Chief Chekwas Okorie, the pioneer National Chairman and founder of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), in this interview with CHIBUIKE CHUKWU, speaks on the fast approaching Anambra State governorship election and the chances of Governor Charles Soludo, as well as other national issues. Excerpts

You said earlier that the November governorship election in Anambra State is a three-way fight between APGA, APC and Labour Party. Given the place of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the former ruling party not only in the state but nationally, does it mean you don?t reckon with them?

As I speak to you, I don?t even know who is the candidate of PDP in the same November governorship election. I also don?t know how many people who know the candidate of the PDP in the election. So it?s not about the party, it?s about the current reality. PDP was a ruling party in Nigeria for 16 years but we are talking about today. Today in Anambra State, PDP is existing in name, to the best of my knowledge and I know very many prominent people in PDP who are my friends but none of them seems to be interested in the goings-on there, some of them don?t even know who their candidate is. Because of the crisis in PDP, they don?t know who is sponsoring who. So even the PDP stalwarts in Anambra that I know are not involved in the campaign because they don?t know who they are campaigning for. So if I exclude PDP in my counting ahead of the election, it is for a good reason, not out of malice. And if you ask anybody in Anambra, they will tell you that if PDP is in the campaign for that office, they are also not aware.

I know you are not a PDP member but given your huge experience in managing a political party and in the Nigerian political space, what do you think is the problem with the once imposing PDP?

They ruled the country for 16 years which is what they should have built upon. Basically for me as a person who has also administered a political party for quite a while, I can tell you that the problem of PDP is indiscipline and lack of party control which again borders on a lack of internal democracy in the party. PDP forgot that if a party is in full control, the party is respected. In a political party system, the party is supreme. So no matter how highly placed you may think you are, or the size of your pocket, which you may think is enough for you to get away with certain things, the party is supposed to put every member where they should be. If you don?t want to belong to that same party, you have the liberty to leave. Joining a political party is voluntary, and exiting it is also voluntary. But this party (PDP) sat down, pandering more to the size of the pockets of their misbehaving members. And there were (and still are) clear cases of anti-party activities, which in those days, even during my time as party chairman, would never have been tolerated for 24 hours. But they went ahead and continued to turn the other face. The PDP was there when the former governor of Rivers State constituted a team of five governors, and they called themselves G5. And they were clearly opposed to the party?s aspiration for the presidency at the 2023 election. All of them worked against their party, but that of the former Rivers State governor was most outstanding. He never pretended about his anti-party activities, and nothing happened. So from there, indiscipline became the order of the day in the PDP. When a party is in that situation, it begins a free fall. And the PDP has been on a free fall. If you look at the whole PDP, they are now going to beg people to come around; they are all over the place, sending their important personalities like Professor Jerry Gana, going on television and appealing to Peter Obi to please come and have their presidential ticket, and who would have thought this would happen? The PDP presidential ticket used to be a hot cake but here they are going about begging Peter Obi. Governor of Bauchi State is also among those begging Peter Obi to come and take their ticket. They are assuring him that if he takes the ticket, no person would defeat him, he would be on a sure way to becoming president. Obviously, they want to use him to shore up the image of the party. So this is the extent the PDP has fallen. It?s all happening in the public domain. Everybody knows it and they themselves know it but it?s unfortunate that they have not started solving it. Some of them believe they are doing something to solve the problem but for as long as they cannot put their foot down on the ground and bring those recalcitrant members of their party to book as required in a party that has any modicum of discipline and control, then their problem will remain like that. And 2027 is fast approaching. Those who don?t want the party to survive are still in the party, hiding their anti-party activities, it?s such a shame.

Governor Charles Soludo has been romancing the All Progressives Congress, especially the presidency. Some people have said it is borne out of panic and desperation for re-election. What is your take on this given that Anambra is the only APGA state?

APGA may lose Anambra State because of Soludo himself. This is because Soludo had the opportunity to make peace in APGA. When he joined APGA, the party was already in crisis and I went to him personally. I said to him, ?you are coming in at a very auspicious time. You are not part of the quarrel in APGA, you did not instigate it. There?s no faction that can be ascribed to you as such. So being the only governor, you have become the de facto leader of the party. And that you could use your position, leverage that position to bring these factional leaders to the roundtable and have a conversation. If you want me as a former chairman and the founder of the party to also play a role in that reconciliation, I would be available because the house divided against itself cannot stand? I told him all of these. I thought we had a very healthy and productive conversation. And he said as much before I left him. We spent three hours in his house at Enugu going through all of these. If you get to my book, the last paragraph was basically extolling Soludo and the opportunities that APGA will have to grow again. The caption of that chapter is ?A New Vista Beckons? and was basically extolling Soludo on his quality, the pedigree, the profile with which he came into office, and the expectation that he would not only deliver as governor but bring about peace in APGA. But he turned all of those things down, preferring to pitch his tent with one of the factions and spent an enormous amount, an unbelievable amount of money on this. Now, after all that, and he cornered the soul of the party, what has he done with It? I told him ?the idea was for you to go for a second tenure. ?You will go for a second tenure without having to spend this kind of money because as an incumbent governor, you have the right of first refusal. Nobody?s coming to take it away from you?. And no sane person in APGA will see and walk against the only governor whichh would be the platform to reach out for other electoral successes. But all that did not appeal to him. Now, he eventually got the party under his control and nothing, the chairman that he promoted his PA, that he promoted to become chairman, returned to his official duty as PA to him. And he?s no longer jumping about television houses, talking and all of that. So, they have all reclined back to their cocoon in Awka, and the party has not made any growth, improvement. Rather, what is going on in Anambra is that the party is divided into several dissenting groups. When your house is like that, what do you want to do? Now, when the president visited Anambra, it was that same desperation that made him to announce that the party had endorsed him; in fact, he was the first to endorse President Tinubu for a second time, even before the APC and obviously, of course, I know Tinubu could not be deceived now because the president is a party man. He knows that it is not the duty of an elected person to endorse anybody on behalf of a party. If a party has taken such a decision, it is the national chairman of the party that should make that type of announcement, not the governor. So, he knew he was just playing to the gallery. So if he likes, let him go and take up a room in the Villa, the president is determined to go for a second term, and toying, gambling with a state like Anambra will present him as somebody who is not as politically astute as he?s been credited.

Apart from the division within the ruling APGA in Anambra, do you think the governor has done enough to convince Ndi Anambra to reelect him in November?

Well, the information I get from there is not very encouraging. And when I also advised, I knew that the election coming up in November this year may not favor Saludo, because most of the roads are not well done, the rainy season would have set in, which it has set in, as I had predicted long ago, that by November, rainy season would have reached almost its peak, and some of these roads I saw being commissioned would be washed off because I didn?t see them as the type of roads that would stand the test of a serious rainy season. And most of these roads are collapsing as the rains are falling. His opponents are using the thing against him. You know, so some roads have been done, but they are of such poor quality that even the rains are not sparring them. And it?s only this infrastructure that the administration really can boast of. Nothing more, nothing in the neighborhood of what Peter Obi did, say in education, health and all of that. It?s only those roads, and those roads are not standing the test of the season. So it?s just that, I doubt if he will win in a free and fair election.

Soludo has been a strong critic of Peter Obi, which has given Obi?s opponents something to talk about. What is your take on this as the former chairman of the party that gave the two men platform to be Anambra governors?

It is to Soludo?s own political detriment to attack Peter Obi. I mean, of what need is his criticism of Peter Obi because I don?t see what political sense he makes to begin to attack somebody who has gained so much popularity. So, it is not in the interest of Soludo to attack Peter Obi. Obi has graduated from being a local champion to the national level, a big player in the Nigerian politics. So when you go to attack such a person, it?s just like if somebody is attacking Nnamdi Kanu or you are attacking Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu. These are people that have already etched their names in the hearts of the people. So it becomes politically na?ve to begin to target such people. You might ignore them and do what you are doing, but don?t attack. So that attack cannot earn him extra votes. Instead, it will reduce from whatever he would have gotten.

Leaving Anambra, what is your impression of the ADC coalition? Some people said individual ambitions may derail the coalition ahead of the 2027 election given that Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi and Atiku Abubakar are all reportedly eyeing the presidential ticket?

Well, first of all, I?m not even aware that Peter Obi is a card-carrying member of ADC. If he is, the PDP wouldn?t have been ?oing about begging him to come over.

But there is room for defection?.

(Cuts in) You can?t register in a party overnight and before you say Jack Robinson, you are defecting again. Some people at that level spend some time before they can have reasons to leave. Not you enter today and leave tomorrow. So he?s not a member of ADC, he?s not a card-carrying member. To me, he?s still freelancing. Labour is where he is still expected to belong. He has not really resigned from the Labour Party and he has not registered with any other. I don?t know whether Peter Obi will be a card-carrying member of ADC because if he is, these other people like the PDP who have been going about begging him to come and run won?t have been coming. However, the ADC has been very clear through their current chairman, David Mark, that their convention will be free and fair for everybody to come and contest, that there will be no preferred candidates. Those are statements that are reassuring that democratic practice will be allowed to play out. Of course, a party?s presidential primary is a delegate election. So, if any person wants to win, he has to work hard to win as many delegates as to win nominations. That?s the way I look at it.

As a stakeholder in the Nigerian political space, do you have any trust and confidence in INEC ahead of the 2027 general election given that the last election was believed by many to have been compromised by the electoral umpire?

Well, the word trust is too much for somebody like me to say I trust, but I cannot say I don?t trust either. The reason I say this is that in the last election, to a large extent, technology was allowed up to a point to play out. But unfortunately, at the presidential level, the next thing we heard was that there was a glitch. And considering that the National Assembly election and the presidential election took place the same day, the same time, and this glitch occurred only at the presidential election level, created a lot of doubts. There?s no doubt in the mind of average Nigerians as to what that glitch was all about. So the National Assembly has a duty here. We have not seen the new Electoral Act. I know that the amendments have been made to ensure that things like having glitch do not reoccur, that the elections will be resourced, will be transmitted directly from the polling units, so that people can know the outcome of the election in real time. Well, these are some of the things we are yet to see but if they are put in place, the next election might be more credible. And we just hope that, again, more people will participate, because even the participation in the last election was not very good. One thing was clear in the last election, whether you won or not, between Peter Pbi and Atiku Abubakar, the two of them garnered as much as 13.7 million votes by INEC records. Then Tinubu won the election with 8.9 million votes. The simplest explanation there is that more Nigerians who voted did not want Tinubu to become president. So if 13 million people did not vote for him and only 8.9 voted, that shows you that our system needs to be revisited. That victory to every intent and purpose was an illegitimate one, because he didn?t have the majority of the people. And that?s why I support a former vice president when he said, and I have also been proposing it, that our election should follow the standard that is practised in multi-party democracies, which is any person who will win 50% plus one vote is declared winner. That means you have won the majority of the votes. There will be no chance of this type of result that somebody with 8.9 million votes will be presiding over 13 million people who said no to him. (Daily Independent)

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