against me. I challenge him to bring proof that I was on the payroll of the APC.
“Instead of addressing the message I passed about his master to the public, they are busy attacking the messenger. Why should I take him to a meeting with APC 19 when I was not in the party? It is all lies.”