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Former spokesperson for the Labour Party (LP) presidential campaign council during the 2023 election, Kenneth Okonkwo, has hinted at leaving the party.
“Any party that is not visibly committed to the welfare of Nigerians will most likely not see me there. I don’t rule out going back to anything because change is constant,” Okonkwo said in an interview with the news platform Symfoni.
“My own Labour Party is not impressing me. Assuming they continue on this trajectory where they cannot even hold an acceptable national convention, then you’d tell me I’d be there?
“I was a spokesperson at the presidential level and I did not know that the Labour Party was having a convention. When I saw it on social media, I thought it was fake. They were rejected in Umuahia because it was a leprous convention.
“Those people are clowns. It is the greatest joke I have ever seen in a political party and then you want to position yourself as a party of integrity. You cannot give what you don’t have.”
Okonkwo left the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2022, citing the adoption of a Muslim-Muslim ticket for the 2023 presidential election. A month later, he joined the LP.
The LP has been embroiled in a leadership tussle after Lamidi Apapa, deputy national chairman of the party (south), declared himself the acting national chairman in 2023.
The crisis worsened in 2024 when a national convention of the party in Anambra saw Julius Abure re-elected as chairman of the party amid opposition from a faction of the party, with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) stating it did not monitor the LP’s national convention.
The Board of Trustees (BoT) of the party described the convention that re-elected Abure as a charade, adding that Abure’s tenure as national chairman of Labour was over. Abure has since been sacked by the court.
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