Okowa and Tambuwal in Delta during the visit

Delta Governor,  Ifeanyi Okowa on Wednesday lamented the political slant given to the recent visit of Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal to the capital of his State, Asaba, asserting that the visit was purely social.

The visit came up three days after the Abuja Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convention that produced Chief Uche Secondus as chairman. Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers state and Chief James Ibori, a past governor of Delta were also at the meeting.

While Ibori appeared at the Cenotaph, where products exhibition by beneficiaries of Okowa’s skills acquisition programmes was going on, Wike commissioned a road constructed by the Okowa administration.

That Tambuwal, an All Progressives Congress (APC) governor paid a visit to Okowa, a PDP governor (with Wike materialising like a conjurer’s rabbit in a jiffy) has sent tongues wagging.

Putting one and two together, anaylsts had interpreted the visit in relations unfolding 2019 presidential election permutations. According to them, PDP is looking for a credible candidate to confront President Muhammadu Buhari of APC. Indeed, Buhari has disappointed his enemies who thought that by now, he would have become a bed-ridden vegetable! Rather, the old man waxes stronger in health every day, traversing the globe for one meeting or the other and even finding time to see his cows in Daura…
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With Atiku who is a presidential material in PDP now, strategists within the party are jittery that he might become a baggage for the party because of the allegations of corruption against him ( though no Nigerian court has pronounced him guilty).

Those strategists, therefore, see Tambuwal as a young man (compared to Buhari and Atiku) who, with the agility of a cat, can hobnob well with his age mates who are heads of government in the international community. Moreover, Tambuwal does not have an albatross of corruption document following him about like an ancestral spell.

Wike and Tambuwal in Delta

But Okowa who spoke at an interactive session with the media in Asaba, said the visit of Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal was politicised, even as he acknowledged that insinuations about the visit may have to do with its closeness to the recent Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convention.

Okowa said: “Tambuwal’s visit was purely social; it had nothing to do with politics.

“The empowerment/business fair was to encourage our youths, but somehow politics was dragged into it…”

According to him,  Tambuwal was impressed with the empowerment scheme and had promised to send his  people to understudy it.

The Governor also lamented that the ability of his administration to perform has been hampered by funds, as he noted that Delta has the highest deductions and highest exposure from Federal Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC).”

He however said with the restructuring of the debts by his administration, the economy of the state was relatively stabilised.

He added that the restructuring led to reduction of the amount the State was using to service its loans from N5.2 billion to about N2.9 billion