By Emma Amaize
PORT HARCOURT— FIRST civilian governor of Edo State and national chairman of the South-South Peoples Assembly, SSPA, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, who is gunning for the position of National Chairman of the All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP,  has said he is in the race to give the party a credible leadership alternative.

Chief Odigie-Oyegun, who spoke to Vanguard on phone, however, said that if elected as the National Chairman of the ANPP at its next convention, and the party goes ahead to pick a South-Southerner as its Presidential candidate based on merit,  he will  relinquish his position  for somebody from another section of the country.

According to him, “ANPP is a great party. It has suffered a lot of unfortunate misfortunes from the not too distant past arising from its being undermined and sabotaged during the former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s time,  when people were seduced with decamping, and even in the time of former President, the late Umaru Yar’Adua, when the party’s Governors became in-laws to the President.”

The former Governor added  that the ANPP “has lacked inspirational leadership for a while and given the mood of the country today, the people are looking for inspirational alternative and some of them came to mount pressure on me to come out and give the party hope, hence my decision to gun for the office.”

He said the ANPP will nominate its presidential flag_bearer not on the basis of zoning, but, based on the competence of the aspirants, adding that it was only when that decision was made by the party that the question of his chairmanship of the party wont affect the South_South would arise.