By HENRY UMORU & INALEGWU SHAIBU
ABUJA—THE two Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, senators from Kogi State have warned the immediate past governor of the state, Alhaji Ibrahim Idris, not to further provoke them with his claim that he made way for them to be returned to the Senate.

Senators Smart Adeyemi (PDP, Kogi West) and Nurudeen Abatemi-Usman, (PDP, Kogi Central) at a joint briefing in the National Assembly, yesterday, expressed shock that after fighting them to no avail during the party primaries that the former  governor could dare claim to have supported them.

The senators warned that they should not be provoked as they claimed that they have abandoned Idris to await the consequences of his alleged financial misdeeds in the hands of  anti-graft agencies.

Adeyemi  claimed that Idris vowed to stop his re-election to the Senate despite the popular support he (Adeyemi) had among the electorate, recalling  how the former governor allegedly sponsored a member of the then Kogi cabinet, T. J. Faniyi, to confront him in the PDP primary.

Don’t provoke us, Adeyemi tells Idris

Adeyemi recalled that even when he defeated Idris’ protégée, Faniyi, in the primary election, Idris prevailed on the former commissioner to cross over to another party to challenge him in the general election.

He said: ‘’I want to appeal to Alhaji Ibrahim Idris not to confront us. He should know for sure that we have kept quiet after he left office, leaving his issue to the anti-graft agencies to look into his tenure of office. We want the sleeping dog to lie low, no fight, but if Alhaji Idris is ready to confront us we are very formidable to challenge him.

‘’But, I want to appeal to Alhaji Ibrahim Idris not to let us remind the people of Kogi State of the maladministration and  financial misappropriation that took place in the last nine years under him. He should not make us to remind the people how they laboured and they were enslaved by that government.

Kogi State today is governed by a PDP government, but let me tell you, if not for the intervention of President Goodluck Jonathan about a week to that election, PDP would not have won that election.

‘’It was because the President invited all the stakeholders and appealed to us to go and campaign for our party. We would have delivered Kogi State to another party but because of the respect that we have for the President, we decided to go home with our colleagues to mobilise overnight, to campaign, to remove some of the political obstacles we put on the way because of Alhaji Ibrahim Idris. I ask him, if a governor is popular for nine years as he claims, how come the three senators today are not his candidates”