Publisher and politician, Chief Dele Momodu, has described the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as a “cadaver room,” alleging that agents of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have hijacked the one-time governing party.
Speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, the former PDP chieftain explained his defection to the African Democratic Congress (ADC), stating that he could no longer, in good conscience, remain in a party he believed has lost its soul.
“It’s a coalition of different political parties, and I resigned from PDP because I saw that we had reached a kind of call to sack, so I joined ADC,” Momodu said.
“We could see that PDP has been completely hijacked by agents of the ruling party who insist on staying in PDP while working for the APC. It’s a kind of anomaly, but that is fine. If I don’t agree with my party, the honourable thing to do is to resign, and that’s what I did.”
The veteran journalist said his decision was not new to his political character, noting that he has always chosen to leave rather than compromise on principle.
He recounted his earlier foray into politics when he contested the 2011 presidential election on the platform of the National Conscience Party (NCP), after resigning from the Labour Party which, at the time, showed no interest in fielding a presidential candidate.
“Anyone who knows me and remembers my trajectory will remember that I contested the presidency in 2011 on the platform of the National Conscience Party. I came to the National Conscience Party from the Labour Party when I discovered that the Labour Party was not interested in contesting the presidency then.
“I resigned honourably, and then I moved to the National Conscience Party. Of course, I got about 26,000 votes nationwide, and I feel privileged to have been a presidential candidate in Africa’s biggest country, Nigeria. So the lesson I learnt from it is that it will be difficult for a strange political party to win a presidential election,” he explained.
Momodu said he later joined the PDP after losing faith in the Buhari-led APC, seeking a broader platform to pursue his political aspirations.
However, he said his experience at the party’s 2022 presidential primaries, where he scored zero votes, exposed the dominance of moneybags in the system.
“I wasn’t satisfied with the way Buhari’s APC was going, so I joined the PDP to have a larger political platform. In 2022, we had our primaries, so I scored zero because I couldn’t match the billionaires who contested at that time,” he noted.
The former presidential aspirant painted a bleak picture of the PDP’s current state, accusing entrenched interests of keeping it on life support.
“PDP is at the dead end. Some people are desperate; they don’t want to kill it, but they want to keep it in ICU for whatever purpose in the future. That is why they have refused to leave. Everybody is now leaving PDP as a cadaver room, which is a place where you keep bodies that are dead, or if not dead, you keep them in the ICU. It’s a shame, but I have learnt, and I have left,” Momodu declared.
Beyond politics, the Ovation International publisher stressed that his core identity remained that of a journalist and public commentator.
“Of course, apart from being a part-time politician, I am a journalist and a reporter, and I will be a journalist for the rest of my life. I monitor the events in the PDP and other political parties, and I am almost certain that the PDP will not be able to rescue itself from the agents of the ruling party. That is why I left,” he said.
