2015: WHY PDP WILL NOT RETAIN POWER - OKORIE

Founder of the crisis-torn All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, Chief Chekwas Okorie, is progressively nurturing another political party that will soon join the league of registered political parties in the country.  In this interview with MIKE UBANI, he speaks on the campaign for an Igbo president and the controversy surrounding Chief Olusegun Obasanjo's support of Alhaji Sule Lamido for the 2015 presidential election.

What is your reaction to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo's reported choice of Sule Lamido/Rotimi Amaechi's as the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential flag bearer in 2015?

This is a PDP affair. Obasanjo's Sule Lamido/Rotimi Amaechi equation is an internal conspiracy within the PDP. In many democracies, incumbents have automatic nomination on the platform of the party that elected them into office, especially presidents. So if the PDP decides to torpedo the aspiration of their own incumbent president as a result of some internal conspiracy, it is their cup of tea.

But I also want to say that the United Progressives Party (UPP) is lurking around like all the other political parties, to benefit from the implosion that is likely to arise because nothing will be the same again if the conspiracy led by Obasanjo succeeds. It will be a minus for the PDP because that will mean that President Goodluck Jonathan did so badly that he needed to be changed.

If the president goes, the party that produced him will also be changed, since the president and the party are one and the same thing. But if the president is able to get the majority support of his party members to be re-nominated for a second term, the North will definitely react.  I don't expect any violent reaction, but the North will react by way of supporting one of their own in another party.

The North has two fall-back platforms: the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP).  The South-West has always enjoyed the fall-back platform of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).  It is only now that the former Eastern Region, South-East and South-South, will have the benefit of a fall-back platform which is the UPP.

So with these key regions well entrenched to lock horns in a presidential democratic encounter, the parties will definitely benefit from fallouts from PDP's internal conspiracy. But whatever happens, PDP will face a very serious competition because it has had its chance and it has failed to deliver.

In which areas do you think the PDP has failed?
The party has failed in all areas, in fact the principal of which is corruption. Corruption in the country has reached its highest level. Never in the history of the country has the judiciary been so battered by corruption that the average Nigerian has lost absolute confidence in that arm of government that used to stand as the last hope of the common man. I can tell you now that there is hardly any person who has done contract in Nigeria that will have his money paid to him, no matter how small, if he has not parted with some percentage to an agent of the minister.

In the ministry now, you have an agent for the minister, an agent for the permanent secretary, an agent for the director of finance. And these are contracts that are supposed to be competitively bidded for and won with reasonable margin of profits. And when they make demands, they make demands on the total sum you are paid, and not on the supposed margin of profit.  And that is what has made it almost impossible for internal debts to be paid to those who have done their jobs.

And you have uncompleted and abandoned projects scattered all over the country.  So corruption has eaten deep everywhere, and you cannot see any focused, spirited effort being made to address this cankerworm. The economy is in shambles.  There is need for change to address the problems of Nigeria holistically by serious minded leaders.

On what platform do you think a presidential candidate of Igbo extraction will emerge since Obasanjo is thinking of fielding Lamido/Amaechi on the PDP platform?

I am certain that the platform will be there and that platform is a new platform that has gone through the process of registration and become a political party by the provisions of the Electoral Act and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and that is the UPP. We became a political party on July 15, 2012. As we speak, we are only waiting for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to authorize the issuance of the letter of registration because we have scaled through all the hurdles and passed all the tests.

We know that its primary base is the South-East and we also know that it is one political party that is not owned by any cabal. If we are to make an impact, we are not going to take our presidential flag bearer from an area that is already saturated. So it is a simple political calculation to know the aspiration of the Igbo people of Nigeria and the Nigerian masses because it is a mass movement that will produce a presidential candidate from the South-East who will fly the flag for that democratic encounter.

So the issue of a platform is settled; the popularity of the platform is guaranteed, the spread of its membership and support is assured.

The Igbos are now more politically conscious than they were ten years ago. So some of the problems we encountered at that time are not likely to reoccur. But that is not to say that we are going to throw our presidential ticket up in the air for anybody to grab.

We will take appropriate measures to ensure that our presidential candidate is one who is acceptable to most Nigerians, and a credible Nigerian whose antecedents will not be whipped up to cause us any sort of embarrassment. I don't want to take on the PDP, but definitely they have had their chance since 1999, and the time for Nigerians to take a hard look at what has happened in all of that period has come.

All that we are asking for and we shall all work for is a credible election on a level playing field. These are areas that are far more important really than the actual politicking because if actually you have done all the hard work and the votes of the people are not allowed to count, it will make a mess of the entire exercise.

What exactly do you mean when you say Igbos have become more politically conscious?

The political elites have been meeting at various levels all targeted at achieving the same objective.  You must have heard about the C21: they have been meeting with a view to promoting the Igbo presidential agenda. You have the South East Forum (SEF) which I consider far more serious because of its large membership of the Igbo political elites all coming together for the same purpose. There are also smaller groups that I cannot list now.

The people are rational human beings; they know when a serious platform is on the ground. I don't see the Igbo and the marginalized people of Nigeria who can be found in the North, South-South and in the South-West wasting their votes on the basis of sheer sentiments. I am optimistic there will be a very keen contest different from what it used to be.

But it appears that the party that is likely to have a major internal schism, which the late Dr Chuba Okadigbo will call implosion, is the PDP because the type of conspiracy blowing up against their own incumbent president will be an interesting drama to watch. And I am sure that parties such as the upcoming UPP will not lose out from the fall out of that implosion.

Don't you see groups like the SEF being hijacked by politicians from outside Igboland?

No. I don't think so and that is why I keep talking about an improved consciousness. In 2007 and 2011, especially 2011, there was no platform for the Igbo to pursue their aspiration. The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) was in crisis and really nobody will see a falling house and yet go on to stake his political future there.

The only platform where the Igbo had some kind of voice is the PDP, but because of the structural imbalance within the PDP and the emergence of President Goodluck Jonathan, who also is from the former Eastern Region, the major people who had earlier come together to fight for an Igbo presidential ticket very quickly dissipated and went into the camps of the contenders.

Even before that time, Ohanaeze which is not a political party was so concerned about Igbo producing a presidential candidate that it set up a political committee led by Chief Dr Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, but before the chips were down, the same Chief Iwuanyanwu had become the co-coordinator of the Obasanjo Campaign Organisation in the South-East zone.

All those that happened in the past will not re-occur. Why I say so is that it will be at the detriment of such people to betray the cause mid-stream especially when they have assumed certain responsibilities.  They will be exposing themselves to unnecessary danger.