Idoma governor: Senator Moro breaks silence on failure of Benue South to pick PDP ticket

The Senator representing Benue South Senatorial District, Comrade Abba Moro, has finally broken his silence on the outcome of the just concluded guber primaries of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Benue State.

Recall that the Idoma once again failed to pick the governorship ticket of any of the major parties in the state, thereby extending the quest for an Idoma governor to about half a century.

Titus Uba of the Tiv nation clinched the PDP ticket ahead of Benson Abounu of the Idoma nation while Rev Fr. Hyacinth Alia picked that of the APC.

Many people blamed the leadership of the PDP Benue South over the failure of the zone to clinch the ticket.

However, Senator Moro in setting the record straight, said Benue South should put it’s house together so as to face the fight another.
He made this known a statement he personally signed and issued on Wednesday.
The statement read below.

We set out to persuade all Benue State voters of all political persuasions to consider zoning the Benue State governorship
to Zone C. And reasonably so. In the congress of the People’s Democratic Party in Makurdi in 2021, I had robustly conversed this advocacy. We had hoped that our brothers and sisters in Zones A and B would support this position fully as the people of Zone C had always done for them in times of need. Unfortunately, recent events have not met our curve of expectations.

I’m constrained to issue this notice because since we were unable to clinch the governorship ticket of the People’s Democratic Party, there has been a furry of activities, write-ups and blame games on the social media. Events leading up to the Benue State elective congress of the People’s Democratic Party showed that certain persons would not be able to favorably compete in the congress.

With pain, a sizeable
number of our delegates voted for the candidate that won with a landslide, Rt. Hon. Titus Uba, other than the candidate of Zone C.

We had envisaged that the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) would Zone the governorship of her
platform to Zone C with hope that this time around we would break the jinx of not being supported to govern Benue State. We had hoped to be supported to produce the governorship candidate of the PDP to enable us churn out our people-oriented programs that would address and redress the myriad of challenges that face us as a State. As it turned out, there was no way the candidate of Zone C would have competed fairly. This threw up a few questions;

1. Should the Zone C delegates not vote for the candidate of Zone C apparently to make a
statement or send a message even in face of obvious defeat?

2. Why should we grand-stand and play to the gallery with the fate/destiny of the good people of Zone C?

3. What was best for the people of Zone C in the circumstances?

Where you gave me your mandate to work in the Senate, there is what we call “The mood of the Senate”. People watched the mood of the political gladiators/leaders and acted for the best interest of the
people. Today people, especially social media users, are castigating people for acting the way
they acted, playing the holier-than-thou game, calling them all manners of names. Even people who stood on the fence, kept mute when it mattered most or gallivanting, criss-crossing through all political parties in Nigeria are pandering to political correctness because the political mood provides them the opportunity to play the ostrich. Not even a moment of sober reflection to ponder over what transpired?

It takes more than emotional outbursts anchored on sentiments to win elections. Have we sat down to ask ourselves whether we did enough to win this election? Apart from the frenzy of the social media, did we sufficiently engage the delegates?

What the PDP Congress has proved is that Zone C votes alone wasn’t going to save the Zone C candidate from defeat. Truth is, we all didn’t do everything right that winning campaigns do to be successful.

If we blame the people you called “mediocre” leaders in PDP in Zone C for our predicaments in the Zone, who do we blame for the travails of aspirants of Zone C extraction who did not even know where and when elections took place in APC? Our aspirants who did not know who took electoral materials to where? Or was everything, agitation and BRM advocacy about PDP only?

Let us cease fire on the social media war and appraise our political journey so far with a view to charting a more realistic and effective path to success.

Governor Ortom told PDP, indeed Benue people his mind on what he thought would happen, and he was vilified. Akume did not tell anybody anything yet orchestrated a political abracadabra that has left our governorship aspirants hapless in the political wilderness and the silence from our social media Critics and Influencers is deafening.

Well, as they say, he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. The Benue South governorship conundrum has once again shown that we need to do more as a people to get things right to produce a candidate to win election and govern Benue State. And I dare say that we should not kill ourselves because of a failed aspiration. After all, if we are not governor today, we can be governor tomorrow. We need to be alive to fight tomorrow. Let’s keep the spirit alive.