A former Governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, says the Igbo did not vote for the Peoples Democratic Party in the last general election in the South-East, maintaining that the PDP massively rigged the election in the region.
Kalu, who was an ardent supporter of President Goodluck Jonathan before the elections, said this during a programme on Channels TV titled, “View from the Top,” on Monday.
The former governor said out of the five states in the South-East, the PDP only won elections in Ebonyi and Enugu states.
He said it would, therefore, be unfair to accuse the Igbo of voting en masse for the PDP.
Kalu said the people of Abia State voted against the PDP because of their feelings towards Governor Theodore Orji and the overbearing nature of the President’s wife, Patience Jonathan.
The former governor, who lost the Abia-North senatorial election on the platform of the Progressives Peoples Alliance, maintained that he did not lose but that the PDP rigged the election.
He said, “The issue is that what happened in my constituency was a rigged election. Apart from Enugu and Ebonyi states, where the PDP had very good outings, every other state they won in the South-East was rigged.
“So, the Igbo did not make any mistakes, I feel bad when I see people blaming the Igbo. In the presidential election, the result brought out from Abia where I was, did not reflect the voting pattern of the people.
“In Aba, I can tell you and I will tell Jonathan, that he did not win election in Aba. The APC won the election there but when I saw the result, it was a different thing because the people were angry because of the attitude of T. A Orji and the occasional interference of the wife of the President. People were angry.”
Kalu said it would be unfair to criticise a geopolitical zone for voting en masse for a party, adding that in 1999, the South-West voted massively for the then Alliance for Democracy even though Olusegun Obasanjo of the PDP is from the zone.
The former governor said the PDP lost the general election because of its greed and superiority complex.
He said he and a former Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, had planned to form a merger around 2007 but his political associates in the South-East thwarted the plans.
He said he was not surprised that Tinubu went on to form Nigeria’s biggest opposition party which finally defeated the PDP.
He said, “The PDP was bound to lose the elections because many people were very greedy. There was impunity; people in the party felt they were mini gods. And when you feel that God Almighty is no longer God and that you are the new God, you are bound to fail and that was what happened.
“The PDP felt that they could afford anything money could buy. My brothers, the Igbo didn’t understand the local politics. What you see in the country today was planned by Bola Tinubu and me.
“He is alive, you can ask him. He planned to go with the Action Congress and I planned to go with the PPA. We said at the same time, we could come back to the stage but the two governors we had from the South-East were not as forthright as Governor Babatunde Fashola. Fashola was the only AC governor at the time.”(Punch)
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