By Chief Olori Magege
When the Reconciliation Committee of Delta State APC led by Chief O’tega Emerhor recommended that both Festus Keyamo, the Minister of Aviation and Senator Ovie Omo-Agege should co-chair the party’s Elders’ Council not a few found the idea laughable because of its un-workability. The Emerhor Committee knew where and who to blame for the woes of the party but lacked the courage to say so. So it came up with the idea of the two factional heads to co-chair. The committee must have realized that a way must be found to make Keyamo and Omo-Agege work amicably together in Delta APC if the party is to grow in the state. As it is today APC is a party enmeshed in crisis and controlled by one man stronghold.
The Emerhor Committee came up with that co-chairing recommendation when it realized that Omo-Agege’s stranglehold on the party structure must be dismantled to allow for internal democracy to root and grow and most importantly to enable other leaders to contribute to the party too.
But the ink had barely dried on the recommendation when a minority report of the committee surfaced upturning the co-chairing idea and calling for a full congress to elect the party executives at various levels. This suggestion would have been it but for the fact that Omo-Agege, a known anti-democrat is the one championing it. That makes it suspect.
Omo-Agege is not a Democrat by any wild imagination. He has lost out in the scheme of things in the present arrangement and is looking for a breathing space to re-strategize to enable him to capture the APC state structure again by any means.
Festus Keyamo is a sitting minister of the Federal Republic, the poster boy of a youth in Tinubu’s government. He seems to have the ear and trust of Mr President.
Ovie Omo-Agege on the other hand, is a ‘has been’, a former Deputy Senate President. He is at loggerhead with his party state chairman, who is a master political strategist, a political fox and a cat with many lives; a man he single-handedly appointed.
Ovie Omo-Agege’s toxic role in the emergence of candidate Tinubu in 2023 is well known and this certainly has not endeared him to Tinubu; besides questions have remained unanswered as to how the funds provided for his 2023 guber election were used.
The idea of co-chairmanship cannot work as far as Omo Agege is concerned; certainly not with Festus Keyamo who he sees as a small boy, an ordinary minister. To Omo Agege it is an abomination. His giant ego cannot allow that. He can co-chair with Donald Trump, or with President Putin, perhaps with President Tinubu, but with Keyamo, no way.
So the time is not near for the end of the APC crisis in Delta. When Omo Agege boasted that there was a crisis in Delta PDP that would wipe out PDP in the State he was talking of his party APC.
Yes, his party for now
Omo Agege will contest the 2027 guber race for sure but not under APC. When he loses out in APC he will, as usual, abandon the party and move to take over an obscure party and fly its flag, but not until he has wrecked complete havoc on APC.
That will spell his political nemesis, his political doom.
- Chief Magege, a chieftain of PDP writes from Orho Agbarho, Delta State.
