The Public Secretary of the Labour Party (LP), Ken Asogwa, has said the departure of its former presidential candidate, Peter Obi, created a huge void in the party.

Asogwa, who featured as a guest on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Monday, described Obi as a colossus.

“We can’t close our eyes to the fact that we lost Peter Obi; he was a colossus within the party. The last time I came here, I remember saying that his departure left a void in the party.

“We lost a colossus within the party, but the party envisaged it. Remember that before his departure, the rumour was already out there that he was leaving, and he eventually left on the 31st of December,” he said on the show.

Obi, the LP presidential candidate in the 2023 elections, defected from the Labour Party to the African Democratic Congress (ADC) on 31 December, 2025.

However, last month, the former Anambra governor moved from the ADC to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), citing internal crises as one of his reasons for leaving.

Despite Obi’s absence from the Labour Party, Asogwa noted that the party has gone back to the “drawing board” to rebuild structures and ranks.

“We discover that the greatest potential the Labour Party has is the institutional members it has in the name of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress (TUC).

“The former leadership annihilated them, but thankfully, we were able to bring them back to the fold, and we are together today,” he added.

While observers believe LP will find it difficult to replace Obi, who polled over six million votes during that election, the Labour Party chieftain says the party can produce a candidate of commensurate stature like Obi.

“So on the issue of the person who is going to drive the face of this project in 2027, I don’t want to preempt what is going to happen in our presidential primaries, but I can assure you that the Labour Party that produced the former presidential candidate has even better capacity today to produce someone of a commensurate stature,” the LP chieftain said. (Channels TV)

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