“They Are Idiots!” Iyabo Obasanjo Slams PDP Leaders

Former senator and daughter of ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo, Iyabo Obasanjo, has detonated a political bombshell — branding leaders of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) “idiots” as she publicly justified her defection to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

In a no-holds-barred appearance on Frontline, a current affairs programme on Eagle 102.5 FM, Ilese Ijebu, Obasanjo did not mince words as she tore into her former party, accusing its power brokers of arrogance, political shortsightedness, and treating prominent members as disposable tools.

“I think they’re idiots, if you can put it that way,” she declared bluntly. “If elections are about people and you don’t reach out to the people who are prominent in your party, how do you win elections? You can’t,” she said against the background of the claim that party leaders only reached out to her during elections.

Her verbal strike lands at a sensitive moment for the PDP as internal cracks widen ahead of the 2027 general elections.

Obasanjo, who recently re-emerged into partisan politics after nearly 15 years abroad in academia, insisted she was neither courted nor pressured by the APC.

“APC never approached me,” she said. “I made a choice. I analyzed the situation. I left PDP because I wasn’t comfortable there.”

But what appears to have fueled her fury was what she described as the PDP’s “transactional politics.”

According to her, party leaders only remembered her when elections approached — not out of respect, but out of need.

“The only time I got a call from them was when elections were coming,” she revealed. “Somebody from the presidency reached out. How transactional is that? I dropped the phone. You only remember people when you need them.”

For Obasanjo, that moment symbolized what she considers the PDP’s fatal flaw — a leadership culture that neglects its own until campaign season.

“I left and nobody cared to ask why,” she said. “At the level I left, nobody cared. The individuals there are not people I want to associate with.”

She suggested that the party’s inability to manage relationships within its own leadership circle reflects why it struggles electorally.

“If you can’t care for people in your own leadership team, how can you care for the ordinary person on the street?” she asked pointedly.

Obasanjo disclosed that she had long contemplated leaving the PDP but delayed doing so because her father was still a leading figure in the party at the time. Now that the former president has publicly severed ties with the PDP, she says she feels politically unrestrained.

“He tore his party card. I’m a free agent,” she said.

Having lost her Senate re-election bid in 2011 to Gbenga Obadara of the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Obasanjo withdrew from frontline politics and relocated to the United States, where she rose to become a professor. Her return now — and the ferocity of her remarks — signal that she is not stepping back quietly.