Kogi Guber: November 11 experience shows Kogi East Can’t produce Governor Without Other Zones – Melaye Reveals

Following the just concluded November 11, Governorship election in Kogi State, a candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Senator Dino Melaye, has asserted that the concluded election left a lot of lessons in the anal history of the State.

Melaye, who formerly served as Senator for Kogi West District noted that lessons learnt from the November 11 governorship election indicated that one particular tribe can’t decide the fate of the entire State.

Melaye maintained that the people of Kogi East Senatorial District failed because thought they could be governor without other zones.

Senator Melaye spoke during a dinner organised in his honour by members of his campaign organisation in Abuja, on Thursday.

He said one key takehome from the governorship election was that Kogi East people now know “more than ever before” that they cannot win the governorship seat without support from other Senatorial districts.

According to him, Kogi West also learned from the last election and listened to the words of wisdom from the elders, “not from commercialised characters who because of their individual and selfish interests created problems for us.”

“One of the lessons is that the East now knows more than ever before that they cannot become governor alone.

“You will have to collaborate with another zone to become governor. We went through these elections, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of betrayals, and so many things,” the PDP candidate said.

Buttressing the government’s stance that Kogi State is peaceful, the former Senator confirmed that he had a very peaceful campaign, insisting that all his tours were devoid of violence.

He said, “Throughout the campaign, not once did we have any gunshot at us. Not even once. We were moving around the state throughout the dead nights. We even went to Bassa.

“We were driving through that very lonely road on unholy hours of the night. We got to Anyigba at about hours like 12 midnight or 1 am and the kind of stories of gunshots, there were no cases of gunshots at us or the kind of killings like what we were told when the SDP visited any other place in the East.

“We didn’t experience any of such, we didn’t lose any soul. This, we are grateful to God.”

He also berated some leaders of the West for not wholeheartedly working with him, saying that they contributed to his defeat.

“There was this very false message that some leaders from the West that one of my leaders said that I wanted to create confusion. Yet some leaders insisted and said this is what they were going to do. Everybody has been served breakfast.

“I want to believe that by the grace of God, we have learnt a lot of lessons from this election. We gave Kogi the type of campaign they have never seen. That’s the truth,” he noted.

Melaye, however, gave himself and his team a thumbs up for running “a sophisticated campaign.”

“We had a policy document that took about three months to put together and we had the message and we went round. And by the grace of God, we cannot also say we lost because there was no election.

“By the time we do the statistics, what we spent in this election has never been spent by PDP in the history of Kogi State. We know. I mean, we know that,” he said.

Urging his supporters not to despair, Melaye said they should not lose hope as there would be another opportunity shortly.

“So, we need not get disillusioned. It’s not to get disenchanted. It’s not to get discouraged.

“It’s for us to hold ourselves together as a political family and say what we lost on the streets, we will regain at the roundabout. And this election also taught a lot of lessons,” he stated.