A political group, Oredo Political Front (OPF), has called on the two-term member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama, to join the 2024 governorship race in Edo State.

Ogbeide-Ihama withdrew from the race in 2020 to pave the way for Governor Godwin Obaseki who was denied the All Progressives Congress (APC).

The group in a statement made available to newsmen in Benin said that while it understood the pressure that was brought on Ogbeide-Ihama to abandon his governorship pursuit in 2020, the OPF said that the former lawmaker now owes it a duty to the electorate to salvage Edo State from the mess it now finds itself.

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In the statement issued by Ken Ekpe, the group observed that Ogbeide-Ihama was set to obtain the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2020 before the party’s governors and the national leadership foisted Obaseki on Edo PDP mainly on the argument that he was an incumbent governor.

“We have all learnt our lessons from 2020 and we will not want to look back. Our party has been devastated by the Obaseki regime and his credentials in office is not what we are looking forward to as PDP partisans to campaign with.

“It is for this reason that we are calling on Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama to pick us up from where he abandoned us with Obaseki four years ago.

“We know it was not his fault and that he was under the intense pressure of PDP governors to yield the ticket to Obaseki. Now even the PDP governors and the national leadership have seen where that error took us and seen that for the first time in history that the PDP lost the presidential election in Edo State and the National Assembly elections.

“That was even when we had a so-called PDP governor in place.

“It is for this reason that we are calling on Ogbeide-Ihama to pick up the gauntlet as he remains about the most credible of those around to mobilise the PDP to victory in the main election.”

The Star