1 week Ago By Guardian Nigeria
The recent local council election in Abia State that was won by the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP) and Young Progressives Party (YPP) may have opened the pathway for the gradual decimation of the crisis-torn Labour Party (LP) from the political landscape of the Southeast region, LAWRENCE NJOKU reports. It appears that there are still many miles for the Labour Party (LP) to cross to stamp its feet on the political lexicon of the country. The party, which took the polity by the storm in the 2023 general election and posted an impressive result, has not been able to manage its success from every indication.
A leadership crisis, which arose immediately after the elections, has not been resolved several months after the process was concluded. The crisis has so deepened that many members who worked for the party’s success during the polls, including officials elected on its platform and leaders, have abandoned it for other political parties. Yet, its combatants have refused to sheathe their swords.
The outcome of the recent local council election in Abia State has lent enough credence to the thinking in some quarters that the redemption of the LP from its current crisis is still very far. This is because even when the party produced the government in the state, results posted by the Abia State Independent Electoral Commission (ASIEC) indicated that it lost all the chairmanship and councillorship positions in the election to other political parties. The local council election was the first to be conducted in the administration of Governor Alex Otti, who assumed office last year.
Recall that Otti is the only governor that emerged on the platform of the LP in Nigeria. But of the 17 local council chairmanship seats in the state, the LP won none. It lost the entire seats to the relatively unknown Zenith Labour Party (ZLP) and the Young Progressive Party (YPP).
While the ZLP, which had never been reckoned with in any previous elections in the state won 15 chairmanship seats, the YPP won in two local councils. Indeed, the outcome of the exercise jolted many and triggered another round of debate about the seriousness of the state governor to use his office to deepen the LP in the Southeast region. Many pundits are wondering if the outcome of the election has not signaled the gradual end to the forays of the LP in the region.
Local council elections conducted in the country so far have largely returned victory to the ruling party in the states, save in Rivers State, where the face-off between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, also resulted in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) losing the poll despite being the ruling party in the state. In fact, many opposition political parties would readily affirm that they declined to participate in elections because doing so had always amounted to a waste of time and resources. It is against this backdrop that many stakeholders query the outcome of the council election that handed defeat to the party in power in Abia.
However, offering what looked like an explanation to the failure of his party in the exercise during the swearing in of the elected council chairmen and their deputies, Governor Otti stated that it was simply to avoid importing crisis in some political parties into the process in the state. “Permit me to comment on the issue of political parties from where you emerged. Recall that at the beginning of this process, I had charged every interested contestant to join any party of their choice while encouraging Abia people to vote for the best candidates irrespective of political parties.
The reason is simple: I realised that a few parties have leadership crises that I didn’t think should be imported into this process. I also know that our people have always voted candidates and not necessarily parties; 2015 is clear proof, as my carefully chosen candidates at that time won almost 50 per cent of the House of Assembly seats from a party that had not won a councillorship seat in the state prior to then,” he stated. In the beginning What played out in the Abia local council poll was an offshoot of the hurried national convention of the party conducted in Nnewi, Anambra State, earlier in the year that returned Julius Abure as the national chairman with other executives.
Although the convention offered Otti, who was absent, the ticket of the party to re-contest his current position in 2027 (apparently in a bid to placate him), later events indicated that the governor was not pleased with the gathering. Otti had, alongside other leaders of the party, waited until September this year to manifest his anger. At a stakeholders’ meeting of the party he hosted in Umuahia, a former Minister of Finance, Nenadi Usman, was nominated to chair the 29-member national caretaker committee of the party.
In attendance at the meeting were the party’s presidential candidate in 2023 elections, Mr. Peter Obi and his running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed. However, no sooner had the committee settled down to work last month than a High Court in Abuja declared Abure as the substantive national chairman of the party and went ahead to validate the national convention that elected him and other national working committee members of the party.
It could be recalled that even the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had earlier rejected the convention and its outcome. The Guardian gathered that it was this court ruling that set the tone for Otti to tinker with his strategy in the November 2 local council election, basically because of the implications. It was further gathered that moments after the pronouncement of the court, the Abure leadership of the party had approached the ASIEC with a fresh list of candidates of the party for the election.
This was said to have jolted Otti. And since he could not get the State House of Assembly to amend the law that confers authority on the chairmen and secretaries of the parties to submit lists of candidates for the election, he opted for a deal with leaders of other opposition parties to allow his candidates use their platforms to contest in the election. Implications/way forward Those who have reacted to the development insist that it is a major setback in the move by the LP to consolidate its foothold in the Southeast region.
They believe that should the macabre dance over who should lead the party continue, the party might lose more grounds in the region before the next general election. A political analyst, John Nweke, said the development has further compounded the challenges of the party, which he noted had lost several members to other political parties since the conclusion of the 2023 elections. “This is a party many of us had looked forward to.
But I can recall that in a single day, the party lost six members of the Enugu State House of Assembly to the PDP. In Abia State, it has lost two elected lawmakers to the APC as well as one in Imo State. The way things are, even the presidential candidate of the party, Mr.
Peter Obi, who brought it to prominence during last elections, may have lost faith with the party. So, I think that efforts should be channeled towards sustaining the peace in the party with the next general election approaching. This should be the paramount thing for the leaders of the party for now,” he said.
According to him, Otti is only responding to stimulus that may further deplete the party. He added: “If he continues on this trajectory, I am afraid there may not be LP in the Southeast region because he remains a brand that the party can be identified with since the elections ended. His numerous projects are giving the party a good name.
” A chieftain of the party, Mr. Chima Ndudim, insisted that Otti was right to have encouraged his preferred candidates to use another platform other than LP to actualise their ambitions. “I am a registered Labour Party member and I stand with the position of my able governor, Dr Alex Otti on this.
The Abure leadership will make people like me move out of the party if he remains the party chairman. I don’t even know what Peter Obi is still doing, thinking that issues could be resolved in a peaceful and gentleman’s way. Rather, more and more problems are coming up on a daily basis without solutions,” he stated.
Another member of the party partly blamed the problem on the inability of Otti to recognise those who toiled for the good of the party during the elections. He said the governor decided to work with a new set of people. “For instance, in Abia State, the former state chairman, Ceekay Igara, who nursed the party singlehandedly, was not given a car.
But the moment the acting chairman, Mr. Emma Otti, took over, he gave him a car. Ceekay was never involved in any appointments made by the Abia government.
Yet he defended them in court. If you are the one, will you be happy? Let’s be sincere to ourselves. Do unto others as you would want them to do to you remains the golden rule.
Those who applaud fraud and greed will not escape their fate,” he said. National leader of a socio-political group, Abia State Equity Group (ABSEG), Rev. Okechukwu Obioha, said the governor’s use of another platform other than the LP to produce his preferred elected local council officials was provocative and unfair.
To him, the action indicated that Otti does not want the party to grow, neither is it good for the development of the state. “This is not just like bringing misfits into governance to the detriment of the state, but that these people are very qualified people more than those that Dr Alex Otti has chosen to assist him produce dividends of democracy. As a matter of fact, where were all these people he has chosen to align himself with when people were in the trenches fighting to ensure that he becomes the governor of Abia State?” he queried.
Another chieftain of the party, Ibuchukwu Ezike, blamed the development on the leadership crisis in the party that has refused to be solved. His words: “What can I say except that Nigerian politics has become the more one looks, the less he sees. I think people are wiser and acting the words of enekentioba, the bird, in Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart.
Enekentiobasaid that since hunters have learnt to shoot without missing, it (enekentioba) has learnt to fly without perching. It is applicable here. “You know there is a crisis in Labour Party.
Julius Abure insists that he is the National Chairman of the Labour Party despite INEC’s position that his tenure had expired and that it (INEC) didn’t observe their unlawful Nnewi Convention while the governor of Abia State, who is the highest ranking elected leader of the party and his colleagues have set up a National Caretaker Committee headed by Senator Nenadi Usman to organise the congresses of the party from the wards to the states and then the national convention. Abure’s men are in charge of the party in all the strata from the national to the wards and so Governor Otti fielding candidates in Labour Party for Abia State local government polls will be akin to pouring water into a porous pot. “I presume I may be wrong that this informed his taking his candidates for elections to the Zenith Labour Party (ZLP).
If you recall, too, a few weeks ago, the Governor of Rivers State, Siminalayi Fubara, took a similar action during the Rivers state local government elections when he fielded his candidates in APP to clinch 22 of the Rivers 21 local government areas instead of using the PDP that produced him as the governor of the state. This was because the national secretariat of the PDP ceded the structures of the party to the former governor Nyeson Wike. So, what Governor Alex Otti did is neither the first nor strange in our political lexicography.
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