UTOMI NWANNE AND HIS PROXY WAR TO KILL VICTOR OCHEI'S SENATE BID

Basil Okoh

Utomi Nwanne has filed a case in court to challenge the nomination of Victor Ochei to stand for senate election in Delta North under the NDC party. Utomi Nwanne registered in NDC and signed-up for primary election to the Senate. His romance with the NDC ended at that point because of his previous history with the political group that formed the NDC in Delta North.

In 2022, Utomi Nwanne had also enrolled in the Labour Party and through bombast, was subsequently nominated in the primaries for election into the federal House of Representatives for Ika Federal Constituency. Carried on by the Peter Obi wave, Utomi Nwanne even without a serious campaign effort won that election clearly. But at the Ika Northeast collation centre in Owa Oyibu, Nwanne was alleged to have sold his victory to his kinsman in PDP after a load of money changed hands. At the collation centre, the figures were changed and the “Esau” Utomi Nwanne left to enjoy the proceeds of the sale of his “birthright”. So Utomi Nwanne allegedly sold his victory to Victor Nwokolo and he took the money and fled to the United States of America. 

Move forward to 2026. As the 2026 campaign year opened, Utomi came back to find out the party where Peter Obi was moving his next wave. He first registered in ADC and when Peter Obi moved camp to NDC, he followed and enrolled in NDC. Unfortunately for him this time, most Obedient Movement members from the Labour party in Delta North, also registered in the NDC and they remembered Utomi Nwanne who had sold their victory for porridge in the previous election cycle. And they went after him, not with blows but with petitions flying to the NDC Headquarters.

So warned ahead of his arrival, the hierarchy of the NDC lay in wait for Utomi Nwanne even before his papers landed in their office. In keeping with the law, Utomi was allowed to go through the motions of filing for the Senate primaries for Delta North. He obviously chose the Senate this time so the pie will be bigger. It was also to raise a false opposition against his mentor now running for the same senate from APC. If he had taken the NDC ticket, at the appropriate time, he will be instructed to stand down for Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa. But unknown to him, the authorities of the NDC had chosen to take the consensus option to select the candidate of the NDC for the Delta North senatorial district. So when Utomi Nwanne thought he was playing the Obedient Movement a second time, he himself was been played out entirely.

The crucial challenge that confronted the NDC during the primaries season was how to filter out APC pretenders and false flags bearers infiltrating the new party. Even up till now, some candidates are suspected to be APC implants into the NDC, particularly in Delta state. It was a project planned and budgeted for by APC, to suffuse the NDC candidates list with APC agents. NDC had to take extra care to weed these infiltrators out. Whether they fully succeeded will come to light at election time. 

But even with the infiltrations, a steady stream of defectors continue to leave the APC for the NDC. So when this writer insists that APC has been defeated before the elections by the NDC, it is an assertion derived from the psychology of unceasing loss and its depressive consequence. The state of mind of the APC going into this election is depressed and without the willpower and self assurance necessary to contest an election on a big scale. 

When a political party has to continually try to stop people from leaving the group by offering them jobs of SA and PA, it is bribery to keep unwilling members. In Delta state, APC is no longer running a political party of free people. APC is running a prison and a captive organization. The number of people offered jobs of SA and PA by the Delta state government in the last three months are over a thousand. It was all intended to stop people from leaving the APC.

The matter did not end for Utomi with the popular and well received nomination of Victor Ochei. Well funded for the purpose, Utomi Nwanne has been doing everything to cancel the nomination of Victor Ochei as Delta North candidate of NDC to the Senate. Immediately after the NDC primaries, he moved house to Abuja and started circulating among NDC politicians and personnel and infiltrating the NDC staff, allegedly giving money to change primaries results from Delta State. He and his co-traveler Oriehi Anyaiwe, succeeded at first to change the name of Ogor Tony-Obuh to the name of Anyaiwe as the winner of the House of Assembly primaries for Ika South. They didn’t stop there but continued to pump money to the illicit project, even for the Senate race in Delta Central. Of course these were names too big to turn.

During the upload of the names of NDC party nominees to the INEC portal, Victor Ochei’s name was missing from the list of uploaded names. A frantic effort began at the Headquarters of the party to find out why Victor Ochei's name was left out. In the end, the candidates name was uploaded to INEC portal.

So to say that Utomi Nwanne has been well funded and desperate to take out Victor Ochei from the election into the Senate is to simplify the matter. It has been the project of the APC from the start to ensure that by every means possible, Victor Ochei is not allowed to be in the ballot and does not contest the senate election. So the court action is not new, only the more public in the many actions taken against Victor Ochei to stop him from contesting for the Senate seat.  

That a man should invest all of his life into disrupting another mans progress is sinister and creepy. Utomi Nwanne has been investing his life to disrupt Victor Ochei’s Senate bid. It is an unceasing wonder that people around Ifeanyi Okowa always invest their very lives to destroy other people as a means of serving his interests. Another man recently staked his own reputation at the risk of criminal exposure and lifetime disgrace to serve his pleasure of locking up another man. This is not normal. His hold on people around him is spooky.

@basilokoh