By Basil Okoh
The dam is broken in Delta politics and the great embankments have all given way. The cascading water is surging downhill, pulling down everything in its way and the torrent keeps billowing. Obarisi Ovie Omo-Agege pulled his bets and resigned from the APC. Delta APC politics has broken from its strongholds.
He has promptly joined the spring planting, Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC) which is set to start blossoming in the emerging Nigerian sunshine season and will sustain for a long time to come.
We knew from the beginning that the defection of Ifeanyi Okowa, Governor Sheriff and the entire APC establishment was eventually going to lead to this, the disruption and destruction of the APC as they did the once robust PDP in Delta state. I said it in many essays written at the time that Okowa and Sheriff are both insecure persons and both are too cantankerous to build or manage any organization to success. Okowa is an intensely divisive politician, a termagant with a sick sense of self entitlement which is destructive to group survival or progress. Sheriff is a former goon with a low self-esteem expressed in the intense desire for dominance and control.
This writer has always insisted that the APC in Delta state, since the defection of the PDP into its turf, had become thoroughly unmanageable, built entirely on the whims of two contrasting characters, a goon and a failed doctor with a sick desire to own everything and everyone. APC is running at full speed and is now a quarter mile to perdition. The fact of Omo-Agege’s resignation means that the parts of the vehicle are already splintering on the way. It is shedding its good parts on the way in the run to self destruction. The APC contraption in Delta has lost control with no brakes, no experienced driver and the vehicle itself had no good chassis. All it has is an agbero from Effurun park as driver who cannot read road signs.
APC had won zilch, nada, nothing, in any election in Delta state before the coming of Obarisi Ovie Omo-Agege who brought a new and fresh impetus to its endeavours. Omo-Agege brought the party to competition and reckoning across the state, becoming deputy Senate president himself and winning two out of three Senate seats, one House of Reps and 7 House of Assembly seats.
The party was already on the momentum to take over the entire state when Okowa and Sheriff, sensing a defeat and loss of power, saw the surge coming and made a life or death decision to jump ship and ride the surging wave of the Delta APC. But in taking that jump, they didn’t forget their tools for wrecking political organizations.
The seed for the destruction of the APC in Delta state was planted by the erstwhile chairman, Elder Omeni Sobotie, who feeling deeply hurt by disagreements between him and Omo-Agege, the governorship candidate in the 2023 election, sought outside help and convoked the Council of Leaders to help him challenge the overwhelming influence and power of Omo-Agege in the party. The council of leaders incorporated many personalities who were jealous of Omo-Agege’s towering presence and influence in Delta APC. They also were determined to cut him to their own size. They too sought outside help and enlisted Representative Waive of Ughelli North, Ughelli South and Udu federal Constituency to bring in Governor Sheriff. Governor Sheriff himself, feeling completely insecure as governor before Omo-Agege in a failing political party, used the opportunity to seek a defection to the ruling party to solve two nagging problems:
The first was to seek to remove the overhanging threat of Ovie Omo-Agege who he feared would challenge him and kill his ambition for re-election as the towering figure in APC, the federal ruling party. Sheriff feared that Omo-Agege will take over the governorship from him in the next election.
The second was to defuse the threat hanging on himself and his benefactor Ifeanyi Okowa, over discoveries of theft in DESOPADEC and threats already made by the EFCC on the humongous theft of N1.3 Trillion in DESOPADEC. These two reasons had already made Governor Sheriff Oborevwori desperate to leave PDP and defect to APC.
The success of the defection and the eventual sidelining of both Omo-Agege and the Sobotie-led College-of-leaders did not stop the overweening ambition of the PDP hierarchy, particularly Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa and plots were immediately hatched to hijack the party from the original owners of the APC and put it under PDP control. While Omo-Agege maintained a studied silence, watching events unfold, Sheriff went to work with the treasury of Delta state government, overwhelming the National Working Committee of the APC. The dizzying impact of that windfall resulted in the bizarre actions coming out of the National headquarters of the APC. The National Office of the APC has become disoriented with so much infusions of cash from the Delta Treasury that APC became drunk and can no longer count people in a queue or identify potential winning candidates in its own primaries.
So now every good man and woman has to join Ovie Omo-Agege and leave the APC as they trickled out of PDP before Sheriff and Okowa joined them. The two men have once again, caused a mortal damage to their party APC as they previously destroyed the PDP. To safeguard their sanity and be part of the winning group in the 2027 election, every serious politician in Delta State must leave the APC. So just like PDP before it, APC is on its way to perdition, killed by the same people, Sheriff and Okowa who also destroyed the PDP in Delta state.
No matter how loud it’s empty drums beat, APC can no longer have the will and the capacity to win elections in Delta state. And no one should remind us of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who has never been liked in Delta state, even from the very beginning.
So anybody who tries to tell you that Omo-Agege leaving the Delta APC is of no consequence, as they are won’t to say, tell him that Omo-Agege along with the people who believe in him, built the APC in Delta state, brick by difficult brick until it became the attraction to all politicians in the state, including the governor and the entire political establishment in the state who now pride themselves as members of the APC. No one in the entire world has seen a ruling party defect into an opposition party except in Delta state where an entire government and ruling party defected into the APC which Ovie Omo-Agege built. We will live to see the massive meltdown of APC after its failure in the 2027 elections.
@basilokoh.
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