Founding national chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, has said that the World Bank was saying the obvious with its latest report that 160 million Nigerians would be thrown into abject poverty this year.

In an interview with VINCENT KALU, Okorie, a former presidential candidate of the United Progressives Party (UPP) in the 2015 election, warned that the way the nation’s leaders flaunt what ought to be the common patrimony in the faces of the citizens can be very provocative.

How can you describe the state of the nation today?

The state of the nation is very unhealthy and very unsafe to a large extent and a bit tense. The impact of government economic policies on the ordinary people is severe and biting very hard. Only a handful who are probably enjoying the perquisites of office can say they are not feeling the pain of this moment. Businesses are not doing well, food staple remains scarce and expensive because of mostly insecurity in the area where farmers could go and farm and produce the staple food and bring to the market.

So, generally, we are really looking forward to a better place, a better country, a better economy and safer environment.

Many of the leaders, especially those at the federal and state levels don’t seem to be sensitive to the cry and yearning of the ordinary people. The way they flaunt what ought to be our common patrimony in our faces shows that they lack that empathy that a leader ought to have. These things can be very provocative, and has made patriotism to be at its lowest ebb. Not many Nigerians can raise their head and say they are really proud to be Nigerians at this time. This is the way I can describe it.

It’s not a pass mark anyway, but that is the truth.

The presidency says that the Tinubu reforms are yielding dividends, but the latest World Bank report says 160 million Nigerians will be thrown into abject poverty in 2026. What is your take on this?

The World Bank has simply mirrored what I have said and they have put it in their usual way of using statistics to say the same thing I have said.

It’s unfortunate that It is President Tinubu that is setting the exam for himself and he’s also marking it himself. Nobody does that and would not score himself high. I have thought that as a president, that he should be listening to the people through several media. There are so many ways that he can listen to the people and know what the people really are going through and what ought to be done.

Other than the pain and the poverty aspect the World Bank emphasised on, the country is so divided. There is mutual suspicion everywhere; ethnic consciousness has been elevated to an all-time high, and that is why I said the patriotism has really suffered. This didn’t just happen by itself; it is by the attitude or actions of the government in power. Many of us complained so much about the way the late President Buhari managed our diversity. Everybody expected that the president being somebody that was credited with high dose of democratic ethos would be able to improve on that and even though it is the same APC, and that his leadership would show a lot of better management of our diversity. But he has worsened it, and has gone deeper and worse than Buhari. Many people say that in terms of nepotism and ethnicity, he’s simply saying that the President Buhari was a learner compared to what he’s doing. Even in the South-West, where he comes from, they’ll break it down and tell you that they are just bearing the bad name that they didn’t deserve; that the president is simply empowering and foisting his Lagos cabal and a few of his relations outside Lagos in positions of authority. So, it’s not as if the South-West people are happy. As for the Igbo, we are like he who is down needs no fall anymore because you can’t go deeper than this. Whatever Igbo people have attained in this country, it is out of grit, out of resilience and their efforts. You reach a point where the Nigerian police will come out publicly to say that Igbo people no longer come to take their quota when recruiting; the military has said the same thing. What does that tell you? More and more of our young men and women have lost confidence in their citizenship of this country. When you add this to the general suffering, the poverty that the World Bank has so eloquently alerted us on, you will know that we are sitting on a keg of gunpowder; a very little thing can ignite a major conflagration and that is why we keep praying and urging the government to do what is right to do, but they don’t seem to bother, but they continue to massage and tell us that everything is alright and that the economy is improving and the national currency is very strong.

However, I will tell Nigerians not to despair, those who feel that there must be a change of government through democratic means have opportunity coming their way very soon.

The worst thing is that when people do not participate in the process of leadership recruitment and they turn around to say that the person who they have indirectly put in there (because when you refuse to vote, you have indirectly voted for the person who you wouldn’t want to lead you) will come and complain when the wrong people have taken very critical positions.

So, I just want Nigerians to bring out that day and time to exercise their franchise.

Incidentally, it’s a multi-party democracy, so quite a couple of persons for every particular office.

Among them, there must be the ones that one can say; well, based on the person’s records and antecedents can do better than the other. But, when we don’t participate, that is where the bad ones continue to return. It becomes a recurring decimal of bad leadership.

President Bola Tinubu has presented a budget of about N58 trillion for 2026. Out of this amount, about N15 trillion representing 27 per cent is for debt servicing. What is your view on this?

The unfortunate thing here is that when it comes to debts, there are certain obligations. If you want to cut down the money for servicing of debts, it simply means that to some extent you will renege on your obligations to those who you borrowed money from.

So, where the real problem lies is in borrowing. If we can reduce the rate at which we jump into the easy way of generating income, which is borrowing, then we won’t have a heavy debt burden. But once you have borrowed, you are obliged to service your loan according to the agreements, failing which there will be a run on your country, just like a bank that is not able to meet its obligation to its customers. There will be a run on you and the situation will be worse. But what we have gotten wrong is borrowing for unnecessary expenditures, most of which are for conspicuous consumption, not just consumption like in paying overheads, but conspicuous living and display of affluence at the expense of the people. Some projects should not be priority under the circumstance. What should concern the government is how to build and make the average person put food on the table, and create jobs. Of course, everybody knows that if you create jobs, you increase revenue because when people are working, whether they are working for government or you create an enabling environment for them to operate their own businesses; then they will be generating income and they will pay taxes, and the services they render or the goods they produce will be abundant in the market and prices will go down. These are all very simple economic principles. When they achieve one little thing, they will come and throw it in our faces even when we are not feeling any impact.

This is the problem, we can’t run away from servicing debt, but we can control borrowing. However, we continue to borrow because it’s an easy way out for a government that is not creative in thinking out of the box. So, to borrow becomes very easy. Just like a person who, instead of working hard, thinks stealing, going to rob is a better way of making money. Because when you borrow in this manner, it is the people that you are robbing, and it is not normal.

The build-up to 2027 has actually started right now in 2026. What are your expectations from 2027?

Actually, many Nigerians, I can say a majority of Nigerians, including myself, cannot wait for 2027 to come, because the only peaceful way of contributing to rewrite your situation is to participate in an election that will bring in people that will do better.

We run a country that people do not follow the rule of law, including those in power, otherwise, the campaigns that seem to have started well in advance of INEC blowing the whistle for campaigns to start ought not to be so.

And it is the ruling party that started this when they began their endorsements of this and that quite early last year. And so others felt that they wouldn’t be left behind. So, they jumped into the fray. The most fortunate part now is that governance definitely will suffer as attention has shifted to the politics of 2027.

I anticipate a very robust encounter, very robust encounter indeed, but the National Assembly seems not to be eager to give us an electoral act based on the demands of the people. People have submitted their memoranda. INEC has submitted its own amendments deal that they think will improve on their performance, but the National Assembly promised that these things would be ready before last December.

Now, we’re in January, and they are still in recess. I don’t know when they intend to begin in order to give us the electoral laws that will make certain malfeasance that occurred in the past not to repeat themselves.

For instance, the issue of saying that there is a glitch. When elections will hold on the same day of various offices like the National Assembly and the presidential election, while the National Assembly elections will be in order, and the presidential election which held at the same time, within the same minutes, we now say it has a glitch, and that glitch has resulted in going to a manual computation, and they now come up with a result that everybody is shouting. Till today, many people have not accepted that result, and even the judgement of Supreme Court.

Those are the things that I would expect the National Assembly to take seriously, and to save Nigeria from blowing up, because if the elections are manipulated, there are people who are not able to tolerate it. Now, Nigerians have become more conscious; there are more people at the polling unit waiting for the polling unit result to be announced, and they will take their records from that unit than before, where people would just vote and go home and sit.

So, the issue of transmission from units to the IREV ought to be made mandatory so that people can have an idea of the flow of the results, not waiting for certain midnight results to come up and people will be shouting and they will tell you to go to court. It is not in all circumstances that people will be able to bear those kinds of manipulations.

It Is better the government, the INEC and the national assembly ensure that we have a peaceful, credible and hitch free election. If we do that, whoever that is elected becomes the choice of the people. Whether he is good or bad, the people will live with what they have chosen, but not an imposition. Imposition will not make Nigeria grow. Nigeria’s growth looking at contemporary countries is about the slowest and the poorest. All the contemporary countries that got independence the same time we got are far ahead of us in all considerations.

Talking about 2027, the APC has 30 governors and controls more than a fair majority in the National Assembly, as well as some states’ assemblies. Do you think that any of the opposition parties can muster enough strength to beat Tinubu?

If you are using that type of statistics to measure electoral strength and prospects, then you may say that Tinubu has won already but it doesn’t really happen like that.

For instance, Peter Obi was almost a one-man army in the Labour Party. Before he joined the party, he had already paid nomination in the PDP, and left the money when he saw he wasn’t going to be nominated and, he moved to the LP that was practically obscure and they were begging people to come and become candidates. Many that contested under the party didn’t pay nomination fees.

And before now, it used to be a walk in the past for a governor to say he was going to the Senate. He would just move from there to the Senate as part of his retirement process. But it happened in the South-East, both the governors of Abia and that of Enugu states failed to go to Senate because the people voted differently and votes generally counted.

Because of the calibre of the person that presided over INEC in elections in Abia, today, Governor Otti is able to become governor, otherwise, what happened to him in the two previous elections, where he lost and fought all the way to Supreme Court and still lost, would have repeated itself.

Today, Abia people are the better for it because I’m from Abia. I’m sure you are from Abia as well. So, we know that we are seeing things that we thought were not possible in our own state.

It doesn’t really follow that these governors will carry the vote of the people as they move from one place to another.

What about the Delta State in 2023? The incumbent governor was a vice presidential candidate. The governorship candidate was the incumbent speaker at the time of the same state, and Peter Obi defeated them all.

Those who are in South-East, who are boasting that they will return South-East to Tinubu, have to check the statistics to see that in 2023 President Tinubu had 5.1 per cent of the total votes cast in the South-East. Their ambition should have been to see that the man is able to make the threshold of 25 per cent, which the constitution and electoral law require for you to be able to become president, if you do that in at least 24 states. They already said they would deliver the zone to him, but they should remember that Tinubu is not a fool. You’ll be asking yourself, where would the magic come from?

In the southern part of Nigeria, there are 17 states. President Tinubu won five states, four in the South-West, out of six states; and one in Rivers, that is South-South. That’s five states. Atiku Abubakar won one state, which is Osun.

Peter Obi defeated them in 11 states, without a large war chest, just by the mere fact of his popularity and the movement he triggered.

And today, he’s in a party where there are governors, senators, House of Representatives members; a party where they will have candidates all over the country, unlike the time where he couldn’t even have polling agents in over 120,000 polling units, according to INEC.

So, if he becomes candidate of ADC, he will be the one to beat. He will be the person everybody will be so scared of.

I’m not impressed by all these defections, because as far as I’m concerned, these defections almost just point to the fact some people are so scared of what anti-graft agencies may do against them and they want some protection. It is not as if they are carrying people’s votes along, no. I don’t see it like that because that has not been the case in the country.

What do you think should be Tinubu’s selling point or cutting edge in 2027?

I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know what he will tell me or tell most Nigerians that is affecting them so positively that they will want to wholeheartedly ask him to continue or say that their situation is so good that they want to remain in that situation.

So, until he begins to tell us… But the only thing is that whatever he tells us, we are going to weigh it against the reality on the ground.

I know that money plays a huge role in the Third World politics. I also have seen some intimidations here and there, where they have bought SUVs to all the local government coordinators of their campaign, buses for the same number.

That can have a backlash in itself. The people will say, so a coordinator in local government can now drive SUV, and yet many of them can’t even make ends meet. They should be careful the way they flaunt this money that we own together.

If I were in APC, I don’t know what I would be telling people of the benefits of the Tinubu administration to the ordinary people. I know one governor, who said that he was going to support the Tinubu for president. This governor is in another party and has not even joined the APC. He did make mention in a private chat of how he was going to support Tinubu. Somebody in that group asked him if he would be able to go to any of the major markets in his state, and stand on a soap box and tell them to vote for Tinubu for president. And he was unable to answer it because the answer is very clear. If he tries it, he may not leave the place in one piece.

This is how bad things have become. So, it’s difficult to really campaign for this man openly, and he made it like that. The time for election is nearby; I wonder what magic he would perform to turn things around that people would say he should continue. (The Sun)