FORMER Senate Chief Whip, Senator Roland Owie, last week, rose strongly in defence of the embattled acting national chairman of the PDP Board of Trustees, Chief Tony Anenih, who was taken to the cleaners, Monday, in Abuja by President Olusegun Obasanjo and the national chairman of the party, Chief Audu Ogbeh over his role in the alleged “imposition” of Chief Godspower Ake as the national vice chairman of the party in the South-South.
Owie in an interview with Sunday Vanguard in Benin City said “the four South-South governors who are challenging Anenih on the swearing in of Ake are being ungrateful to their godfather and should shut up”.
His reason: “It is the same manner Chief Ake has been imposed on them that they (the governors) were imposed on the members of the PDP in their respective states by Anenih.
Is it not this same Anenih they are crucifying today that went around in 2003, declaring with a fiat that there was no vacancy in any of the Government Houses in the six South -South states, did the governors rebel against him? They did not because it favoured them; why are they rebelling now?” The senator who was elected to the National Assembly on the platform of the PDP but dumped the party in 2003 said that “a man does not care what the wife he had sacked does with her buttocks but I am being forced to talk about PDP because of the ingratitude these governors are showing to their benefactor”.
“Governorship primaries did not hold in PDP states in the South-South in 2003, Anenih ordered that there should be none in the selfish interest of the governors and they undemocratically shut out others who wanted to contest for the party’s ticket.
Nobody called him names when he declared that all other persons eyeing the Government Houses in their states were mere aspirants while the governors , with no primaries held, were the candidates of the party. The 1999 election of some of the governors followed the same pattern, why are they accusing him now.
“He has not done anything new or different from what he has been doing before. Or did any of them say that his action was undemocratic when he imposed them on the people of their states in 2003? Look, they cannot eat their cake and have it back. They should not hang Anenih, there is a Bini proverb which says that when the rain was beating the running board of a house, the verandah was laughing but when the rain got heavier, it equally beat the verandah.
The governors have only gotten a taste of their own poison and they should stop complaining”, Owie said. “I am aware that in Edo state where I hail from, that Human Rights activist Chief Mike Ozekhome was shut out of the contest for the governorship ticket in the state because Anenih decreed that there should be no primary. He imposed Igbinedion just as he imposed the other governors. I think they should all go and apologise to Anenih for ridiculing him after benefitting from him in a similar manner”, he added.
