…explains how electoral process can be sanitised

…reveals why Ekwueme did not scuttle Obasanjo’s ambition in 1999

…insists Nigerians must change their attitude

Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo was former governor of Enugu State, founding National Secretary of the Peoples DemocraticParty, PDP, as well as a former National Chairman of the party. In this interview, he says with the pronouncements of the Presidential Election Petititon Court and the Supreme Court, it would be difficult to have free, fair and credible elections in Nigeria because politicians would steal and kill to win and ask the loser to go to court. For the coming Imo, Kogi and Bayelsa governorship elections this month, Nwodo says if what Chairman of INEC, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, did in February and March this year is anything to go by, Nigerians should not expect free, fair and credible elections. He tracks back to 1999 and the formation of PDP and reveals why and how the party missed it.

Excerpts:

By Jide Ajani

What did you make of the Supreme Court judgment?

To be honest with you, I align myself with the views expressed by Atiku in his press conference for many reasons. He summarised the areas in which the general public was dissatisfied with the decisions of the PEPC and the Supreme Court. The dissatisfaction of the general public emanates primarily from the two courts relying heavily on technicalities and avoiding the real issues. You cannot tell me that justice was done when you say that Bola Tinubu’s Account was guilty of money laundering and Bola Tinubu is innocent. You cannot tell me that the constitution which realises that we have 36 state and that you must score 25% of votes in at least two thirds of the 36 state and Abuja, simple English Language, technicalities were brought to tell us that FCT is not special – but it doesn’t have three senators, a plethora of Rep members or a state governor, but it is administered by a minister who sits in cabinet (it has just a senator and two Reps, in spite of the fact that its landmass is bigger than most states. Now FCT residents and indigenes are asking that FCT becomes the 37th state because the courts have granted them statehood. How do you handle that? The court in the US that insisted on the Chicago State University, CSU, deposition, understood the importance but the courts waved it aside using technicalities. But today, our doctors and nurses in some parts of the world are being subjected to terrible experiences with their certificates. Some of them cannot proceed with their internship because they are Nigerians while others are being processed, just because there are issues with the certificate of our president. The crucial democratic fundamentals were avoided and that is what some Nigerians are not happy about.

The judgment has been delivered and there’s nothing you can do?

Yes, I agree with you but most of the issues which you also raised in your article of Monday require constitutional amendment and review of the Electoral Act 2022. Why is it that Kenya can, in four days, determine the judicial position on presidential election, but we spend so many weeks and months doing our own.

You are focussing on the judiciary but INEC and its chairman contributed to the lack of confidence and the Supreme Court spoke to that?

Yes, if Mahmood and INEC were serious and honest with Nigerians and results were uploaded as you said in your special report, most of the petitions arising from the presidential election will not be there. In addition, it would have helped litigants to be able to say exactly where results collected by their agents differed from what was uploaded because when you want to get authenticated results from INEC, it’s like a camel passing through the eye of the needle. INEC will make it difficult if not impossible to get it and at the end of the day, what you get may not meet the time or you may not be able to study them well before time lapses. But if these things are electronically available, lawyers would be able to prepare their cases on time and convince the court or even convince themselves that there is no case to even take to court. The technology we were promised and which we were disappointed with needs to be better deployed and our laws also tightened for easy applicability.

I have a problem with those who keep blaming the courts and those who claim not to agree with tribunal judgments. There is what is called Doctrine of Substantial compliance and Doctrine of Consequence. You must prove that the elections did not substantially comply to have it invalidated and what will be the consequence on the nation and polity if an election is overturned or upheld. The law does not specify what substantial compliance means and you are looking at over 176, 000 polling units. What number of polling units would you identify as not having free, fair and valid elections? It is indeterminate because even if you bring evidence from over 50,000 polling units, that can not be substantial enough to knock off the over 120,000 polling units you left out. Worse, the Supreme Court now says you must bring 50,000 witnesses to support the issues you claimed happened in the over 50,000 polling units?

What I say to it is that technology should be deployed more effectively because collecting evidence is difficult and INEC even makes it much more difficult. We are not the only ones conducting elections. Secondly, the burden of proof should not be on the candidate who is just moving from his house to the polling unit to vote. The burden of proof should be on the INEC which conducted the election. We need to look at these issues and when we correct these laws, it will be easier for the public to understand, easier for the lawyers to prosecute and it will be easier for the judges to adjudicate on and it will be transparent. The law is made in favour of INEC and whoever INEC pronounces as the winner. That will only give room for war and just as you mentioned in your report, how will it be easy to produce evidence from how many thousand polling units, that will take years. There must be a threshold in our law to determine what is substantial non-compliance. Go and look at all the videos by Yakubu and Festus Okoye where they promised online, real-time upload which gave confidence and people went out to register and even turned out en masse to vote but what did we get? The courts agreed with INEC. If you reduce the credibility and confidence level, that means the election couldn’t have been credible. Our laws should not be framed in such a way that you do not have somebody in mind who would sign tailor-made laws to avoid loopholes experienced by a party just to have an edge, as Buhari did.

Acrimony in PDP

With the acrimony that arose from the party’s presidential primary and the choice of running mate, that led to the formation of the G5, if you are to capture everything in brief and within the context of the push for the southern presidency, what would you say?

Let me say that the struggle to have the presidency zoned to the south was Germaine. It has become a culture in our country that we rotate the presidency between the North and the South, those of us from the Southeast believe that if it comes to the South, for the same reason, we are asking that it should be the turn of the Southeast.

Southwest had President Obasanjo for eight years and Osinbajo was serving as vice president for eight years. President Johnathan had served as Vice president for two years and president for about six years and we haven’t had anything like that in this dispensation in the Southeast.

So for justice, equity and fairness, we thought it was our turn. We campaigned as vigorously as we could to draw attention and the conscience of the country to zone the presidency to the Southeast. In the two major political parties and APC.

We in the Southeast felt extremely disappointed at the level of rejection because if you look at the PDP at the end of the day, we had Anyim Pius Anyim on the ballot and Anyim pulled about 13 or 14 votes – that was our best performance. And none of the candidates from the Southeast in the two major parties got a vote from outside the Southeast, not even outside their state. So, that was the pain the Southeast had after the primaries. And that explained the massive following Obi received when he came out. It is not unusual in Nigeria. So one was not surprised that in this election tribe and religion played a major role.

I was in Jos in February 1999 during the presidential primary contest of PDP between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Dr. Alex Ekwueme. It has almost always been highly contested. In Jos, information filtered out that there was a threat to Ekwueme’s life. This was confirmed by multiple sources?

Ha! That’s a long time ago. There was a bold threat to life because when Ekwueme landed in Jos with his wife, I had secured accommodation for them in the Hilton Hotel, Jos, where most of us were staying. So, when they checked into their suite I went to greet them and I asked him, what happened to the resolution that if somebody didn’t win this local government and state, he should be disqualified from running. The wife said to me, ‘please, leave that matter, don’t go there unless you want Alex dead. This thing can take somebody’s life’. So, I looked at Alex and I saw somebody who appeared to have been brow-beaten and I said to him, if your life is going to be on the line because of this, let’s leave it. Let’s go for the primary and take whatever is the wish of God and I left them.

We will discuss PDP formation, G-18, G-34 and Jos, 1999, later. What happened in PDP at the presidential primary in Abuja last year?

In the PDP, we were unfortunate. The Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, spent massively to get that nomination and was riding on the agreement by the Southern Governors. But Atiku defeated him at the primary and refused to have him as a running mate. So, Wike had only one agenda and that is Atiku must not be president. This is because in politics, you make calculations and if Atiku becomes president, he doesn’t even have a chance in the next round of elections even if the presidency is coming to the South.

But what about those of you in PDP from the Southeast who continued to support Atiku, when Obi had come out; and people were complaining that some Southeast governors did not support Peter Obi?

Well, I will speak for myself and a few of my friends.

Sorry, before you speak for yourself, the primaries of the PDP and the APC had delegates from all the states of the federation including the Southeast. Now, people will start wondering why delegates from the Southeast did not even vote for aspirants from that zone at the primary. For instance, Anyim got thirteen votes. It was not only thirteen delegates that came from the Southeast – they are more than thirteen. Umahi and Onu, in APC, from the Southeast, the number of delegates they got is far less than the number of delegates from the Southeast so even delegates from the Southeast on their own did not see the need to present or show support, solidarity for the person of their extraction. How will you begin to explain that, some people will say that it was self-inflicted ab initio?

That was our second tragedy, we had ninety-nine delegates from the Southeast, three per state and what Anyim and Onwuabuwa got as you said, left everyone paralysed. Does it mean all the things we said about the Southeast presidency, our people didn’t even believe us? Why are we complaining that others didn’t believe us? It is a tragedy.

In the APC, there were three hundred and something delegates. All the delegates in the Southeast didn’t get more than thirty-six votes so that was indeed a major tragedy, a catastrophe even?

What I was going to advise is that if we could not support our people why are we expecting other people to support them? It has not happened in the history of Nigeria that someone became president without being strong in four out of the six political zones and, going back to Shagari, up to today that has not happened. Nobody ever became president by being strong in two or three political zones. You must cover at least four. That will help you to get the two-third spread.

So we didn’t see how Peter was going to make it. There’s a group I worked with, we call ourselves Team Peter because we came together to help Peter run as vice president with Atiku and we worked against all our governors who were coming to Abuja to come to see Buhari to deliver 25, 30% of Southeast vote – that was in 2019. We were working closely with Ohaneze Ndigbo at that time. Buhari himself said we delivered 95% to Atiku and 5% to him. Team Peter did massive consultations across the country with all the team makers.

After all of these that happened in the primaries, we sat down and asked ourselves what’s the best way forward for the Southeast, with the agreement we have had with Aktiku all the while that he would like to hand over to Southeast to become the President of Nigeria and we didn’t even mind for four years and handing over to Southeast, we thought if we supported Atiku, that is the fastest way or easiest way for a South easterner to become President, so we stepped back and we supported Atiku. This is how the whole thing was set.

But we never saw the mobilization that Peter was able to mobilise coming, we didn’t expect it.

In local parlance, E shock you?

I will tell you why. Take a state like Enugu, completely PDP since 1999 with several House of Assembly, and Governorship elections we have never lost a counsellor, a Chairman or a member of the House of Assembly, a member of the National Assembly, governorship, all presidential elections in the Southeast, 100% PDP. But Peter was able to create a tsunami, in that same Enugu State today we were struggling in the tribunal to maintain the governorship ticket that we won. From three senators we lost two to the Labour Party, from eight members of the House of Representatives we lost seven to the Labour Party, from 24 House of Assembly we lost 14 to the Labour Party. So you can see the kind of tsunami that went on in the South East. We didn’t see it coming. We were calculating that our worst performance will be, okay 40%, Peter can take 60% but it was a total tsunami. Peter did a great job.

But the story in town is that virtually all Igbo leaders across party lines helped Peter Obi, based on ethnic sentiments and not necessarily political affiliation, hence he turned out those figures?

It is not true. Now Look at the rallies we had in the Southeast for Atiku. Those that came out were mobilised by the leaders of the PDP Southeast. What helped Peter were three factors. Number one, what happened to the Igbos in PDP and APC, they felt rejected. Now, Peter and the Labour Party came as a palliative.

Number two, religion was critical. Especially after APC filed a Muslim Muslim ticket, the Christians in Nigeria saw in Peter a rescue for Christians against this Muslim Muslim ticket and the only answer they had was to support Peter. Thirdly, the youth, especially those who actively organised the #EndSARS, resonated with Peter. And those youths have a lot of influence on their illiterate parents and relations in the villages. And this is how, from the internet, where these youths predominated, they were able to penetrate the hinterland because their parents and relatives listened to them. These three factors helped Peter, the rejection of the Igbos in PDP and APC, the youths and religion, it was not a question of PDP and APC leaders working for Peter, they see their political future in their Party. And they did the best they could. But these three factors swept the whole place.

The former governor of Enugu State, for instance, chaired a committee that was supposed to have worked on zoning the presidency in PDP. One way or the other…

(Cuts in) The governor was chairman of the committee for Chairmanship, and, working closely with Wike, they made sure that the Chairman was zoned to the North and that immediately gave the South the confidence that the Presidency would come from the South because we don’t normally have a president and chairman of the party from the same zone.

So what happened to the committee for zoning the presidency?

The committee for the presidency was Chaired by former Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom. Now, Ortom himself was working with Wike and was more interested in creating an opportunity for Wike to run. But this time we allowed the primaries to take place, and, therefore, it will be in the best interests of the party to allow all the candidates who bought tickets and are in the field to go to the field and continue their campaign and face the general election.

The speech I made at the National Executive Committee of the party that day that report was presented and adopted. If you drop a pin, you will hear it from a distance. I challenged the party and said that PDP in the Southeast has paid its dues since 1999, we have supported the party to the hills. The Buhari administration pronounced and executed it, that we will get 5% patronage equivalent to the vote that we gave to the APC. But at the end of the day, we didn’t even get a 1% benefit and everybody in this meeting is aware of that? Secondly, I told them that we were at the leadership in the formation of this party when Alex Ekwueme was the chairman of the steering committee that formed this party. Three, we have a constitution along the lines of zoning our rotation as a principle that we must follow in the election of candidates in our party why at this time when it is supposed to be the turn of Southeast by that principle we are throwing these tickets open I told the party that it will be extremely difficult to sell this in the Southeast. And with this kind of scenario, the person that emerges will have to go to a massive intersection to know what they will offer the Southeast. But now that Peter Obi is in the race they should not expect anything near to what we have done in the past. And everybody knew I was telling the truth. But if Peter was still in the party and ran with Atiku there would have been no contest. They would have swept the three zones completely.

Peter Obi’s Wrong Timing

Some have described the move by Peter as wrongly timed because what it did was to split all the votes that would have accrued into the PDP baskets if he had stayed. Did he ever mention to you that he was going to leave? And do you have an idea of why exactly he left?

Well, as I said, we were working closely with Peter for the Southeast project and then after he went to see the party members in all the 36 states and FCT minus Adamawa, in reverence to Atiku, he refused to go to Adamawa and we sat down and analyzed the whole thing. In the Southeast, Wike had completely blocked Peter – Enugu and his delegate were going with Wike, Abia and their delegates were going with Wike; in Anambra, we had no executive and the people who were more or less controlling the delegates in Anambra were working for Wike and Olisa Metuh was working for Tambawal. Peter lost out in his state. In Ebonyi State, the Zonal Vice Chairman was for Wike and to some extent initially Wike was working with Anyim until they parted ways he decided to run himself but he gave Anyim the impression he was going to support him.

Anyway, Anyim was able to keep a few delegates but the Southeast chairman of the PDP was supported by the two governors in the Southeast who were all working for Wike so the delegates from Ebonyi were for Wike. In my state Enugu, the current chairman and the secretary of the party were against the interest of the Southeast but Wike had his way. So, that was the scenario – we didn’t see Peter getting up to 20 delegates from the Southeast. The scenario in the North was extremely discouraging – he didn’t get any encouragement from even one state in the North at that time and the nearest sympathy was from the former governor of Jigawa, Sule Lamido, who led from the airport to his village arriving after midnight. He was received at the airport and he gave him the gospel truth that the north was not going to support somebody from the Southeast this time, that he should wait. That was when somebody told him the raw truth as had been a close, long-standing friend of his.

Peter told us that because of what has been done to the Southeast in PDP and APC, he was just going to contest that election, win or lose and that the Southeast must be on the ballot. Well, we gave him our good wishes but we didn’t believe that what we will see at the end of the day was going to be the result he got.

So, you concede to my position that, in retrospect, Peter Obi’s move may have been ill-timed. It served the purpose of putting the South East on the ballot, which is a good statement, but in terms of the outcome, he lost and Atiku lost, at least as declared by INEC and as affirmed by the courts?

Even the outcome, if you look critically at the outcome, Peter’s intervention has exposed two things that were latent in Nigerian politics.

Number one, there’s a possibility that, in the absence of Zik and Ojukwu and Ekwueme, the Igbos can mobilise for a politician and give him the kind of support that they gave to Peter. And that they have the kind of numbers that showed up at the elections.

Number two, it also showed that if religion becomes a factor in an election in Nigeria the Christian populations and the Muslim populations as things stand must be considered because they have numbers; and that nobody should take the position of the youths for granted: Just use them as thugs and give them money and they will be running around? No, people are following national issues critically and making up their minds strongly against even their parents.

In my house despite my position in PDP, one of my children was obedient and we used to have fun arguing with her and to convince her why we should do PDP and she tried to convince us why we should do Peter. So the youths in Nigeria are not just thugs. If you don’t factor-in the Igbo population, you don’t factor-in the Christian population, and if you don’t factor-in the youths, you may be making wrong calculations. If you are running for national elections in Nigeria today you must factor-in these three things and that is what Peter has exposed.

Where PDP Got It Wrong

But some people would still blame PDP for the fate that has befallen it, and they will draw examples from the formation of PDP in 1998. They will draw examples from your activities, the way you handled the primary in Jos, in February 1999, as national secretary without flinching and even bending over for somebody from the Southeast (Dr. Ekwueme) in spite of the pressures brought on you. They will look at the PDP of today and see Wike and the G5; they will see the type of things that Tambawal did at the primaries; they will also see, in a manner of speaking, what some described as the arrogance of the candidate of the party. Looking at all these, where is the point of the departure, where PDP got it wrong.

Let me say that, right from the beginning those of us who formed PDP were very ideological, we believed that we could form a national party that was not laid to the right or the left. We brought conservatives, we brought progressives under the same roof talking about the unity of Nigeria, talking about democracy, talking about putting the military permanently out of government. So that was one uniting factor.? We saw ourselves as Nigerians trying to rescue Nigeria from the military and unite Nigeria, not divided by political ideology but united by the need to rescue Nigeria and install democracy. We didn’t believe that with the resources in our country, any Nigerian should go to bed hungry. We believed that we could try to curtail or eliminate corruption in the system. This was the kind of ideological leanings that fired the formation of the PDP. And when we got together, from G-18 to G-34 leadership, to confront Abacha, the people who did this did it out of the genuine belief that the military has to go and that democracy has to return and return strongly in Nigeria.

Well we succeeded in bringing back democracy and it has been there now for quite some time, but unfortunately for us and I say this with all due respect, the military from the back door went and released Obasanjo from prison and was comfortable with the person that they will handover to, for reasons of esprit de corp, for reasons of appeasing the West for what happened on June 12 and what have you.

We got it wrong because the people who started this movement saw in Alex Ekueme what we believed in and the leader who was going to take us to what we believed in. Indeed the night we did the zoning in which Southern Nigeria finally convinced the North that we supported Northern Nigeria in the First Republic of Tafawa Balewa, and the Second Republic of Shehu Shagari and then the aborted Third Republic where Abiola was not allowed to rule. So, eventually, we convinced the party.

This meeting took place in Jerry Gana’s house and then Lawal Kaita got up and said this zoning is personal to Alex Ekwueme. He said Ekuweme had championed us to that point where we now can form the political party and we are now going to put in place strategic people who are going to lead the party and the government.

Was this before the release of Obasanjo?

Yes, before Obasanjo was released and again he made this statement openly and it was agreed upon there and then. It was Alex Ekwueme who now got up and said this whole thing is not about him, that anybody from Southern Nigeria is free to contest and that’s how Obasanjo was brought out of prison to come and contest.

I was deep inside this, by that zoning, Chief Solomon Lar became chairman, from the South I became national secretary.

If you want to be factual and trace the point of departure, the constitution of the PDP at that time made it mandatory that whoever was going to be seeking the president on the party’s platform must deliver his ward or local government or state. Obasanjo did not do that at the primary but eventually, the party bent over backwards to allow him to contest in Jos?

Let me put the record straight, as national secretary, I had to prepare the files for the screening committee and each file for every member of the screening committee contains three documents. Go to the Nigerian constitution, what qualifies a person to be the president of Nigeria, go to the PDP constitution, how do we choose the presidential candidate for our party? Our executive committee had decided that if you don’t win your ward, local government, we cannot choose you as a gubernatorial candidate. And if you don’t win your local government and your state, we cannot choose you as a presidential candidate. All these were in the files when they started to screen the candidates and those who were supporting Obasanjo in that committee shouted blue murder. There was a strong, I don’t know the right word to use, that night Abuja shook. Eventually, they were able to persuade Solomon Lar to waive that provision and those of us who supported Alex Ekwueme said Lar did not have the constitutional power to reverse the decision of our executive committee. It’s only the NEC that can reverse itself.

However, for peace to reign, for us to have our primary and the kind of people that were backing Obasanjo – both the sitting military government and all the former powerful military leaders in our country – we capitulated. It was a big sacrifice for the party to allow order to reign.

Did it occur to any of the leaders of the PDP then that had they stuck to the rules, that the military may have found another excuse? Did it ever play in the minds of people because it was a very very critical moment at that point to say, Obasanjo, you are disqualified? Knowing that he was brought out of prison for this particular purpose. Did it ever play on the minds of the leaders then, that maybe the military could have been boxed into a corner. Did it ever happen like that?

Let me just tell you two things. Number one was that the military was really behind Obasanjo but the game that one of the powerful northern leaders played was that he convinced a lot of northerners supporting Ekwueme that Ekwueme was going to bring a regional army. They thought that if a regional army was brought, Biafra would be a success. It was a big blackmail which we tried to resist. But a lot of northerners bought it and the military was pushing this, we didn’t fight for one Nigeria only to come and give Ekwueme the chance to change things and bring back Biafra. Many of the Northern leaders who were championing Ekwueme caved-in.

So, the party got stuck with a man who didn’t know anything about the formation of the party?

Yes, we were stuck with a leader whose primary reflexes were military.

The biggest problem we had in the first four years of Obasanjo’s administration was having to settle himself and the National Assembly because you wake up in the morning and he wants to enact an edict in a democracy and Speaker Ghali Na’Abba and his colleagues will go riotous, and disagree vehemently.

That was when money came into the National Assembly, we saw people surrendering money on the table that was meant to compromise them and all that. So we set committee after committee headed by Alex Ekwueme and major leaders of the party all the time to reconcile the National Assembly and the president. And I remember one night going to Speaker Na’Abba’s house and begging him to assemble the leaders of the House of Representatives, and I knelt and begged him. I told him we’re playing the role we’re playing today because we are in a democracy. If there is a coup tomorrow morning, none of us will even be where a second lieutenant will be when decisions in this country are being taken.

In 1999, when the democratic institute was having a pre-inauguration seminar, you were one of the key speakers that they invited and you said something instructive. You said during the botched Third Republic that if the NRC governors who wanted another election had known that the election they were talking about will sweep everybody out of office, they would have just easily calmed down and said ‘look, SDP has won, let’s continue first, we’ll come and fight another day’. I think you said it was a lesson which ties to what we have said now about protecting democracy.

Exactly, sometimes we don’t look far, we are shortsighted by the events of the moment, and we react to them without thinking about the consequences in the long term. So that was how the fabric of PDP started to crumble and in the eight years of the administration of Obasanjo, we had five senate presidents from the five states in the South East. He was just changing them like wrappers and the same thing happened to the party, he was changing the party leadership just like that, so all these things weakened the internal fabric of the party.

Going forward, things continue to deteriorate, with the quality of leadership that led the party because that first executive that we had, each of the six geopolitical zone presented its first eleven into the executive, but now when the president is sitting and influencing those he thinks can work with him to be the party leadership, it is no longer as effective as when zones were protecting their interest and sending their first eleven to represent them.

Now, one person wants to be responsible for all the members of the executive, if you go to the state, the governor wants to be responsible for even the ward executive members not to talk about local government and state. Without internal democracy, you can not impart genuine democracy to the country when in your bedroom you have not practised internal democracy, you can not allow the will of the party members to choose their candidates whom they will voluntarily come out to campaign and vote for at the election. When you impose the candidate of your choice on them, you have to compromise some to vote for that candidate and most of the time they do that unwillingly or they extort a pound of flesh in order to do so before you even start to talk about the people who are not in your party to vote for the candidate. So, internal democracy has been grossly eroded, not just in PDP but worse in APC where Asiwaju Bola Tinubu has never believed in internal democracy. He is the one who chooses whoever is going to be anything from the House of Assembly to state and national in his party.

Until the parties practice internal democracy and until they believe in something. I tried to do this when I came back as national chairman, I wanted PDP to have a face, a positive face that even a child in primary school can identify that this is PDP and all of us in PDP leadership will believe in that and that is what we promised Nigerians, that is our covenant with them in every election. Of course, I met a brick wall with the governors who didn’t see things the way I saw them and I had to leave.

But, I still believe that political parties in Nigeria need internal democracy more than anything. They also need to have a face. What does a party stand for? What is the party promising Nigerians? What are all the elected members fighting to deliver because this is what they believe in?

In the absence of all these, we are just joking. It’s a question of whatever it takes, I will join any party that can give me the ticket and I can win from that area because that party is popular in that area. At the end of the day, there is nobody considering Nigeria, it’s their interest they are considering, how they get to power and what they do with themselves when they get to power. So this is how the PDP and other parties have lost it and until we reverse the situation things will continue to get worse for the political parties.

Unfortunately, I do not see how the PDP will come out of the problem it has created for itself – having lesser number of governors compared to what it had before, having lesser number of legislators compared to what it had before and not having the presidency, what future do you see for PDP, I don’t see any future for the party but being a leader of the party, I don’t know if you still see a window of revival to the ethos and virtues that birthed PDP in 1998 as you enunciated?

Well, to be factual, first of all, the best thing that could have ever happened to PDP is if Atiku had won at the tribunal or for the tribunal to order re-election for him to win, that would have been the greatest live wire for PDP to resurrect fully. The second opportunity is if the elected governors of the PDP and those who are coming back can bond and say this is where we are, this is who we are, this is what we want and if we stand here Nigerians will follow us.

The only thing I want to say to Nigerians not necessarily to PDP is that if any Nigerian believes that we have not reached the end of the road now then I don’t know how bad they want the country to be before they know we have reached the end of the road. Our attitude has to change, we need to believe in Nigeria, we need to believe that we Nigerians are those who will make Nigeria what Nigeria will be, and if we don’t, in consideration, put Nigeria first in all that we are doing we will end up sooner or later not having a country.

How do you think the 2027 elections, or even the off-season elections in Kogi, Bayelsa and Imo, would go?

Any Nigerian expecting a free, fair and credible election this month, next year or in 2027 is deceiving himself. Let’s take Kogi, Bayelsa and Imo – look at the level of violence going on in Kogi and you think Nigerians in that state will come out massively to vote? Yet, INEC will declare results there. In Bayelsa, there will be a war between two elephants (Governor Diri and Sylva) and you have about 100 islands scattered everywhere. Is it the INEC that hasn’t some well in dry terrain that will succeed in swamps and islands? Look at Imo, where Governor Uzodimma is squaring off with IPOB and ESN people. How do you conduct a free and fair election in such an atmosphere?

QUOTES

It would have helped litigants to be able to say exactly where results collected by their agents differed from what was uploaded because when you want to get authenticated results from INEC, it’s like a camel passing through the eye of the needle. INEC will make it difficult.

Any Nigerian expecting a free, fair and credible election this month, next year or in 2027 is deceiving himself

Ekwueme’s wife said to me, ‘please, leave that matter, don’t go there unless you want Alex dead. This thing can take somebody’s life’. So, I looked at Alex and I saw somebody who appeared to have been brow-beaten