By  Ikechukwu NNOCHIRI
ABUJA—Ahead of the 2011 general elections, a former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Chibudom Nwuche, yesterday, disclosed that over one million volunteers turned up for a two-day screening exercise organized for persons interested in partaking in a door-to-door campaign for President Goodluck Jonathan.

The former deputy speaker who made this disclosure while commissioning about 500 computers that he said would be used to campaign on facebook, twitter, U-tube and other social networking sites on the internet, maintained that the aim was to secure about 40 million votes for President Jonathan come 2011.

According to him, “our role and duty to our fatherland is to make sure that every Nigerian understands very clearly the manifesto of candidate Jonathan via a ‘Jehovah witness/Obama style’ door to door campaign.

“The campaign e-center that we are commissioning today will provide a platform for those that has volunteered to partake in this crusade to effectively interface with prospective electorates who make use of the internet, with a view to sensitize them on the need to allow Jonathan to complete the good works he has started.

“This is a novelty in the Nigerian campaign history and it is going to help in curbing the rent-a-crowd syndrome in the Nigerian politics,” he added.

Meantime, the coordinator of the project and son of a First Republic Senator, Chief Richard Lamai, has expressed his surprise at what he described as an “overwhelming turn out of volunteers”, for the online campaign, insisting that it was a pointer to the acceptability of the Goodluck\ Sambo mandate.

“We initially targeted about 42, 000 volunteers for the project. It was surprising that within two days more than one million persons returned the interest declaration forms they filled and printed out from the internet.

“Our target in 40 million votes for President Jonathan using about 500, 000 volunteers who will be manning the different e-centers designated for the campaign”, he said