A philanthropist, Peter Okocha, has joined the race to succeed Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State, saying he does not believe in power shift but that Delta North will produce the next governor by divine arrangement.
Okocha, who ran for the post on the platform of the defunct Action Congress (AC) in 2007, explained that it was divine arrangement that made James Ibori (Delta Central) Governor from 1999 to 2003; and Uduaghan (Delta South) since 2007.
“The same divine arrangement” will make him, from Delta North, governor in 2015, he insisted.
Okocha said in his Ibusa home that he plans to empower Deltans through education because “I don’t believe in empowerment through bags of rice and beans. I believe in empowerment through enduring and long-lasting policies.”
He promised to build industrial parks and develop infrastructure statewide.
“I am a businessman in politics,” he reiterated, “not a typical Nigerian politician who has no job” and believes “in a political leadership where you leave office on a Sunday and go to your private office on Monday rather than remaining jobless until another cheap political opportunity comes for the lure of public office.”
Okocha said he and Uduaghan are “brothers and have the same destiny” but denied that he is a protege of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
“We are good friends with mutual respect for one another. We have been friends since the 1980s while he was a Customs Officer. I was already a multimillionaire before I met Atiku Abubakar.”
He expressed confidence that he “will win the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) primaries, the governorship election, and serve for eight years as PDP governor.”
Another PDP governorship aspirant and former Speaker of Delta State House of Assembly, Victor Ochei, promised to ensure good governance, accountability, unity and peace, jobs, and even development irrespective of tribe, gender or religion, if he wins in 2015.
He told Delta State Leader and Elders Forum in Warri that this agenda will be the cornerstone of a viable development that every indigene of the state will be proud of.
Ochei said he desires a state devoid of ethnicity where diversity should be the driving force in strengthening the bond of brotherhood.
