Enugu lawmaker Ogara explains why he did not go with six other members of the Labour Party House of Assembly to join the PDP.
Hon. Harrison Ogara, a member of the Enugu State House of Assembly, told THE WHISTLER on Tuesday that he would feel morally obligated to join the Peoples Democratic Party and quit the Labour Party, which gave him the opportunity to become a legislator.
Remember that the PDP, which had previously been a minority, became the majority when six Assembly members who had been elected on the LP platform two weeks prior joined the party.
The Labour Party’s crisis was mentioned as the reason by those who withdrew. These actions, according to Ogara, the Assembly’s Chairman of the Committee on Information and Communications, are a result of the absence of ideology in Nigerian politics.
“I did not participate in the decamping because I felt that it would be a moral burden on me,” he stated. I ran for office as a candidate on behalf of the PDP.
However, I was informed halfway through the competition that I wasn’t qualified for the job. I won and found a position in the Labour Party after quitting the party. It will be morally difficult for me to leave the party that gave me the platform and join the one that denied me the opportunity to run in the first place because of how the primary was rigged to favor one candidate over another. Let it be known that perhaps LP is not attempting to win power in the upcoming election if I were to go on.
The LP is not in a crisis, and even if it were, every Nigerian party would be experiencing one. You have to wait until the very end before acting.
Regarding the classification of LP MPs who decamped as traitors, Ogara remarked, “If you call it betrayal, you are not far from the truth.” You wouldn’t be too far from the truth if you dubbed it the Nigerian approach to politics. In Nigeria, the typical politician lacks an ideology.
That is the rationale for someone’s ability to randomly switch parties. He travels to whatever favorable area that he discovers. This isn’t like what we have in more temperate regions like the US.
Nothing can cause a Republican to defect to the Democratic Party or a Conservative to switch sides. Anything goes in Nigeria. Numerous variables came together to form what transpired in the Enugu House of Assembly.
Ogara commented, “It’s not as if the party’s leadership in the state is in a crisis,” on the future of the LP in Enugu State. Our chairman is still Barr Casmir Agbo. No one is challenging it beside him. Actually, the party’s hierarchy, all the way down to the ward levels, is still in place. In an attempt to elicit readers, the media urns set up a situation.
Crises were noted by many who switched from LP to PDP. It’s not. In a legal case, Julius Abure was declared by the Supreme legal to be the rightful national chairman. That case had already been settled at the Supreme Court by the time they were switching to the PDP. To which catastrophe do you refer?
With the resources at his disposal, he was already having an influence on his voters, so he asked LP supporters to maintain their composure. We have been in office for less than a year, to quote him. Our focus shouldn’t be diverted by decamping. Making the average man in Enugu State the benefactor of our administration is what we ought to be discussing.
