The All Progressives Congress in Ekiti State has described as “untrue” reports that the convoy of the APC lawmakers of the Ekiti State House of Assembly killed a man at Efon Alaaye-Ekiti on Tuesday.
It said the report by Governor Ayodele Fayose’s media aide, Lere Olayinka, alleging that the lawmakers’s convoy killed a man was a “figment of his imagination and one in the series of media spins he had been using to mislead the people to get sympathy.”
Reacting to social and electronic media reports of the purported killing, the Special Adviser on Media to Speaker Adewale Omirin, Mr. Wole Olujobi, said Olayinka was in a familiar terrain of mindless propaganda to mislead the public.
The party argued that its members could not have been responsible for the death of anyone in Efon Alaaye when they were turned back by soldiers in Itawure, a distance of not less than two kilometers from where the deceased was reportedly shot dead.
Olujobi said, “The truth is that no one was killed. Nobody saw a dead body on the way up to Itawure junction, where the soldiers disallowed us to pass. Itawure junction is not the same as Efon-Alaaye, so we don’t know where he got his story.
“However, we heard that Fayose removed a dead body from the mortuary and presented it to Efon people, claiming that Honourable Folorunso Ogundele, a member of the House of Assembly and an indigene of Efon-Alaaye, was the one who pulled the trigger to kill a fellow Efon-Alaaye man in order to instigate violence in the town against him.
“For those who know Fayose very well, this story is typical of his rabble-rousing tactics to cause mob action against opponents.
“It is gratifying that the people were able to quickly decipher that Fayose was up to mischief to set brothers against brothers.”
The statement explained that the soldiers, who reportedly stopped the lawmakers on their way, offered no explanation for their action.
“Instead of losing our cool because of their strange behaviour, we just left the place,” it stated.
The APC said sources later confirmed that the soldiers were allegedly under a firm instruction of Brigadier-General Aliyu Momoh to disallow the lawmakers from passing through the checkpoint.
It said Momoh, whose voice was heard among those that were implicated in the leaked audio tape detailing Ekiti election fraud, was the Commander of the Battalion, where the soldiers at the checkpoint were attached.
Meanwhile, the lawmakers have vowed to go ahead with the impeachment proceedings against Fayose, saying the lawmakers had a constitutional duty and responsibility to probe any infraction of the constitution.
