How We Produced Labour Surge That Powered Peter Obi – Utomi

A chieftain of the Labour Party, Patrick Utomi, has urged stakeholders of the party to work towards producing leadership that would promote the party’s ideals.

Professor Utomi stated this while reacting to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the party’s leadership crisis, on Friday.

Naija News reported that the apex court, in its ruling, struck out an Appeal Court’s ruling that recognized Julius Abure as the party’s national chairman.

The court dismissed Abure’s cross-appeal for lacking merit and upheld Nenadi Usman‘s appeal on the leadership crisis.

Reacting to the ruling, on Saturday, Utomi told the party’s stakeholders that the efforts of the former Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) President, Ayuba Waba, Wale Okuniyi and himself produced the surge that powered the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Peter Obi.

He emphasized the need for them to uphold the social democratic ideology of the party.

It read: “As the leadership of the Labour Party looks to reconstruct its house and reconcile all, let me remind stakeholders of the motives that brought then NLC President, Ayuba Waba and I, with Wale Okuniyi as ground engineer, together, to work a process that produced the Labour surge which powered Peter Obi and the Obidients in 2023.

“It was an expression of a desperate need to save Nigeria through rejecting machine politics that just seeks to capture power. We learnt in 2015 that just capturing power is without any use unless shared values and a collective accountability frame was firmly established ab initio.

“As Ayuba Waba firmly expressed in his speech at an event marking my birthday on February 6th 2022, we desired to change the course of electoral democracy in Nigeria by building political parties as platforms for setting a clear path for national advance.

“The party we wanted to build should then recruit people of character, competence, compassion, and commitment, who are champions of service to the people; and then form, prune, and align their disposition to entrepreneurial social democratic principles that put people first. while seeking rapid economic growth to reduce poverty by creating jobs in a competitive economy with social harmony.

“In the many hours of meetings in Ayuba Waba’s office at the NLC offices in Abuja which I chaired, I never hid my admiration for Scandinavian free enterprise models in which education and health care were radically socialized, universal and geared to production.

“Finding people whose ways align to these foundational principles of that third force we set out to build is critical for impact.”