Former Ogun State Commissioner for Health and daughter of ex-Nigeria President, Iyabo Obasanjo, has given reasons for her defection from the Peoples Democratic Party to the ruling All Progressive Congress.
Obasanjo insisted that she was not pressured or persuaded by the ruling party but left because she became uncomfortable in PDP.
Recall that she returned to active politics after about 15 years and joined the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, ahead of the 2027 general elections in Ogun State.
She had lost her re-election bid in 2011 to the after being defeated by Senator Gbenga Obadara of the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and subsequently returned to the United States to pursue her academic career, rising to the rank of a professor.
Speaking on Wednesday while featuring on Frontline, a current affairs program on Eagle 102.5 FM Ilese Ijebu and monitored by our correspondent in Abeokuta, Iyabo Obasanjo disclosed that she could have quit the party long ago but was unable to do so since her father, Olusegun Obasanjo was a party chieftain at the time.
Her words: “APC never approached me. I know there’s a lot of things out there in terms of APC, reaching out to people to join and all that. I never was approached.
“So, for me, it was, I made a choice to join. So, to kind of say, oh, APC pressured me to join and things like that, there was never anything. I analyzed the situation. For me, the primary reason was that I left (PDP) because I wasn’t comfortable in the party.
“ I could have joined the other party then, but my dad was then still a chieftain in that other party. It would be like I was joining against him. Now, he doesn’t belong to any party, he tore his party card and I’m a free agent. It wasn’t even that I wasn’t a free agent then, I could have done anything I wanted on my own. But it’s the image it presented that I was trying to avoid.
She insisted that she wasn’t pressured into making the decision and had no regrets leaving a party(PDP) where nobody cared, recounting how the party often reached out only when it needed her to mobilize support during elections, sidelining her contributions and insights in the process.
“My own situation was a decision based on analysis and based on who I am and where I feel comfortable being part of. I’m not comfortable being part of an organization that I left and nobody cared to find out why.
“And I can even tell you, it was this bad that the only time I got a call from them….. I was a senator of the federal republic and I knew the followership I had there and then the election was coming and somebody from the presidency reached out. How transactional is that? So, I dropped the phone on the person. I’m like, you only realize that there are people that can help you during elections.
“So, yes, I will never go back to that party. I just feel that at the level I left, that nobody… I don’t know if I feel betrayed, I just feel the individuals there are not people I want to associate with.
“I think they’re idiots, if you can put it that way. And I think they’re idiots because if elections are about people and if you don’t reach out to the people that are prominent in your party, how do you win elections? You can’t” she stressed.
Obasanjo argued that politics was not about using people for an end but about caring for people and carrying them along.
“And if you can’t care for people in your own leadership team, how can you care for the ordinary person on the street? she asked.
