Ex-governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa, said that the former Senate President Bukola Saraki had no “moral right” to criticise his decision to leave the Peoplrs Democratic Party, PDP, for the All Progressives Congress, APC.
On Monday, key political stakeholders in Delta State, including Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, his predecessor, Okowa, and political appointees in the state, officially decamped to the All Progressives Congress.
Saraki had said the ex-governor’s move was “unprecedented” and symptomatic of a deeper leadership crisis considering that Okowa was the PDP’s vice presidential candidate in 2023.
“It is shocking and unbecoming. It’s simply a sign of how low we have sunk as a polity,” Saraki said.
Reacting, Okowa, while speaking on Arise Television’s The Morning Show on Tuesday, said he did not expect someone like Saraki to comment about his decision to move to another political party.
Okowa said that Saraki did not have the moral right to comment about decampment because he, too, had once abandoned the PDP for the APC.
“I did not 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,” Okowa said.
He stressed that 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 decamp was motivated by the lingering crisis in the PDP.
According to him, recent communication from the party’s leadership showed that the party was not the proper political vehicle for Delta State ahead of the 2027 election.
“Several things have been going on in the party. While I do not 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 did not appear to us that that was a proper political vehicle for us to continue in,” Okowa stated.
Okowa said that the PDP governors’ rejection of a coalition coupled with the leadership crisis in the party suggested that the opposition party was not ready for competition.
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