Former Labour Party (LP) chieftain, Kenneth Okonkwo, has accused the party’s 2023 presidential candidate, Peter Obi, of treachery.
Okonkwo, who officially declared his resignation from the Labour Party in February 2025, made this claim during an interview on Saturday.
He stated that Peter Obi was misled by the Julius Abure-led faction of the Labour Party when they informed him that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had recognized them.
The Nollywood actor cum politician expressed his dismay that Obi secretly returned to the Abure faction despite having cautioned him that such a move would ruin his political career and that all his assertions regarding integrity would be rendered meaningless.
“Any politician that knows what he’s doing cannot be betrayed by another. If there is anybody that betrayed the other, I can say it emphatically that Peter Obi betrayed me.
“The Julius Abure-led LP members lied to Obi that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had accepted them and Obi surreptitiously went back to them but I told him: ‘Sir, you have made a public statement on integrity and even if INEC has accepted them, that is not a criterion for you to go back and start dealing with them because they have shown that they are not democratic. If you go back to them, they will destroy your political career and everything you have said about integrity will die,” Okonkwo told Symfoni.
“I told Obi that these people had become agents in the hands of the government to destabilise him. What they did was absolutely illegal and unconstitutional, I told him that if he went back to them, I wouldn’t join him in doing so.
“Thereafter, I called all the people that were in the inner circle and told them the same thing about what Obi was trying to do. I told them he wanted to go back with the Abure people and if he did, I wouldn’t go back with him because I do not swallow back my words.
“And after saying all those things, within like 72 hours, Obi went back to Abure’s office to publicly endorse them and while he was there talking to them, one of the leaders in that executive sent me the video to mock me that the person I was fighting for against them has come to their office to endorse them.
“It was when INEC dissociated itself from Abure that Obi came out to start acting neutral but I told him he could not be neutral and something had to be done,” he added.