Pat Utomi, a chieftain in the Labour Party (LP), says major opposition leaders in the country must shun personal interest for talks for a “mega coalition” to progress.
He stated this on Wednesday during an interview on Channels TV.
Mr Utomi, a former member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), said he has had conversations about the proposed political party with all the major presidential candidates in the last election, including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi of the LP and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP).
He explained that the proposed new political party is not conceived to actualise the presidential ambition of any of the candidates, but that “it is not about you, it is about Nigeria, it is about the ordinary people in the street.”
He said Messrs Atiku, Obi and Kwankwaso are going to form the base of this new political party.
“Nigeria has become a circus of elections. Let us leave elections for now, let us look at how our country can be made to work for everybody. Let us create a political party that can bring the issues to the fore so that Nigerians can reach consensus on how to solve problems. If we have that consensus, we will find Nigerians that can provide leadership.
“I talked to several of the presidential candidates in the last election about this track we are travelling. I have had conversations with Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, I have had conversations with Engineer Rabiu Kwankwaso, I have had conversations with Peter Gregory Obi and people like Ralph Okey Nwosu of ADC and some of the people who probably constitute the base.
“I had said to them, it is not about you, it is about Nigeria, it’s about the ordinary people in the street, it is about truly moving from this business of sharing from trickles of oil sales to how we can become one of the most productive economies,” Mr Utomi said.
Speaking further, Mr Utomi said the LP was hurriedly used during the last election to challenge the existing system but the proposed party will be properly planned.
He added that all the political parties formed since 1999 were conceived to be used to capture state power.
“It is actually a clean start. You have to start from the premise that Nigeria has not had a political party since 1999. And let’s be very honest with ourselves, what we have managed is to create platforms that enable machine politics from which to grab power usually for the purposes of state capture,” he said.
“We want to calm down now and design a real political party with clear ideas of how you will become part of it, what you will do in it and therefore you accept to do or not to do before you come into it.”
Other coalition talks
Aside from the Mr Utomi-led new political party initiative, there are other ongoing talks about the coalition.
In December last year, some leadership of some political parties met in Abuja and announced some sort of coalition against the ruling APC.
Also, Atiku has repeatedly called for collaboration among the major opposition parties to challenge the ruling party.
Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, Messrs Obi and Kwankwaso held talks on a possible merger but they could not reach an agreement.
However, the presidential ambition of the actors has made it difficult to achieve a united front
Many believe that a united opposition would have defeated the ruling party. The three leading opposition leaders got a combined vote of about 14.5 million votes against the 8.5 million votes polled by President Bola Tinubu during the last presidential election.
Blame Buhari for APC’s failure
Speaking on APC, Mr Utomi, who played a leading role in the formation of the party, accused former President Muhammadu Buhari and his government of deliberately not making it unworkable.
He said he wrote several letters to different APC national chairpersons but none of them responded to his letters.
“Let me tell you why I have walked away from arrangements that have not served the Nigerian people. From the get-go, they did not want it to work – These people who captured the state. The Buhari government did not want the state to work,” he said.
Mr Utomi participated in the 2019 Delta State APC governorship primaries but lost the ticket to Great Ogboru.
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