Former President of the Senate, Sen. Adolphus Wabara has disclosed that he advised former President Goodluck Jonathan against contesting for the 2015 presidential election but was shunned.
Wabara, who is the Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), said that Jonathan’s insistence on contesting the election, against sound advice, cost the party power.
He explained that after he visited Jonathan in Aso Rock to warn him about the dangers of contesting in the 2015 polls, the president’s Chief of Staff, Mike Oghiadomhe, denied him access to the president.
The ex-Senate President said that his advice was based on the party’s principle of rotation of power between the North and South that was in practice at the time, not because he hated the president as some said.
“If President Goodluck Jonathan had listened to me, PDP would not have lost power in 2015. I visited President Jonathan in 2011 and pleaded with him not to contest the 2015 presidential election,” he told Vanguard.
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“If he had heeded my advice, we would not be suffering today. We lost because of Jonathan’s misunderstanding of politics. I advised him not to contest, you are not a Northerner.
“2015 belongs to the North, you can’t complete their tenure. But you can complete the tenure of your late boss, that’s constitutional.
“He ignored my advice and his then Chief of Staff, Chief Mike Oghiadomhe denied me further access to the President.”
Wabara, who represented Abia South from 1999 to 2007, insisted that PDP made a mistake in not sticking to its zoning arrangement and zoning power to the North in 2015.
He stated, “Zoning is key in PDP, when you talk of zoning, you talk of equity. Our party macro zones and micro zones positions. PDP would have been in power if President Jonathan had respected our policy of zoning in 2015. It was a mistake by the PDP.”