The lawmaker representing Benue South Senatorial District and Senate Minority Leader, Senator Abba Moro, has declared that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, ‘s choice of Senator Ifeanyi Okowa as its Vice Presidential candidate in the 2023 Presidential election was a political miscalculation.
The former Governor of Delta state, the present Governor, as well as several political leaders and stakeholders, dumped the opposition PDP a few days ago and joined the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.
The senator made the assertion Tuesday evening when he featured on Politics Today, a Channels TV programme monitored in Makurdi. He said the PDP would have won that election if other candidates were picked instead of Senator Okowa.
He said: “It was a political miscalculation to have picked Senator Ifeanyi Okowa as the Vice Presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2023 Presidential election.
“Having said that, I think that the most important thing now is that he has defected with his Governor, who was elected on the platform of the PDP.
“And I can tell you that even without the pronouncement of the Supreme Court to the effect that it is parties that individuals vote for, we all know that people identify with political parties, and political parties win where the majority of the electorates are members of the party or have sympathy for the party.
“So he has walked away from the PDP and gone to the All Progressive Congress, APC, fine by us in the PDP, let the game begin.”
When asked if Alhaji Atiku Abubakar would have had the chance to win the 2023 presidential election if Senator Okowa had not been picked as his running mate, Senator Moro said: “I would rather say that given what we know now, with the hindsight that we have now some of us think that the party would have won the election if other candidates other than Okowa had been picked as the Vice Presidential candidate from the South.”
On Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s error in judgement in picking Senator Okowa as his running mate, the Senate Minority Leader said, “I think there was an error of judgement on the part of everybody that was involved in the choice of Okowa as the candidate.
“I mean, come to think about it, how else do you characterise this scenario as one in which a sitting governor, a former senator, or a vice presidential candidate of the party couldn’t deliver his state even to the presidential candidate?
“And to think that two out of the three Senators from that state were from the opposition party other than the PDP. PDP won only one Senatorial election. And I can tell you today that that person may have won that election because of his person and contribution to that community.
“And so I think that picking Senator Okowa as the Vice Presidential candidate of the PDP in 2023 was a very serious mistake.
“As it is now, you can safely conclude that we lost the election because of lack of commitment. Otherwise how can you explain that shortly after losing a state that ordinarily should have been a very easy pick for the PDP, instead of tendering apology to the party and Nigeria, he is now talking about regretting being on the ticket. That means that his soul was not in the PDP, his soul was not in that election and that is why we performed very miserably in that election.”
Credit: Vanguard
