AMORI’S UPF AND THE 2007 ELECTION

By Amori Media

“Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.”. Jay-Z

That Ighoyota Amori has paid his dues is a fact that speaks for itself. In the build up to the 2007 elections, Amori founded the Urhobo Political Forum, UPF. It was a formidable pressure group led by Chief Ighoyota Amori. The role played by the group in that elections will ever remain part of the history of Urhobo ethnic nationality, especially because, even though its objective of producing an Urhobo governor was not achieved for the purpose of fairness and equity in the state, it laid the foundation for having an Urhobo governor come 2023 as well as having a formidable voice in Delta.

There is no doubt that the UPF was formed with the intention of having a formidable voice of the Urhobos in the polity, not only in Delta State but beyond, as there was no tangible political platform for the breeding and pursuit of topical Urhobo political issues at the time. The UPF’s Chairman, Chief Ighoyota Amori who held sway as one of the strong men and arrowheads of the Chief James Ibori’s 8-year rule used his connections and popularity to breathe life into the group, giving it a larger than life image to the extent of making it the rallying point for all Urhobo political office seekers in the 2007 elections.

In fact, UPF carried on with a laudable determination in its propagation of the ideas of ‘Urhobobility’ and laying of solid platform for the emergence of Urhobo governorship, which, however never materialized because the PDP’s constitution recommends power rotation.

UPF was a formidable political force that pulled a lot of crowds that span even beyond Urhobo land. The group’s latter support for Dr. Emmanuel Ewetan Uduaghan was done in the best interest of the state bearing in mind that the collective interests of the Urhobos are taken into consideration which was done. With all the odds favouring Dr. Uduaghan in the rundown to the 2007 elections, it would have been suicidal for a group like the UPF to isolate itself from keying into the general agenda mapped out by the league of elder statesmen in the state simply because somebody wanted them to produce an Urhobo governor at all cost, without thinking about the future or looking at the bigger picture ahead.

The bottom line is that UPF did what it had to do and in good fate too to ensure that Urhobo march along with the political trends as falling out of line would have been disastrous and at the same time devastating.

(The above is an Excerpt from the book, Uduaghan: The Portrait of a Patriot, with slight modification).