PDP Expulsion: ‘I Warned Senator Nnamani Against Support For Tinubu’- Petitioner Opens Up

The expulsion of Senator Chimaroke Nnamani from the Peoples Democratic Party is a result of his ‘arrogance’.

Barr Ray Nnaji, a chieftain of the PDP in Enugu State, stated this in Enugu on Monday. Nnaji is a former council chairman of Senator Nnamani’s Nkanu West LGA as well as ex-national auditor of PDP.

Nnamani, a former governor of Enugu State and senatorial candidate of Enugu East senatorial zone in the 2023 elections, was last week expelled by the PDP, alongside five others, over alleged anti-party activities.

Barr Nnaji, the petitioner, stated that, “I wrote the petition to the PDP national, believing that Nnamani would retrace his steps. It was not to expel him.

“I was a council chairman in 1997 before Nnamani became governor in 1999. Jim Nwobodo laid the structure that brought him in. Because of the crisis that rocked the state PDP then, Jim and Senator Okoro joined the Alliance for Democracy from where they went to the Senate. Chimaroke refused to join them because it amounted to anti-party activities.”

Nnaji said Senator Nnamani, after leaving office in 2007, left PDP and formed his own Peoples Democratic Congress, where he contested for Senate and lost.

According to him, “It was Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi that brought Nnamani back to PDP, from where he went to the Senate. Now he wants to rubbish PDP. The first anti-party activity of Dr Nnamani was his write-up in the Sun newspaper eulogising APC’s presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu. I told him to refute it, but he refused.

“This is a serving senator having the ticket to return to the Senate if he wins. Dr Nnamani is in the APC Presidential Campaign Council. I called his attention to these. He went ahead to host the APC stakeholders at his country home, Agbani.

“That was why I petitioned him. I told the PDP I was going to court if they fail to act. He then mounted his billboard with Tinubu. In fact, Nnamani took our mandate for granted. Somebody told him about my petition, and he called me. He is arrogant. Now he is engaging lawyers, wasting his resources.”

He said Dr Nnamani might have read the 2017 constitution of the PDP, which stressed that such expulsion would start from his ward, unknown to him such powers had been given to the party’s national working committee ‘in cases of emergencies, although subject to the party’s NEC’.

On what Nnamani’s expulsion meant to the party, Barr Nnaji said, “Evidence is overwhelming that he might not survive it. The time of substitution is gone. And if you leave him, you are setting wrong precedence. It can destroy the party. PDP can still contest, but if Nnamani wins, the person that came second will have a good case.”

Meanwhile, Senator Nnamani had rejected his expulsion from the party, maintaining that the Iyorcha Ayu-led National Working Committee lacked such powers, as such could only be exercised by the party’s National Executive Committee ( NEC).

The letter was written by his lawyer, Mr Olusegun O. Jolaawo, SAN.