Former President of the Ijaw Youth Congress (IYC), Worldwide Engr. Udengs Eradiri has urged Bayelsa State Governor Senator Douye Diri and the immediate past governor and serving Senator Seriake Dickson to join the All Progressives Congress (APC)
Eradiri stated this in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State capital during an interaction with members of the Federated Correspondents Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Bayelsa State.
The Labour Party (LP) candidate in the 2023 gubernatorial election in Bayelsa State called on Dickson to take the lead, pointing out that defecting to the ruling party would strategically position the Ijaw nation at the centre of decision-making in the country.
He added that the country’s politics is beyond ethnicity and insisted that the Ijaws must play politics to drive home their agitations and bring development to the oil-rich but impoverished region.
His words: “Governor Douye Diri has been a member of the House of Representatives and Senator. Dickson has been a representative too, a governor and now a senator, and they can be on the table of discourse so that the Ijaws must be represented. This is me, an Ijaw leader, saying that Nigeria’s politics goes beyond ethnicity, and we must play this politics to be heard.
“Today the Senate President and Nyesom Wike determine what happens in the Niger Delta. When Wike said we are a minority, we were all shouting here and there, but he is telling you that we are minority in politics. They set up the South-South Development Commission and from a juicy position that Bayelsa had, they stripped us and ended up giving us just one of the Executive Directors.
“If we had a Dickson or Douye Diri on that table, it wouldn’t happen because they would have been consulted the same way Hope Uzodinma is being consulted, the same way Delta state governor Sheriff is now sitting on the table. First, he is a governor and second, he will be protecting the interests of his ethnic nationality,” he said.