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The most commonly advanced reason for Emmanuel Uduaghan, immediate past governor of Delta State to dump the People’s Democratic Party, PDP for the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC has been his ambition to go to the Senate. At least that is the refrain from his associates and sympathisers. But those who say this perhaps forgot that Uduaghan dropped same ambition in 2015 because he would not allow supporters on both sides to use it as a reason for bloody conflict. A medical doctor by training, he demonstrated that he valued human lives more than personal political upliftment.
The James Ibori political family under which he had been part of government since 1999 became hostile to him since the primaries that produced Governor Arthur Okowa, his successor. All efforts to reconcile the two politicians have proved abortive, and Ibori’s intervention appeared not to have made peace realisable. Lately, associates of Uduaghan began to notice why Ibori could not break the ice. They suspected that the former governor appears to side with Okowa. It does became apparent that if Uduaghan is to continue to be relevant in the political calculation of the state, he would have to seek abode somewhere else. So after a lot of unsuccessful meetings and what appeared to be half-hearted persuasion, he finally left the PDP for the APC.
But when Uduaghan released a statement on his movement he did not talk about personal political experience and frustrations. Rather he gave as reason for his defection the pace of human and capital development in the Niger Delta region under President Muhammadu Buhari.
Below is his full statement:
