THREE VETERANS TO BUTT HEADS IN DELTA NORTH APC SENATE PRIMARIES

Basil Okoh

MaTaZ ArIsInG
Dallas, Texas

There will be spectacle going into the 2026 APC Senate primary election in Delta North as three former senators and bitter rivals, each a power hungry political steamroller, seek the Senate nomination under the APC flag. The three are old friends but now bitter rivals and all three have the money and capacity to power the election their way by the sheer power of their wealth.

All three have an abhorrence for opposition politics and harbour the desire to remain on the winning side of establishment politics in Nigeria while dominating the Delta North senatorial district.

As fresh worms keep crawling out of the old wood in the district and as chicken hover to peck at them, each must test the capacity of the other to survive the emerging political order in the bloated APC behemoth in Delta state.

As things are presently, no one can say with certainty what constitutes a new order in Delta state as persons and groups keep defecting and new alliances are built and then unravel. And as we await the gale force that will be Peter Obi’s second coming in 2027, the old order may be completely out of kilt and rendered electorally useless.

For the foxy Ifeanyi Okowa to have entered the Senate race in Delta North, he must have a scent of success, seen or conjured an opening which bends the APC primaries to his manifest advantage. Okowa is no adventurer and not the kind of man who will set himself up for probable failure.

Ned Nwoko, the reigning senator of the district has dominated public presence in the district for two years and is now seen as likely primary winner and candidate of APC going into the 2027 election. But we know primary elections in Nigeria defy the logic of popularity and swing always to the person who delivers the biggest day pay to the primary electors.

With Peter Nwaoboshi in the race, all three are well endowed in wealth but with governor Sheriff firmly backing Ifeanyi Okowa with deep government pockets, there is probably no likelihood of Nwaoboshi or Nwoko taking the crown. Okowa arranged the same pre-bended primaries that enabled the present governor Sheriff Oborevwori to emerge as governorship candidate of PDP, the ruling party in 2023. 2027 will be payback time.

As if the gods were truly working for Nwoko, he defected to APC before President Tinubu’s declaration of open sesame for everyone to join APC, but the un-envisaged collapse of PDP, the ruling party in Delta state, months after Nwoko’s own defection into the APC, put a spanner in the works and brought new challenges to his smooth sail in APC. Now the old antagonists have gathered together again in APC, old wounds opened and rivalries revived.

Ned Nwoko dominates the effusive social media in the district but not the APC party machinery or the electorate. He set a performance bar for himself with the Anioma State creation matter and made himself obligated to deliver on his own commitment. He has spent good money on the project. But in spite of himself, the matter is largely not in his hands and he pursues an agenda without precedent of success in a civilian regime.

He has an effective media manager and she clearly writes and understands well the political issues of the region. But most of the rest followers just write drivel that does not compel followership. For Ned Nwoko, It was beginning to feel that no one could possibly upset his dominance of the region going into the 2027 elections. But challenges are crawling out now from supposedly dead wood as nobody thought would happen a few months back. As no one can possibly fault his dedication to the cause of Anioma, an overly large percentage of the electorate support him on that issue and in a direct election contest, can easily prevail. To make the state creation possible, he has thrown in borrowed political capital, passion and spent his wealth to see to the realization of the Anioma dream. But it’s looking now that his passion and money are not good enough reasons to leave the Senate seat for him without a challenge.

Ned Nwoko has the gift of speech better than the other two, but even with those gifts, he has an issues based agenda that should sway the entire Delta North to his side. The other two aspirants have had no issues and no agenda to present to the electorate. Ifeanyi Okowa and Peter Nwaoboshi are too deeply immersed in the old PDP political style of brigandage and subterfuge to bother with issues. For all his many decades of leadership and electoral success in Anioma, Okowa has never championed any causes nor pursued any transformational agenda for the region both in the Senate and as a two term governor.

Except for the irritation that the issue of Peter Nwaoboshi caused him, It was as if APC was the dream party made for Nwoko’s return to the senate before the defection of PDP. But now the slugs have crawled out and he must deal with challenges from Okowa and the reigning governor Sheriff Oborevwori. The PDP self-immolated and grafted it’s remains into the APC and even as it continually tries to work on its new identity, the grafting is being rejected and the bodies are not working together in synchrony.

A sinister plot was hatched in PDP and has been renewed in APC by the duopoly of Okowa and Oborevwori against Ned Nwoko’s bid to go back to the senate for another tenure. It was for this reason that Nwoko defected from the PDP to the APC, to bypass the Okowa/Sheriff ambush against his re-election. As Okowa has reawakened his interest in the senate under APC and Sheriff as both governor and APC party leader, the duopoly feels secure in the belief that they can swing the APC primary election to Okowa to emerge as APC senatorial candidate. It was shown in the past week that the intrigues for which Okowa gained infamy has reared its head again in APC. The nine local government party chairmen in the Senate district who had previously given endorsement to senator Nwoko’s Senate run have suddenly made an about-turn.

So the three members of the old guard, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, Barrister Peter Nwaoboshi and senator Ned Nwoko, all three are establishment politicians in the bloated APC in Delta State. All three grew their milk teeth from the PDP and all three come with tonnes of money in war chests. So the real fight will be in winning the APC senate primaries for Delta North, not in the election itself. And the stakes couldn’t be any higher.

Ned Nwoko is bullish about his popularity as the reigning senator for the district. But then, even as the reigning senator, his popularity has not been tested at the ballot box under APC, a party that has never won any election in the district. And until he brings success in the effort to create Anioma State, he cannot depend on his many hands in the social media to take him back in the Senate as most of them are writing hagiography in hieroglyphics.

Ifeanyi Okowa is an old dog of war and a veteran of Delta North politics. A deeply provincial politician, he has never left the district except during his time in the university of Ibadan and during his single term at the Senate. He has worked, ruminated in and ravaged the district for votes and political support. He knows the district well and it’s political inclinations, had dominated it politically and manipulated the people for his personal successes which gave him so much power and wealth. His political roots in the area go very deep and any politician who ignores that fact, does so at his peril. Okowa should be respected by any aspiring politician in the district as he has made and unmade so many politicians there in the past. Even as he is presently running out of popularity among the electorate, Okowa cannot be underestimated, especially as he has acquired a mountain of money which he seeks to preserve by becoming a senator again.

Ifeanyi Okowa’s political influence however does not travel beyond Delta North, no matter how much his name is bandied outside the area. But in Delta North, his contacts and tentacles are long and his reach, wide. Any politician who under plays his dominance faces the real risk of being played by the very same people he relies on to run his campaign. Okowa has the old habit of planting moles and disruptors in opponents camps.

And that says so much about the political beliefs and style of Ifeanyi Okowa. Okowa is never ideological and does not have guiding principles to his politics, survival is the name of the game. He also does not fight in the open. His political engagements are subterranean. He is a master of subterfuge and destroys his opponents without a direct blow to the body, even while touting them as friends. He gnaws at his opponents until he brings them down. He is recessive but always has a knife ready for his political enemies which he uses without qualm or regret. He does not confront them directly. Okowa is a master of deconstruction of his opponents. He knows how to exclude opponents from the party hierarchy, which is what he’s doing now to Ned Nwoko through the party Chairmen in Delta North.

Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa has never been popular in the ways that people have passions for politicians they like. Okowa rather operates in the realm of awe and fear. Politicians fear him and the people are awed by the seeming successes of his chicanery and duplicity. A man once said Okowa can trick the devil with a straight face while keeping his friendship with him. But of course these are not virtues.

Okowa’s success in politics has depended almost entirely on wild risks, readiness to bend rules and dexterity in playing the system. Every electoral victory he has won, every office he has been appointed to, was through his chicanery and capacity to take risks while by-passing rules. In James Ibori’s first election in 1999, Okowa had no money to support the man he bet on to win the governorship, James Ibori. So he sold the house he had at the time and used the proceed to jack up the electoral register and win the Ika Northeast LGA for James Ibori. He was appointed a Commissioner in Ibori’s government afterwards. Throughout the period of the electoral system before IRev and BVAS, Okowa led the effort to alway raise the voting population figures of his LGA from about twenty five thousand voters in 1999 to over 131,945 in 2023. In the presidential election of 2023 where he was vice-presidential candidate of the PDP and where BVAS and IRev got deployed for the first time for voter verification, the total accredited number of voters in the election in Ika Northeast fell to below 32,000, not much more than a quarter of the registered voters for that election.

Ned Nwoko may just be a high stepping conquistador who understands the broad strokes of politics in Delta North but it’s obvious he will be lost in the brass and tacks of village politics without being inured in the petty squabbles that propel community politics in Delta North. He has twice won federal elections in the district but always on the back of the ruling and popular party.

A bullish and enthusiastic performer with a lot of steam, he is not seeped in the grubby, mud slinging activities that characterize local politics. His foe, Ifeanyi Okowa is a master of that art. A friend once said Nwoko works from the examples he draws from British politics and is not deeply immersed in the dark realities of Nigerian affairs. Not being a diabolic person, Okowa can easily outwit him when it gets to the gritty. He harbours the injurious mistake of believing that the world loves him and so continually seeks the world’s attention and validation, particularly through the social media.

Nwoko is not an ideological person either but an infectious enthusiast for whatever are his beliefs and passions. Nwoko is one of the worlds dreamers with a sense of mission to change the world and he believes the world owes him an obligation to fight on his side. Note his fights against malaria. He has his contacts and tentacles deep into the innermost recesses of the APC federal government and feels entitled to benefits that most APC big wigs cannot even dare to ask for.

Peter Nwaoboshi made a lot of enemies among the political class during his stint as state chairman of PDP. He was reputed to have extorted every aspirant for political office in the state as PDP held unquestioned dominance in the politics of the state.

Peter Nwaoboshi may perhaps be the most experienced politician in the state as he cut his political teeth as Personal Assistant to Chief Nosike Ikpo, senator representing Bendel East in the second Republic 1979-83. Nwaoboshi thereafter proceed to the Ambrose Alli University Ekpoma to qualify as a lawyer. He brought his second Republic experience to bear on the Grassroots Development Movement (GDM) and as first state Secretary of PDP at the beginning of the 4th Republic, he helped steer the party to victory.

Peter Nwaoboshi’s personal lifestyle and proclivity to be tied to Igbuzor politics denies him the reach and outward acceptance across the entire senatorial district. As a result he has been unable to build cells and loyalists across the communities in the district. So Nwaoboshi is known within the party ranks but not so well among the voters, in spite of winning the senatorial seat twice. He rode on the back of a ruling party in elections that were not as keenly contested as will be in 2027.

As three juggernauts gather to fight over the APC candidacy for Delta North, fireworks will be expected, not in the elections itself but in the APC primaries.

Political parties don’t just fail, they drift first and when there is a strong challenge, they rip apart. APC has become too unwieldy for electoral success in Delta state and harbours too many disparate and opposing interests to succeed. It still stands because it’s members are too determined to remain and be identified with the mainstream, the ruling federal government. There are no principles in Nigeria politics and there is morbid fear of opposition politics. In Nigeria, the mainstream means the party with the power to fix elections. The challenge of a more nimble party will rip APC apart, at least in Delta state.

@basilokoh.

---

1SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER NOW

Email address:

Leave this field empty if you're human:

---

Support MATAZ ARISING’ journalism of integrity and credibility.

Good journalism ensure the possibility of a good society, an accountable democracy, and a transparent government.

We ask you to consider making a modest support to this noble endeavour.

TEXT AD: To advertise here – Email ad@matazarising.com

LATEST POSTS