Mr Osagie Ize-Iyamu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for Edo governorship election on Sept. 19 has appealed to Gov. Godwin Obaseki to return to the party.

Ize-Iyamu made the appeal on Monday in Benin while addressing newsmen shortly after his emergence as the candidate of the party.

In the party’s primaries conducted across the 18 local government reas of the state, Ize-Iyamu, defeated two other aspirants to clinch the APC ticket.

He scored 27,838 votes to beat the state’s former deputy governor, Dr Pius Odubu, and Mr Osaro Obaze, who scored 3,776 and 2,324 votes respectively to emerge second and third in the primaries.

Ize-Iyamu said he deemed it necessary to appeal to the governor to retrace his step to avoid a similar mistake he (Ize-Iyamu) made when he left APC for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2014.

While commending the two other aspirants in the primaries, he said he would unite the party.

“This is the time to unite all the members of the APC. Sometime ago, somebody asked me a question; when the problem of APC will end and I told them that every problem has expiry date.

“And in my humble opinion the day we complete our primaries, that day the problem will end.

“So, I believe that by this process which we have just completed, the party is now on the path of full recovery.

“We are going to talk to everybody; we are going to bring everybody back. And let me also say that I want to salute my brother, the governor of the state, Mr Godwin Obaseki.

“I will like to appeal to him to return to the party. In every family we have disagreements, let it not be said that this disagreement pushed him out”.

“I made that mistake before and I have come to realise that it was a grievous error and I don’t want him as a senior brother to make the same mistake,” he said.

He also said that it was time to restore peace in the state as the atmosphere had been tense in the past few months.

Ize-Iyamu lauded the delegates for conducting a peaceful primary election inspite of the stringent rules put in place by the state government. (NAN)