Former Governor Ifeanyi Okowa has told the former Senate President, Bukola Saraki that he lacks the moral right to comment on his defection.
According to Okowa, Saraki had at a point dumped the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the All Progressives Congress (APC) and so shouldn’t tackle him over his defection.
Recall that key political stakeholders in Delta State, including Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, Okowa and political appointees in the state, officially defected to the All Progressives Congress on Monday.
Saraki, while reacting to Okowa, noted that the move was “unprecedented” and symptomatic of a deeper leadership crisis considering that Okowa was the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2023 general elections.
He said, “It’s shocking and unbecoming. It’s simply a sign of how low we have sunk as a polity,” Saraki said.
But Okowa, while speaking on Arise TV on Tuesday, tackled the former Senate President, saying that he doesn’t expect someone like Saraki to comment about his decision to move to another political party.
He stressed that Saraki lacks the moral right to comment about defection because he had once abandoned the PDP for the APC.
Okowa said, “I didn’t expect that someone like Senator Bukola Saraki should be able to speak concerning me, because he knows that he had also moved to APC before and eventually returned. So he has had movement to and fro. So, I don’t think that he has the moral right to even speak about my defection at all.”
According to him, the gale of defection in Delta State was a collective decision of all political stakeholders in the oil-rich state, adding that their decision to defect was motivated by the lingering crisis in the PDP.
Speaking about the reason for their defection, he noted that the recent communication from the party’s leadership showed that the party is not the proper political vehicle for Delta State ahead of the 2027 election.
“Several things have been going on in the party. While I don’t want to join issues with people, as stakeholders, our leaders in this state have sat down to look at the events in the last several months, and because of the events that we see and the communications coming out from the leadership of the PDP at the moment, it didn’t appear to us that that was a proper political vehicle for us to continue in.” He added.
He stressed that the PDP governors’ rejection of a coalition as well as the leadership crisis in the party suggest that the opposition party is not ready for competition, nor is it ready to win election in 2027.
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