A Case Study in Political Self-Destruction: How Okezie Ikpeazu, PhD, and his ilk's Presided Over the Funeral of the PDP in Abia State

Once upon a party... there was the PDP in Abia; powerful, entrenched, and undefeatable. Then came a mortician with a PhD.

By the time Dr. Okezie Victor Ikpeazu was done with governance (or whatever approximation of it he practiced), the PDP in Abia State had not just lost power, it had lost soul, structure, and, most recently, its last vestige of moral identity: Rt. Hon. Sir Ude Oko Chukwu, PhD, Deputy Governor (2015-2023), finance technocrat, loyal party man since 2003... now gone.

Let us examine, for posterity and pathology, how one man with unlimited executive power and limited executive imagination led the PDP into irrelevance.

During his tenure, no metrics were too sacred to desecrate. Debt soared, salaries languished, infrastructure died unmourned. The only thriving sector? Public deception and propaganda.

What started as an opportunity for equity (Okezue Abia) became an obsession with ethnic domination. The Ngwa Agenda was not just whispered, it became a loud, clanging symbol of the exclusion of other zones. Even when the principle of zoning dictated that Abia North should produce the next governor, the former governor insisted on backdoor options from his ethnic enclave, abandoning even his loyal deputy, Sir Ude Oko Chukwu.

Under Ikpeazu, the PDP was no longer a political party. It was a choir of electoral misfits, recycled failures, and "yes sir!ÔÇØ sycophants, the Abraham Amahs of this world who confused loyalty with mediocrity. Internal democracy was sacrificed on the altar of executive mood swings.

We can't forget that PDP couldn't pay rent for its secretariat. Yet that same secretariat became a phantom project for fund diversion, another line item on the budget of shame. When a political party becomes a squatter, what hope has it to govern?

In the twilight of his tenure, Ikpeazu , PDP's supposed state leader, turned coat and cast his lot with Governor Wike and the APC. He voted against his own party's presidential candidate and then sat back, awaiting an ambassadorial appointment that remains in perpetual processing.

Politics, they say, is about interest. But in Abia under Ikpeazu, the PDP's "interestÔÇØ became the parochial hunger of a clique; a cabal so blinded by self-preservation they forgot the people, the party, and the future.

Leadership is about legacy. And what is Ikpeazu's? Eight years of vanishing funds, unpaid workers, broken promises, and now a broken party. His regime's legacy is so unforgettable.

Sir Ude Oko Chukwu, PhD, calm, cerebral, and long-suffering, has finally pulled the plug. After serving as Deputy Governor, Speaker of the House, and a loyal PDP foot soldier since 2003, he has joined the long list of dignified defectors. What's left of the PDP now? Some spokespersons on Facebook and ragtag miscreants.

Dr. Ikpeazu didn't just lose an election in Abia State. He lost the moral authority to lead, the strategic foresight to build, and the political decency to let go even after the loss. The PDP in Abia didn't just fall, it was buried, in layers of incompetence, ethnic arrogance, and betrayal.

And now that even Rt. Hon. Ude Oko Chukwu, PhD has left, the message is loud and clear: the funeral is over. There will be no resurrection.

Onuakasi Nwadike writes from Ugwunagbo LGA

https://youtu.be/__oRFFrKnss