By a Political Analyst and Columnist, Pamela O.
Victor Ochei’s recent lamentations on Arise News and elsewhere — that Ifeanyi Okowa “betrayed” him and “hijacked” the APC structure in Delta after the mass defection from PDP — are the purest form of political hypocrisy.
Ochei should shut up. Okowa did not betray him. The real transaction was simpler and more sordid: key figures in the old APC, notably Festus Keyamo and elements of the camp that included Victor Ochei, facilitated or acquiesced in the wholesale handover of the party’s residual structure to Okowa and Governor Sheriff Oborevwori.
In doing so, they sold out genuine or earlier stakeholders, including Senator Ned Nwoko and former Deputy Senate President Ovie Omo-Agege.
The timeline is not ambiguous. In April 2025, Oborevwori, Okowa and the bulk of the PDP political machine emptied into the APC in Delta.
Keyamo, the foundation APC man and sitting minister, did not merely welcome them; he publicly declared Oborevwori the undisputed leader of the APC in the state and asserted that decisions would now run through the governor, the senators, the state chairman and the new configuration. That was not resistance. That was an invitation and a coronation.
The old APC’s internal fissures — Keyamo’s faction versus the Omo-Agege tendency — had already weakened it.
When the PDP juggernaut arrived with local government councils, councillors, executive appointments and the full apparatus of state power, the residual “party structure” that the old APC still controlled became the bargaining chip.
Ochei himself has admitted the arithmetic: the incoming group controlled the executive, the local governments and “all 500 councillors.” What the old APC still held was the formal party structure.
Rather than fight to protect a space for earlier members or for those who had already defected in expectation of accommodation (Nwoko moved earlier, in February 2025, on the basis of assurances about tickets and power-sharing), the gatekeepers opened the door.
Keyamo’s subsequent praise for the “organic” and “best” senatorial primaries in which Okowa swept Delta North with over 113,000 (even if it’s unrealistic)votes against Ned Nwoko’s official 2,600-plus, and in which Dafinone took Central from Omo-Agege, is consistent with a man who had already accepted the new order.
Ochei’s later exit to the NDC, and his present cry of betrayal, is the complaint of someone who expected to remain relevant inside the new arrangement and discovered he was not alpha and omega.
The real casualties of that sale are clearer. Ned Nwoko has publicly rejected the Delta North primary result, evidences from agent’s showed he won the overwhelming majority of wards Yes!, with video and agents’ reports and reportedly he was promised an automatic ticket and a power-sharing formula before joining, and described a process in which returning officers and panel members were drawn from the state government orbit.
Indisputable the pattern is familiar in Nigerian politics: assurances given to induce defection or loyalty, then discarded once the larger structure is secured.
Omo-Agege, who had led one of the old APC factions and contested for the governorship in 2023, was similarly sidelined and has moved to the NDC.
These are the people who can legitimately speak of betrayal by the handlers of the old structure.
Ochei’s personal history with Okowa — the 2014/2015 contest, the Accord Party detour, the mutual accusations of double-dealing — is old news. Politics in Delta North has long been a contest of Anioma heavyweights. What is new is Ochei’s attempt to rewrite the 2025–2026 realignment as a personal injury inflicted by Okowa alone.
The structure was not hijacked in the dark; it was negotiated and surrendered by those who controlled the residual APC organs and who calculated that alignment with the sitting governor and the former governor offered better short-term positioning. Keyamo’s public posture and the subsequent campaign council arrangements that place Oborevwori, Okowa and Keyamo at the centre make the direction of travel unmistakable.
Supporters of Senator Ned Nwoko have every reason to view this sequence as a double betrayal: first, of the assurances that induced or sustained loyalty to the APC project in Delta North, and second, of any residual claim that the old APC represented an independent progressive alternative.
When Ochei now lectures about hijacking after having operated inside the same ecosystem that facilitated the merger, he is not an innocent bystander. He is a participant who lost the subsequent distribution of spoils and has chosen the NDC route.
Delta’s politics remains fluid ahead of 2027. Okowa holds the APC ticket in Delta North; Ochei and Omo-Agege are on the NDC platform; Ned Nwoko continues to contest the legitimacy of the primary that produced Okowa. Those are the facts of the contest.
The fiction is that Okowa alone “betrayed” Victor Ochei. The more accurate description is that Ochei, Keyamo and the gatekeepers of the old APC structure traded residual control for relevance inside the expanded party, and in the process marginalised or outmanoeuvred others — including Ned Nwoko — who had reason to expect better. On that record, Ochei’s current sermon is not analysis. It is self-serving noise. He should shut up and let the voters and the remaining party processes decide.
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