Mr. Kenneth Udeze, the National Chairman of Action Alliance (AA), has thanked Nigerians for their concerns and prayers while he was in his abductors’ den.
Udeze, who breathed air of freedom on Tuesday after five days with his abductors who took him last Friday in front of a Zenith Bank branch in Abuja, confirmed to NEXT EDITION on Wednesday through a telephone interview, that his travails were indeed political.
The AA national chairman, who was in transit from Osun State, where his abductors took him to, to Lagos to board a flight to join his family in Abuja, said his ordeal was in connection with his party’s September 7 national convention holding in Osun State.
He, however, fingered on Adekunle Rufai Oma, who he alleged had been working for Uche Nwosu, the son-inlaw of former Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, saying they “fabricated nonsense allegations of forgery and perjury” against him over the 2018 Ogun governorship election.
Udeze said: “Thank you all for your concerns and prayers. I am back from the den of my political detractors…One native doctor Adekunle Rufai Oma (otherwise known as child of a witch) working for Uche Nwosu chose to fabricate one nonsense allegations of forgery and perjury against me in Osun State over the governorship election that took place in Osun State since 2018 where he claimed that AA substituted his name with another name.”
The AA boss maintained that the said Rufai neither purchased the party’s nomination form, nor participated the primary, even as he stated that he would remain bold and resolute in his quest to see that Imo State was liberated.
According to him, “No going back. I can never be intimated,” promising to open up after his party’s convention in Osun on Saturday.
It would be recalled that Nwosu defected to Action Alliance during the last general elections to contest for the Imo governorship when he failed to pick the ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC), of which his father in-law was the out-going governor.
Nwosu, however, lost to Emeka Ihedioha of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), although some politicians who defected with him and picked the AA tickets, won seats in the Imo House of Assembly.
Since after the election, AA had been enmeshed in crisis as those who won seats into the Imo House of Assembly allegedly came together under Nwosu to take over the control of the party from Udeze.
The Saturday’s convention, which was slated to hold in Osun, according to organisers, would be a fight for all between the original members of the party and those defectors who want to take over the party.
It would be recalled that the Action Alliance was founded by Okorocha who soon after dumped the party when he felt it could not provide him with a strong platform to run elections.
He later joined the PDP, later defected to the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), which offered him its ticket to become the Imo State governor. He was later to dump APGA for the APC through which he ran for his second term.
Nwosu, his son-inlaw, had been a strong member of his government from inception and had wanted to succeed Okorocha in the 2019 governor ship election.
