The Founder of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, has said the country shouldn’t expect much from the incoming president because of the dysfunctional structure of the country.

In an interview with VINCENT KALU, the former presidential candidate of the United Progressive Party (UPP), noted that nation’s structure is designed for retrogression and failure.

The 2023 general election has been concluded. How can you describe the exercise?

The exercise is fraught with a number of controversies and a number of poor management of the process by the electoral body. That is what resulted in most of these controversies. The results are being disputed here and there, and we have about the highest number of election related litigations awaiting the tribunals at the various levels to adjudicate more than we have ever had. That is to underscore the fact that the election was not only controversial, but the outcome was not accepted by quite a good number of those who participated.

On the other hand, what would have become a clear innovation and a departure from the past was introduced, and that is the BVAS, which gave an opportunity for votes to count more than they counted in the past. So, there were upsets as some people who had thought themselves untouchable in terms of the offices they always recycled to occupy in this country were overthrown where the BVAS worked. It is a minus plus kind of assessment, but the minus seems to be far more than the pluses.

Why do we always go in circle? Every election year is said to be worse than the previous since 1999. When do you get it right?

The electoral body has a lot of questions to answer. So many things went wrong. If we have a trustworthy national independent commission that is staffed by very dedicated Nigerians, we can get it right. I have been a major advocate of the introduction of technology in our electoral process. I began to champion the issue of electronic voting system in 2012 at the level of both the presidency and the National Assembly, but our embracing it has been very slow. Even the technological innovation we have is still not the full circle. What we have is still a mixture of manual and technology.

I blame the problem on the electoral body. This thing we call BVAS was developed by a young man, Chudi Nwafor, who was a director of ICT in INEC. He has degrees in relevant fields. He went to Japan to study computer programming and came back and was able to develop the BVAS. BVAS was not an imported technology, it was an in house technology, which has been proved to be very difficult to hack and it has been used in off season elections.

Typical of Nigerians, a year before the major election, where he would be of great use to Nigerians, this young man was transferred to Enugu as an administrative officer. An engineer, the developer of the BVAS was thrown away to do a job that is completely outside his area of competence and training. Some other person was brought in and now there is a controversy about the person who replaced him had worked for before his appointment.

These are some of the hiccups we have. We have something going and people were geared towards making it work and they were dislocated at the last minute. That is why I said that when we go full circle in using technology, about 99 per cent of the problems we have now would no longer exist. For instance, part of what I advocated 12 years ago was that if we introduce electronic voting system, people could vote from wherever they are within Nigeria, and their votes would count where they were registered because all the details would be on his phone and his state.

That means there won’t be anything like public holiday on Election Day, which costs Nigeria unquantifiable amount of money and economic loss. There would be no ballot boxes and so the need to hire thugs to come and snatch ballot boxes would not arise anymore. People cannot come to my house to know who I voted for or who I will vote for, so that they begin to harass me. These are the advantages of electronic voting that we canvassed and we did a memo, and listed all of these things, and yet nobody listened. It is not as if there are no countries using electronic voting system to solve their election problems. There are countries using it, but our politicians are reluctant to allow it pass because of their grip on power, but now, the little area where BVAS worked, has proved to Nigerians that technology is the way to go.

The international observers described the election as coming below standard. When you add other negatives indices about Nigeria, what image are we portraying?

All of these international organisations with the statistics that has been published in the areas you mentioned, including the aspect of human rights show us as not a serious country. I have made my suggestions and I will continue to make it to the incoming president whoever that may be, but right now, we have Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared the president. I have congratulated him and I have in that congratulation made my suggestions that nobody, except Jesus Christ who is God, at least by those of us who are Christians, Jesus Christ is God; except Him, nobody born of a woman would succeed in governing Nigeria under the structure we are operating.

This structure is designed for retrogression, it is designed to fail. If we do not restructure Nigeria and allow every federating unit, namely state to develop, explore and exploit its comparative advantage, Nigeria will never grow. A situation where little things are handed by the centre under the very huge Executive Legislative List cannot make Nigeria grow.

So, all of these things have to come down and we have to look at workable democracies in the world and how their states have comparative advantages and compete comparatively too. The aggregate of all of that would give us the fairly rapidly growing economy, improve health, education and employment. Insecurity will be reduced to the barest minimum when you allow every community to be equal stakeholder in his community, and this can only be achieved through community policing and state police.

Nigerian is exceeding too large for a central police command. There are people who are benefiting from centralising the police command. We are here, the police are not efficient and they cannot do their jobs. You take someone who is from Sokoto, he has little or no knowledge of the culture of the Igbo people and forced him to Igbo land to go and police the area. Some of them may not be educated enough to speak Pidgin English, and they come in as occupation army, extorting money and not doing their job. Then you take the Igbo people too and put them in the North. They don’t know about their religion; they cannot speak their language; there is no communication between the police and the citizens and he may be afraid to offend the religious sentiment of the people without knowing that he is offending it because he is not part of that background. Any mistake he makes could cost him his head. We have seen people who have been beheaded for offences that they didn’t know were offences.

This is not the kind of structure that Nigeria can apply and make any headway. The president-elect, why consolidating on the gains of the government that he is taking over from, he should have his focus on restructuring Nigeria. My comfort is that he was part and parcel of the struggle for true federalism for a long time, along with me and others. So, I don’t expect that all the good aspect of true federalism that we all shouted before he came to office would have been forgotten overnight. I hope he would be able to give Nigeria a true federal structure even if that is the only thing he would achieve.

But during his electioneering, he never campaigned on the basis restructuring or true federalism. It was only Atiku and Obi that mentioned that. Are you going to ask him to do what he never promised the people?

I was actually prevented from participating in the presidential election by what INEC did to APGA. I was coming with that as my campaign mantra. The people you mentioned and including the APC candidate who didn’t canvass it were afraid and were just dancing to the gallery and wanted to be politically correct. It was about political reality. They felt that if they said so, they may lose votes. Fears of losing votes from those who were made to believe that a restructured Nigeria would only favour a particular section, and so they decided to distant themselves. The people you mentioned that said it, to what extent did they say it? Atiku said that if he was made the president, he would work with the National Assembly to restructure Nigeria. That is something he knew can never work. It is not a matter for National Assembly. How many years now, we are looking at the 10^thAssembly and there have been 9^thAssembly, and they have not been able to touch the critical aspect of the constitution that would bring true federalism. Peter Obi also was not far from what Atiku said.

If you want to really restructure, what you have to do is to convoke a national conference and while you are doing your governance, the national conference will work to produce a constitution that would bring about restructuring. Then the president would sponsor an Executive Bill for a referendum that would enable him subject the outcome of the conference to national referendum. Once that is done, the constitution comes into effect. You don’t need to go to the National Assembly with people who are there with different agenda to begin to vote again and their so-called two third and all of that.

To restructure Nigeria will come from the people. It is the people’s constitution. We have never operated a people’s constitution since 1999; this is what the issue is. Even now, I’m going to be in opposition, which is constructive opposition. We will embark on constructive criticisms and continue to promote the issue of restructuring as the only answer to solving Nigeria’s numerous problems until it gets into the ears of those who are hard of hearing.

Last time you were contesting for the presidency, during the national debate, you said you didn’t want to be described as the ‘best president Nigeria didn’t have’. Why didn’t you contest this time?

APGA has passed through a lot. It is so painful to talk about what happened to APGA. I founded the party 21 years ago. About 18 out of the 21 years, APGA has been in crisis even when I left, thinking that if I left that all the crises would be over and would be resolved. They were not resolved until I came back and remained unresolved until the 24^thof this month when a Supreme Court gave the final determination of the lingering leadership crisis in APGA. And on March 28, they rolled out the judgement and order, which has put finality to the issue of crisis. So we now have to rebuild and reposition APGA for the future.

So, I couldn’t participate because of the raging war in the party; no house that is divided against itself shall stand. APGA was a party that has two presidential candidates, and INEC recognised one, and the Supreme Court has ruled that the faction recognised by INEC was not the right leadership of the party, whereas, the right leadership of the party that won the Supreme Court judgement was excluded from participating.

Where would I now stand and canvass all the beautiful ideas we have about how to make Nigeria a better place? However, we don’t have to wait for another election to continue to canvass what we believe is our conviction. That is what I’m going to be preoccupied with and perhaps the party itself for the period going forward till another election circle comes up.

After the Supreme Court ruling affirmed Edozie Njoku as the right leader, on March 29, another court ruled that Oye still remains the chairman. How do you reconcile these?

Are there two Supreme Courts in Nigeria? What the man is talking about is a trial court. A five-man panel of eminent justices is what he is comparing with a high court judge; the lowest rung of the judicial process. We know what they did and I don’t want to go into that. The only one that is clear to everybody is that the highest court of the land has made a final determination of APGA leadership crisis. So, any person shopping around at any lover level is just ridiculing himself. If Nigeria is a place where there is a swift dispensation of justice, the people who went for that lower court shopping were part and parcel of the suit before the Supreme Court and which judgement was given on the 24^th wouldn’t have tried it. They went after two days to go and procure that worthless document. Even the judge himself whose attention was drawn that the Supreme Court had given a judgement that we were only waiting for the certified true copy to come out before anybody could be served would have tarried awhile to know what the Supreme Court has ruled and make up his mind on the direction he wanted to go. But he rose to pander the wishes of those guys who approached him. It is so sad that everything in Nigeria is so messed up. My name was mentioned in the suit and I’m still considering dragging the judge before NJC because we must begin to call out people who behave in this manner.

Nigeria, even before the election, was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines. But this election has deepened the division, as we now witness ethnic profiling, hate speeches, incendiary statements among ethnic groups. How do we arrest this?

Everything will centre on a restructured country. A year before the election, I predicted and it was published by many media organisations that the 2023 election would be characterised by ethnicity and religion, and that ethnicity is stronger than religion in the Nigerian context because even people of the same religion will differ on the basis of ethnic interest. We degenerated to the level that even (I’m a Catholic) priests who were insulated by the leadership of the church from meddling into partisanship are now doing so. We would see a Catholic priest may be in the South East campaigning openly on who you would vote for. His counterpart from the South West of the same church would also be canvassing for the opposite person to be voted for, and this is something that the church has tried to avoid by asking their priests to stay away from partisanship. That is just for Catholic, but for the other ones that seem uncontrollable, where one man is the general overseer, after him his wife and the account of the church is with them; those ones are uncontrollable. They can say anything; they can even tell you that they have interacted with God, and that He gave them the authority to speak. This thing tends to heighten the tension, but if we get this country restructured, the powers that would be left for the president of Nigeria to exercise will still be like say the power of the US president to exercise even though it is a super power. The quest to become president will no longer be a matter of life and death. If we restructure Nigeria, even at sub national level, it becomes difficult because of the new structure and mechanisms that have been put in place for a governor to sit on state treasury and deal with it the way he likes. He controls the State Assembly to pass a bill giving him a humongous security vote that he cannot account for. When we have electronic voting, you go for election and people cast their votes from the comfort of their homes, offices or other places, where would you see them to know who voted for who? Where will you see the ballot box to carry. So, when the result comes, you know that is what has happened through the process of electronic voting; process of using technology. All these things will disappear. But as far as we continue to run this system as we are running it, elections will continue to be life and death.

What is happening in Lagos is exactly as the Nigerian military that defeated Biafra planned it to be. This is so because the deliberate policy of the government – all the seaports, Port Harcourt, Onne and Calabar were abandoned; allowed to rot. It was deliberate so that our people who are known for commerce have no choice than begin to migrate to Lagos to do their business.

When that migration began to expand, the space was no longer enough for everybody and swampy areas became choice lands and the owners of the lands began to sell to make money. Those who have money began to buy. All of a sudden, they discovered that most of their landed properties – lands and buildings have been bought by those who could afford it, and envy set in. Has it been that the coastal lines have been allowed to Develop, though President Buhari has started developing them, Lagos would not be as large as it is and the population it can’t even manage. In the North, it is not like that. Who is profiling Igbo people in the North in the manner that this thing happened in Lagos? (Saturday Sun)