The House of Representatives Member representing Oluyole Federal Constituency Honorable Tolulope Akande-Sadipe, was a pitiable sight at a meeting with the new executive officers and leaders of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Oluyole Local Government Area of Oyo State last Friday as she lamented over the loss of the majority of her supporters to Accord Party.
At the meeting held at her instance at Mount Pleasant Hotel, Podo, Ibadan, Sadipe confessed in a melancholic tone that mainstream of the supporters she had been nurturing for over six years under the Community Relations Volunteers CRV that she ostensibly established to rival the APC structure in the federal constituency had abandoned her.
Virtually alone now, Honorable Akande-Sadipe , according to sources at the meeting, told the gathering of party stalwarts and some community leaders that she would not follow her supporters to Accord Party but that she would maintain her membership of the APC.
But while Mrs Sadipe was in sorrow over her loss at Podo, Honorable Samuel Oyewole Idowu the erstwhile Director General of Sadipe’s CRV was dancing away at Muslim Grammar School, Odinjo in a flowing Accord attire where he was being received into Accord with a large number of former supporters of Honorable Sadipe almost simultaneously the same Friday.
The media had been lately awash with reports of Honourable Idowu leading supporters of Sadipe from the All Progressives Congress to Accord preparatory to the honourable eventual resignation from APC and defecting to the Accord.
As much as Honorable claimed ignorance of knowing about the exodus of her former supporters from APC, many of the leaders who put up straight faces as she spoke at the meeting feeling unconcerned believed that Sadipe’s abandonment by her former followers was a strategy gone awry.
As one of the leaders told this reporter in confidence: ‘’ her supporters abandoned her when they realised that she had led them astray. The leader quoting one of Sadipe’s followers said ‘’We found all her boasting to secure the leadership of the party for only CRV members with her so-called enormous power in Abuja, always dropping the names of the president, the First Lady and top aides of the president, to be empty. She did it in 2023 when she got the party’s House of Representatives ticket without attending a single meeting of APC for the whole four years of her first term.
“She has made us lose face in the party. She has made the leaders and members of APC whom we had robust relationships with before she joined us about two weeks before the party primaries in 2019, now to see us as enemies. We have to look for shelter in Accord before she ruins us completely, politically. Water has run dry in her pond. Omi ti tan leyin eja re.”