Anxiety Over Obaseki’s Fate In Edo After Total PDP Defeat

Anxiety is swelling in Edo State ahead of the March 11 House of Assembly elections following the comprehensive defeat of the Governor Godwin Obaseki led Peoples Democratic Party, PDP in the National Assembly and Presidential elections.

The PDP, it was gathered, is now in a panic that the party could lose out in the House of Assembly election opening Governor Godwin Obaseki to a hostile legislature in the last two years of his administration.

GWG.ng reports that Edo State that was until now the bedrock of the PDP and had won all presidential elections in the state since 1999 and won the majority of the National Assembly seats in all past elections was comprehensively defeated in all the 2023 Presidential and National Assembly elections.

Besides losing to Labour Party in the presidential election, the PDP lost all the seats it occupied to Labour and the APC in the National Assembly elections. While Labour won the Edo South Senate seat, the APC won the Edo North and Edo Central Senatorial seats. It is the first time that Labour would win a National Assembly seat and that the enduring APC in the state would win the Edo Central seat that was the fiefdom of the late Chief Anthony Anenih.

In the House of Representatives poll, the APC took seven while Labour took two of the federal constituencies.

GWG.ng reports that the meltdown of the PDP is being attributed to the last minute Supreme Court judgment that upturned the PDP candidates’ list in the state in favour of the PDP faction led by Governor Godwin Obaseki. The judgment was a mortal blow to the mainstream of the PDP led by Chief Dan Orbih which had in 2020 accepted Governor Obaseki into the party after he was denied the APC governorship ticket.

“The governor has surrounded himself with paper tigers and you can see that none of them helped him to save the disgrace of losing all the elective positions in the state, not one of them,” a prominent PDP chief said on Friday morning.

Following the judgment, Orbih, the national vice-chairman, South-South of the party kept a silence that troubled many.

Though Governor Obaseki let it out during a strategy meeting with his associates that Orbih was not picking his calls, many claim that the governor did not do more than bemoaning the failure of his former campaign manager to pick his calls.

While Obaseki savoured the victory of his Supreme Court judgment that gave him the candidates, his predecessor and APC leader in the state, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole did the unimaginable by seeking out Orbih.

Sources confirmed that Orbih and Oshiomhole met in different strategy meetings that culminated in the mainstream of the PDP pulling the carpet from under the governor’s feet.

The defeat of the PDP in Edo State as led by Obaseki has now led to a sense of panic within his ranks with the fear that the governor could live with a hostile House of Assembly.

Unlike in 2019 when President Muhammadu Buhari kept away when Governor Obaseki inaugurated a minority faction of the House of Assembly beholden to him, a possible President Bola Tinubu would not be unmindful of dealing with the governor who had in the past openly mocked him.

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