A former Labour Party presidential aspirant, Joseph Faduri, has accused the party’s Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, of buying the presidential ticket.
According to The Punch, Faduri made the allegation during a Twitter Space session, where he ally his grievances, accusing the Labour Party of sidelining him because Obi spent more than he did.
Faduri lamented that since Obi emerged as the LP presidential candidate, he had excluded him and his team from the party’s campaign strategy.
The aggrieved LP presidential aspirant alluded to the fact that the Obi couldn’t outspend former vice president Atiku Abubakar in the presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party, and he (Obi) found solace in LP, a party Faduri claimed he had spent millions building with his team.
He said, “It’s unfortunate what is happening to the Labour Party and Nigeria right now. The press conferences and press releases we have been putting out have been causing a lot of chaos across Nigeria. It is not our fault. Obi and the LP brought this on themselves. They had five months to resolve this matter but chose not to resolve it. I am not a man that is being used by anybody or any party. And also, my team, Rescue Movement, can never be used by any political party.
“We are an independent and young generation that wants something new in our country. We want a country that can work for everybody. Obi belongs to the same generation of the Atikus and the Tinubus that we are saying that we don’t want but politics was played in Asaba and he claimed the ticket of the party. After that, we expected that he would show leadership but he never reached out. He never lent a hand of fellowship. He never brought us to the fold. He actually excluded us (my team and I) from everything he had been doing.
‘’A great example is the campaign list that just came out. No input was requested from us to say, “Okay, Father Joe my fellow contestant, these are things we need to do. Alright, if there are 10 or 20 people that can serve from your side, this is about service to our nation. So, bring them in and let us add them to the list. No single soul from our team was added to that campaign list.”
“What he did when he was governor, I wasn’t there. His own people would have to be the ones to judge that. I cannot judge him. I cannot talk about his record. I can only say what he would do by judging what he’s doing now, how he’s handling the crisis and how he’s handling leadership. When you become the flag bearer of a party, you become the leader of that party. So, as far as our party is concerned, he’s the leader. So, what it means is that if there are aggrieved people in that party, it is his duty as the leader of the party to bring them together and say let’s come together. What are we fighting about?”
“We came together and we agreed to disagree but we had one focus, which was that we were going to have a new Nigeria void of corruption, void of poverty and void of everything that had been wrong with our country in the past years. So, along the line, we woke the Labour Party up and started pumping money into every aspect of the Labour Party, left, right and centre. In every state and every part of the country, we were on national TV, in national newspaper publications and campaigning with flyers and billboards.
“We were doing all of this, spending millions of naira and visiting royal fathers from the north to the south. It was just four days before the primary election when Peter Obi dumped the PDP and saw a viable party that he could come and hijack. I’m so disappointed today by so many people who are shouting ‘Obi no dey give shishi’ because I know how much Obi brought to the Labour Party. He could not outspend Atiku in the PDP and he came to the party to outspend me,” he said.
He further stated that after he was “forced to step down for Obi,” the party’s promise to refund the money he had spent so far was yet to be fulfilled.
