Former Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State has finally bared his mind on his successor, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa…

“If you had asked me two days ago on my assessment of Okowa’s administration, I would have answered you but today, I won’t answer because I just entered a new party, I do not want to talk about what he has done and what he has not done, I want to face the party.”

“On his accusation that I left a huge debt profile, he changed his comment later that the handover note I gave to him, he didn’t study it properly because the figures he was talking about were quite different from the figures he quoted later. There was a figure that was quoted as soon as I left, and just this year, it was different. Ibori’s position on my defection I do not expect Ibori to say I betrayed him.”

 “Let’s not go to the intricacies of 2014. There was no sitting down to say after this, it would be this and that (talking about who becomes governor), no. It wasn’t something that was pre-arranged as it wasn’t planned that I would take over from Ibori and Governor Okowa should take over from me. But it just happened that the three of us emerged just like that.”

“Else, by now, we should have known who the fourth person should be and nobody can mention or say who that person would be. There was a struggle with 28 contestants in 2007 that went for the primaries and 23 contestants when Governor Okowa was gunning for office. The 28 of us that contested in 2007 had the chance of becoming the next governor.”

“What happened then was that we had three senatorial districts with Central having it for eight years, we formed a group between the North and South and there was a lot of pressure that it should go to the South. In the South, we organised ourselves into a group called the G3 which was very active and in terms of nomination, we narrowed it to one person which was myself.”

“In the G3, which consisted of Ijaw, Itsekiri and Isoko and some Urhobo, who are in South, were able to narrow ourselves. While the others had divided arrangement, we had a single arrangement and that was the big advantage that we had at the PDP primary which led to my success.”

– Culled from ChannelsTV