Edo 2024: Idahosa calls out PDP Govs over deal with Obaseki

A member of the Board of Trustees, BoT of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Hon Charles Idahosa has taken the party’s governors and other national leaders involved in the June 2020 agreement that brought Governor Godwin Obaseki to the party to task over the agreement they reached with him.

Idahosa, who was at the time a close associate of the governor and helped to broker the deal said the governors and PDP leaders pleaded with Hon Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama who was set to get the ticket to step down under an agreement that he said Obaseki has now failed to honour.

Idahosa, one of the leading political actors in Edo State with experience from the Lucky Igbinedion era disclosed how he helped to guide Obaseki when he ran into troubled waters with Senator Adams Oshiomhole but said he is now full of regrets over the governor’s failure to honour basic agreements.

Idahosa who returned to the PDP with Obaseki but has now dumped him to identify with the mainstream of the party in the Legacy Group led by Chief Dan Orbih, national vice-chairman, South-South, said: “The truth of the matter is that the national should do what is right. All those that took part in the agreement and settlement with Ogbeide-Ihama who was already the candidate of the PDP before we forced him down, they are still alive if they are no more governors, they are still relevant they should say the agreement they reached at that time and they should tell us who fulfilled his own or who did not.

“Because if by any error of omission or commission they deny Ogbeide-Ihama the governorship ticket which he is supposed to get because of what they arranged for Obaseki to come in who was given a waiver by the same national, PDP is finished in Edo State.

“Ogbeide-Ihama was already the candidate of  PDP, it was already clear, nobody was going to stop him,” Idahosa said of the position in June 2020.

“I invited him (Ogbeide-Ihama) to my house. Himself and Osaro Idah, because we are related. Here in my sitting room. I pleaded with him and he stepped down. I told Obaseki, you go and discuss with them. That was how they went to Port Harcourt. He left here in my house in the night with one of his uncles, his mother’s immediate younger brother, a retired director in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

“He is alive today. It is like after reading 48 Laws of Power, where they told you to destroy those who made you and that is what he is doing,” Idahosa said.

Addressing fears on Ogbeide-Ihama’s capacity to win the election for the PDP given his political experience as having only represented Oredo Federal Constituency, Idahosa said:

“He broke the jinx in Oredo, it had never happened before. Oredo is a mini Edo state, there is no tribe that is not represented in Oredo, he went there twice nobody has ever done it, he broke the jinx. Before him, you only go for four years, nobody has been able to go two times, he was there twice and he has been in the party since 1998.”

The Star