Sanwo-Olu’s press aide Gboyega Akosile in Twitter rage over governorship poll
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s press secretary, Gboyega Akosile, launched into a Twitter rage with a citizen over the latter’s remarks about his principal.
Gbenga Sesan, a techpreneur, tweeted allusively about Governor Sanwo-Olu ‘stealing’ the vote he is declared by the electoral umpire to have won last Saturday.
He said, “Stole an election on Saturday; Increased salaries on Monday; Sent out tax reminders on Tuesday. Lagos is working.”
Sesan’s innuendo was an apparent jab at the governor, who after winning the vote announced a 20 percent increase in the salaries of civil servants in the mainstream public service, Local Government Areas & Local Council Dev Areas as well as SUBEB.
In his response, Akosile said rather condescendingly of his principal’s critic. He tweeted, “Gbenga, grow up! You’re no longer that little boy of those days we used to promote in tech space. Stay focused and contribute meaningfully towards the development of the country through concrete, visible works. Speaking ill of a sitting governor wouldn’t make you a star.”
Governor Sanwo-Olu won his re-election by garnering 736,000 votes to defeat the second-placed candidate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour who polled 292,000. The build-up to the poll saw intense use of ethnically charged language and tension between the re-elected governors’supporters and those of his opponent, Rhodes-Vivour. Majority of the non-indigene voters in Lagos had backed Rhodes-Vivour, due to his half-Igbo ancestry. They saw in him an opportunity to wrestle political dominance from the stranglehold of the ruling party. This apparently met stiff resistance from the most Yoruba-speaking voters, who equally saw Sanwo-Olu’s re-election as a way of asserting their territorial ownership of the state.
While giving a post-poll assessment, Bayo Onanuga, who spoke for president-elect Bola Tinubu during the campaign, said the governorship election had decisively put paid to Igbo reference to Lagos as being a “no man’s land” –a comment believed to have incensed majority of native voters.
TheCornet reports that the election saw pocket of violence and voter suppression in some areas, which Governor Sanwo-Olu condemned aftermath his victory.
