Ebonyi APC Boils Again

It’s unimaginable that even as the All Progressives congress (APC) cruised to Aso Rock in victory following the 2015 presidential election, which ordinarily would have propelled the party in Ebonyi State to consolidate and bear true fruits in the politics of the state, the party has since busied itself pursing rat while the whole fold is gutted by inferno. The party has already been gutted by leadership crisis which was created by the leaders of the party in the state, sponsored and exacerbated by the aggrieved Peoples Democratic Party members who defected to the Labour Party but could not find the succour they sought in the LP.

The APC could not utilise its influences from the federal government to register its presence or wrest power from the ruling PDP in Ebonyi.

The problem with Ebonyi APC lies with the leaders of the defunct All Nigerians Peoples Party. The crisis started in 2011 between the governorship candidate of the defunct ANPP, Senator Julius Ucha and the National Chairman of the defunct ANPP and Minister of Science and technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu. Both leaders have mutual grouses against each other.

Ucha claimed that Onu worked against his emergence as governor by compromising and under-utilising his position in favour of the PDP, so that power would be shifted to the South in 2015. Close source noted that Onu’s calculation was that if Ucha emerged the governor of the state in 2011, he would truncate the power equation, endangering the chances of Onu’s zone in producing the governor in 2015.

It was also rumoured that Onu was interested in the governorship position in 2015 and never wanted to gamble with the opportunity by supporting a fresh candidate. Instead, Onu silently allowed the former governor, Martin Elechi to complete his second tenure to allow power shift to the South against Ucha.

The frosty relationship between the two allies continued unabated till the merger talk became fruitful, though it gave rise to another hot political firework of who would control the mega party structure in Ebonyi State.

With Onu’s usual “gentleman” political lifestyle, Ucha carpeted him in the state congresses held in 2014. Though Onu is a respected elder statesman in the country, he has been challenged to mention his impacts in the development and growth of the party in the state.

Others challenged him to produce the results of his polling unit in the 2015 general elections.

But the drama in the whole scenario was that as Ucha controls the party in the state, Onu with his closeness to leaders of the merged parties and his contributions as the National Chairman of the then ANPP, was in full control of the APC national leadership.

During the 2014 congresses in Ebonyi, three factions conducted theirs but Ucha’s group was conducted by the five-man committee led by Princess Adeshola Udu and monitored by