Former Governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa, has said former Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has no right to speak on his defection to 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 defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Following the gale of defection which emptied the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) structure into the APC, Saraki, in a strongly worded statement, said Okowa’s defection to the APC is an indication of how low politics has become in Nigeria.
Given the fact that Okowa was the PDP’s Vice Presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election, Saraki said the ex-governor’s move was “unprecedented” and symptomatic of a deeper leadership crisis.
“It is shocking and unbecoming. It’s simply a sign of how low we have sunk as a polity,” Saraki said.
However, reacting in an interview with Arise News on Tuesday, Okowa said his decision to defect to the ruling APC was in his best interest.
The former vice presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) noted that the former Senate President, Saraki, had decamped to the APC before returning to PDP.
He said: “Yesterday (Monday), we did defect to the APC. I did not watch Senator Bukola speak, but I heard about what he said. Ordinary, I believe that we’re a political family in the Delta State, and once we take decisions together, I have to go with my political family because without that family, I have no politics to play, number one.
“Two, I did not expect that somebody like Senator Bukola Saraki should be able to speak concerning me because he knows that he had also moved to the 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. I don’t want to join issues with him. But the truth is, we have a political family in the Delta State. Previously, we were in the PDP. But several things have been going on in the party, the People’s Democratic Party.
“While I do not want to join issues with people, but our stakeholders, our leaders in this state, have started 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 because it did not also appear to us that PDP was ready to be competitive in the 2027 elections.”
