When Beneficiaries of Grace Turn Arsonists: The Untold Story of Alex Otti’s Betrayal of the Labour Party By Meche Oswald

History is being mugged in broad daylight.

The recent attempt to rewrite the history of the Labour Party through the propaganda piece titled “While Otti-Nenadi Builds, Julius Abure-Ceekay Igara Destroys” is not just false, it is a perverse, neon-lit advertisement of political treachery. It is a brazen exercise in deception, meticulously crafted to whitewash ingratitude and demonise the very architects who made the so-called builders possible in the first place.

This revisionist propaganda is a smokescreen, designed to justify a hostile, parasitic takeover of the Labour Party.

The political history of Abia State will long be scarred by the name Dr. Alex Chioma Otti as the ultimate personification of ingratitude elevated to statecraft. His rise stands as an enduring, toxic lesson in why some men are beyond rescue, a living embodiment of the bitter herbs soaked in the tears of King David. In Psalm 35, David lamented those he lifted who later hunted him. That ancient, pained cry reverberates unmistakably within the hollowed-out, treacherous corridors of the Labour Party today.

A Political Vagabond Rescued from the Precipice

Before the pageantry of Government House, there was a documented trench of failure and rejection. Alex Otti was a political vagabond, a man whose ambition was crushed in APGA, spat out by the machinery of the APC, and left standing at the precipice of total political irrelevance. He was not merely unpopular; he was politically homeless, clothed in the filthy garment of repeated, humiliating rejection. Otti had no viable platform, no electoral structure, and no path forward.

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It was at this lowest ebb, this moment of absolute political brokenness, that he crawled to Barr. Julius Abure. He did not stride in as a conqueror; he came as a desperate supplicant. He fell to his knees and pleaded for shelter under the Labour Party’s banner. That is the unvarnished, shameful starting point of this story not the sanitised fiction being sold today by a dishonest propaganda machine.

What must be placed permanently on record is the staggering price Abure paid for this betrayer-in-waiting. It was Abure who performed the ultimate act of political alchemy and transformed a serial loser into a governor. At that crossroads, entrenched interests in Abia State dangled billions of naira before Abure to walk away. He chose the people of Abia. He chose integrity over inducement, conviction over convenience, and the fear of God over the intoxication of sudden, illicit wealth. He stood ready, by his own words, to take bullets for Otti, shielding a man who would later sharpen a dagger for his back.

“He who returns evil for good, evil will never depart from his house.” — Proverbs 17:13

To now turn around and paint those same men as “destroyers” is not politics. It is textbook, vile betrayal.

What Exactly Is Otti Building?

Is it building to assemble questionable, kangaroo stakeholder meetings with predetermined outcomes just to forcefully reconfigure party leadership? Is it building to sideline existing structures and replace them with loyal, puppet constructs? Is it building to manufacture legitimacy through a barrage of repetition until the lie begins to sound like truth?

You cannot enter a house through the front door and then, once inside, declare the landlord an impostor. That is exactly what is playing out.

Within months of assuming office, the trajectory changed. The Umuahia illegal stakeholders meeting became the dark, putrid laboratory where the destabilisation of the Labour Party was engineered. Power, once begged for, fermented into dangerous, unchecked arrogance. Otti did not merely distance himself from the structure that produced him, he became a principal financier and moral backer of efforts aimed at the systematic decapitation of its leadership. He weaponised the authority and state resources derived from the party to undermine its very survival.

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“Many leaders believe it is safer to be feared than loved, and that gratitude is a burden easily discarded.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

The Persecution of Ceekay Igara

Nowhere is this cruelty more evident than in the treatment of Hon. Ceekay Igara, the former Abia State Chairman of the Labour Party. Igara held the line during the storms, defending the mandate when it was most vulnerable. Yet, in the immediate post-swearing-in period, the dismantling of the Labour Party structure in Abia State became Otti’s first major political project.

Party leaders were harassed and humiliated, with a state security apparatus deployed to intimidate the State Chairman during lawful party meetings. During local government elections, alliances emerged that worked against Labour Party candidates, including the blatant sponsorship of rival platforms such as the ZLP, purely to spite the bridge that carried him. The pattern repeated itself across political theatres, the battle in Lagos during council elections, the absence of the Labour Party from the Anambra bye-election ballot, and now the looming FCT council elections, where there is visible, documented resistance to Labour Party participation, with Otti’s fingerprints all over it.

One is compelled to ask: what singular crime did Abure and Igara commit against Otti in helping him become governor?

“Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.” — Immanuel Kant

Institutional Capture Dressed as Due Process

The claim that Abure’s tenure simply expired and that everything that followed was neat, lawful, and uncontested is a deliberate, insulting oversimplification. The stakeholder meetings that facilitated the installation of the Nenadi Usman-led caretaker committee were never about internal party democracy. They were orchestrations designed to create a parallel power structure answerable to the executive power of Abia State rather than the constitution of the Labour Party. By leveraging state resources to navigate the judiciary and apply pressure on INEC, Otti is not saving the party, he is hijacking it.

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Like Brutus, nurtured and elevated by Caesar, Otti has delivered his Et tu, Brute moment to the Labour Party. And like Thomas Cromwell, who rose by dismantling institutions only to be crushed by the same logic of destruction, Otti is learning too late that structures retaliate.

“Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend.” — William Shakespeare, King Lear

The so-called builders mentioned in the pro-Otti narrative are not building a stronger, more inclusive party. They are building a personalised vehicle for 2027 purging anyone who remembers the party before it became an appendage of state government. Once the warriors resisting the takeover are removed, the Labour Party is no longer the movement of the masses; it becomes a private political estate of Otti.

The Verdict of History

History will record that the Labour Party was not retrieved from wreckers. It was seized by those who found the constraints of party democracy inconvenient for their personal ambitions. Those who have been discarded Abure, Igara, and the thousands of grassroots faithful were not the destroyers. They were the ones who built the foundation upon which the current usurpers now stand, confident they can overwrite the past with enough press releases and court injunctions.

Otti forgets a fundamental political law. He is but a moon, reflecting borrowed light. Once that source dims, the glow fades, and he will be left in the cold darkness of his own making. He has traded covenant for convenience, gratitude for arrogance, and loyalty for the god of destruction. And as scripture, philosophy, and history agree, there is no enduring peace for the wicked.

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For those still asking who is destroying the Labour Party, the answer is no longer hidden in rhetoric, it is visible in action. Those who are dismantling existing party structures, sponsoring parallel leadership, weaponising state influence, and financing internal destabilisation cannot, by any honest standard, be called builders.

A builder strengthens foundations. He does not replace them with personal constructs.

Call it whatever you like.

But do not call it building.

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Meche Oswald writes from Abia State.