The Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Mr. Sunday Dare, has charged stakeholders of Oyo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to shelve their differences and work together for the party’s success.
The minister, who spoke through a statement on Saturday in Ibadan, urged the party leaders in the state to go beyond setbacks and disappointments they had experienced in the past.
He told the stakeholders to act in unity as the APC government had a track record of achievements which he said the state had not experienced before.
Dare said: “Despite the extraordinary events that have beset us in the intervening months and perhaps because of these subsequent new challenges, the call to unity and for reconciliation remains our great imperative.
“The APC in Oyo State can only progress if we pull together. Disunity is just another way of defeat. We fight against each other at our own collective peril. Ambition is part of the body of politics.
“However, unbridled ambition serves only to tear that body down. Undue ambition and resultant fractiousness will cause to collapse the very thing we seek to build.
“The current tendency of trying to build individual nests and of running various political plots and schemes will fail to achieve what is sought. These things will only cloud and fog the air so much that none of us will be able to see our way through.
“Not only will the party be impaired. Many of our individual objectives will be dashed also because the state chapter of the party will lack the strength and cohesion to carry us through to the needed ends and to the desired victories.
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“There are many good and illustrious people in our state party. With this pedigree of members we should not know the uncertain condition in which we now find ourselves.
“Part of the problem is due to the high quality, high octane membership we have. People of such talent and experience are unjustly denied due respect and consideration in party deliberations and decisions.
“However, some of our members have crossed the subtle line between commanding due respect as opposed to seeking to take undue command of the party.
“They have done so perhaps innocently and without being fully conscious of what they were doing and that it was alienating other key members and tearing at the fabric of internal unity.
“In the sincere attempt to make the party what it should be they inadvertently stepped across this important boundary. We need to take a step back and repair the damage this process has caused.
“The notion of entitlement or personal ownership of the Oyo APC will keep the party stuck as if caught in wet cement. No one of us owns the party. We all do. The party is an institution of collective membership but also collective ownership,” he said.
