Agbaje condemns disqualification suit

One of the governorship aspirants on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party in Lagos State, Mr. Jimi Agbaje, has described a suit seeking his disqualification from contesting the party primaries as “political mudslinging.”An aspirant for the governorship ticket on the platform of the party, Mr. Nurudeen Balogun, had filed a suit with a Lagos High Court, seeking to prevent the party and the Independent National Electoral Commission from accepting Agbaje as a governorship aspirant or a candidate of the party.Balogun argued that Agbaje only became a member of the party in July 2014.He said Agbaje had neither spent the two years required by political aspirants to be eligible to contest nor received the party’s waiver for the supposed deficiency.In his reaction to the suit, Agbaje, in a statement by his Director of Media and Publicity, Felix Oboagwina, denied that Agbaje only recently joined the PDP.The statement quoted Agbaje as saying, “There is no truth in the allegation. No truth at all. He (Balogun) is not correct. For the sake of clarity, I joined the PDP in December 2011 and I joined the party at the ward level in line with the party’s constitution.“I registered as a member of the party in my ward of residence, Ward B, Apapa, Lagos. The register is there for anybody to check. We expect that the petitioner, who had earlier sent a petition to the party, should have learnt that the party did not dignify his petition with a response because it lacked merit. The party even screened me and gave me a clearance certificate.“Going by the registration date, Agbaje has crossed all hurdles for contesting in the PDP, whose constitution in Section 50(9), stipulates that aspirants must be card-carrying members of the party for a minimum of two years. However, people should appreciate the waiver provision in the party’s constitution.“Balogun and his paymasters should know that politics has moved beyond people just creating problem where there is none and crying wolf unnecessarily.”Also reacting to the allegation, the Director General of Agbaje’s Campaign Team, Alhaji Rahman Owokoniran, described the court case as pointless.