A former PDP Chairman during the Obasanjo years and one of the founding members of the APC, Chief Audu Ogbeh has said working with President Obasanjo at the time was pretty difficult. He spoke to the Punch.

Ogbeh said he saved Obasanjo from impeachment but got vilified in return for his troubles.

Hear him:

“I was not going to be a chairman who would sit and watch the impeachment of the first elected Southern President because I was certain that the South was going to say wait a minute, “is it that Obasanjo was that bad or that these northerners don’t want anyone else on that seat?” I think the latter sentiment would have prevailed. And I saw the consequences way beyond the anger and discontent of the members of the National Assembly who were pushing for impeachment. Thus, I pleaded with Ghali. He wasn’t happy and I am sure he had said so before to people but he respected me and the thing calmed down. That is why it is so strange to read in Obasanjo’s book (My Watch) that Atiku Abubakar, Iyorchia Ayu and I were the ones planning the impeachment and that he had a mole in our midst. It sounds preposterous, to say the least, and highly uncharitable of him.

“I respect him as a former president but he was making wild comments about things he knew nothing about. I was on his side just as I was before his re-election in 2003 when 15 governors came to me that they didn’t want him and asked me to call a meeting to ask him to step down. But I told them I would not call a meeting and he (Obasanjo) in company with (Waziri) Mohammed, the chairman of the Nigerian Railways Corporation who died in a plane crash, drove into my house here shortly after that and asked me what was going on. I told him what the governors said and advised him to appease them and he did. I stood by him and he told people including Adamu Chiroma that God and Audu Ogbeh saved him in the election of 2003. Therefore, these inconsistent statements just to smear people are highly uncharitable and hopelessly un-presidential. History can’t be re-written just because people feel bad about somebody at different times. I respect him as a highly intelligent man but he is too full of mischief and vengeance”.

Ogbeh said he’s tried to mend fences with Obasanjo in the intervening years.

“Yes, he came here and we had lunch. We have no problem (now); I didn’t see him for 10 years. I saw him after 10 years in his house during the last electioneering campaigns. I went there with General (Muhammadu) Buhari and others. We saw and greeted. I will always respect him as Nigeria’s president and an older person. I will always respect his intelligence and capacity for work. He is an absolutely incredible man when it comes to ability to work and grasp issues and deal with them. But I keep saying that the element of mischief and vengeance tends to diminish his greatness”.

He also said it was too late for the APC to expel Senate President Bukola Saraki from its fold.

“It’s too late to do that. I think dialogue is the answer and I wish to God that that dialogue had taken place much earlier. Two, calling that meeting at 9:00am when voting (for leadership positions) was happening at 10:00am was a strategic error. I didn’t know who engineered it. It was a very tragic error. Three, I think a committee should have been set up long ago to get the process of reconciliation over with. The committee not involving the party leadership but elders from the party should meet both sides in the divide within the APC and sort the matter out because the longer it lasts, the more embarrassment we get, the more the public confidence in us shakes and the more difficulties we face in governance”.

You can read the entire interview here.