Saraki has no moral right to speak about my defection — Okowa

Former Governor of Delta State, Senator Ifeanyi Okowa, has faulted Senator Bukola Saraki’s comment about his defection, saying the former Senate President has no moral right to criticise his decision.

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.

Following the gale of defection which emptied the Peoples Democratic Party’s 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.

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Reacting, Okowa, while speaking on Arise Television’s “The Morning Show” on Tuesday, said he does not expect someone like Saraki to comment about his decision to move to another political party.

Okowa maintained that Saraki should not have the moral right to comment about defection 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 return. 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.

Okowa 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 defect was motivated by the lingering crisis in the PDP.

According to him, 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 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 asserted that the PDP governors’ rejection of a coalition coupled with the leadership crisis in the party suggested that the opposition party is not ready for competition.