Only Gov. Soludo can reveal why he is working against APGA leadership — Okorie

Chief Chekwas Okorie is the Chairman, Board of Trustees (BOT) of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). He was the founder and also the founding national chairman of the party before he stepped aside following the leadership crisis that engulfed the party. In this interview with LAWRENCE NJOKU, he spoke on national issues, the party and its brewing discontent with the Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo, among others. Excerpts:

With the last governorship election in Edo State, it would appear there is a desire to enthrone a one party system in the polity?
Your observation is correct and what I can say is that the National Assembly, whether they are rubber stamp or not, if they don’t do what is right, it will consume everybody including themselves.  So, what I will urge the National Assembly to do is to ensure a new electoral law that will make it mandatory for votes to be submitted directly from the polling units to the iREV and avoid all these intermediary collation centres. If it is a state election, you have a state collation; if it is a national election, you have the collation at the headquarters. But everybody, whether you are in Nigeria or not, can get the result real time by simply logging to the INEC portal. That is the kind of law that will make our votes count.

Beyond that, there must be a restructuring of this country in a manner that the Office of the President is demystified. The Office of the President is equated to the power of God, where somebody can go in and he will now turn his kinsmen into demigods that will be seen and feared. It is the political structure imposed on us by the Abdulsalami Abubakar junta that has kept Nigeria in this situation. That is why I found it hypocritical to see the same Gen. Abubakar head peace committees here and there and yet have not been able to achieve any peace during elections. It is the constitution his government imposed on Nigeria that put the country in this mess.
 
So, the National and State Assemblies must rise to this occasion. Nigeria has never been divided as we are now. The Middle Belt block is building up. The entire Igbo population in Nigeria is building up. The Yorubas are doing the same. Hausas have refused to be connected to the Fulani anymore. The Fulani people are binding themselves. Former president Buhari exacerbated these divisions and President Tinubu is carrying it further.
 
If these things that I am suggesting that will give credence to technology in the electoral framework and a restructured Nigeria do not happen, then 2027 will be a mirage. It may never happen. The implication of it not happening may be setting up irredeemable consequences, which nobody will pray for. It can be redeemed if we agree that there is an existential problem, which can be solved.

If you look at the level of crises in the opposition political parties since the 2023 elections were concluded, it appears they are not even ready for 2027 not to talk about contesting for power?
  I can tell you that what is going on is far from what you have described. I talked about the realignment of forces that will happen from the second quarter of next year. What I mean is that you will see a situation where those who made the PDP of today will abandon the PDP for one person who thinks that he is the emperor of the party and he will discover that he is a general without troops. You will discover that those who claimed they made Tinubu to be president will abandon APC for a particular section of the country and they will discover suddenly that the region alone cannot make a president. So, when all these movements start, they are going to coalesce somewhere else. That is why I said the consideration of 2027 is not what you are seeing now and I know that the meetings and conspiracies have already begun. I am giving the Nigerian public up to the second quarter of next year for it to begin to manifest. If you think the opposition has surrendered, it is not true.
 
Then come to Igbo people; look at how we are marginalised. We are alienated. We are not considered in major appointments and we are treated as if we don’t belong to Nigeria. Look at the way Nnamdi Kanu is being treated and that is because he is Igbo. Do you think the average Igbo man is happy? When people complain openly, it is because they want their complaints to be addressed; but when people cease to complain and bear everything, then something ominous is happening. We saw president Buhari take nepotism to a height that was unprecedented; now we have seen President Tinubu take it to a greater height that was unimagined and you think Nigerians will continue to wait for it to repeat in 2027? That is why I am saying that the National Assembly has a duty to calm nerves so that people can play this politics and not think of alternative ways of their self-determination in a country like Nigeria. If the structure, the constitution is right and if the various regions have opportunity to develop and they know that their votes will count, it will douse tension and save Nigeria from the calamity I see in the horizon.
 
President Tinubu’s policies are not bad but his appointments of people into critical sectors of the economy is not just lopsided, it is totally infuriating and provoking anger and in the case of the Igbo people, it is so bad that they are now immune to pain and have decided to keep quiet and what they will do is yet to be imagined. But we are given the opportunity to determine our relationship with any group with our God-given votes. But if we are denied even that one, nobody should blame anybody for what should follow.

Why is APGA leadership at loggerheads with Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo?
   APGA has had a protracted leadership problem. In fact, the type that can make Guinness record; though for the wrong. APGA can be said to be the party with the longest political leadership dispute anywhere in the world. That is a dispute from 2004 till now. It is about 20 years of dispute.
 
When I returned to APGA, Prof. Charles Soludo was a governor-elect at that time. He had not been sworn in. I went to his house at Enugu and we had about three hours of conversation uninterrupted about APGA. I said to him that he was not there when the trouble started but he has come in to meet the trouble and that being the highest elected person in the party at this point in time, he was in the best position to broker peace between the two people struggling for the national chairmanship position of the party. One was Chief Edozie Njoku, who had his convention at Owerri where himself and other members of the National Working Committee (NWC) were elected; and the other person was Chief Victor Oye, who was already operating as chairman into his second tenure. I said to him, between these two people, you can broker peace and it will be to your credit that you came in, saw a raging fire and quenched it. We had these conversations and later he was sworn in but I noticed that he had taken sides. He had his own fears; he didn’t explain to me.

I called him again, this time from Abuja, raising the same issue and by this time, the Supreme Court had given a judgment in favour of Chief Edozie Njoku and I said to him, now that judgment had been given, let us rely on that judgment and make this peace that Edozie will continue as chairman and everybody else will be accommodated accordingly while he (Soludo) will still take his position as the leader of the party so that we can work together to increase the number of governors we have for the party to grow. I told him that it was nothing to be proud that APGA has not gone beyond Anambra State since the registration. It was then that he told me he would never accept Chief Edozie Njoku to become chairman of the party because his rival, Prince Nicholas Ukachukwu, was sponsoring Edozie Njoku. I said to him that he is now the governor; elected, sworn in and enjoying immunity; that some people win elections and even bring their greatest rival to work with. But he said that he would use everything within his power to ensure that Edozie Njoku was not chairman and if he became chairman by any means that he would leave the party within 24 hours and that the party would die. That was when I got angry and offended and gave him my peace of mind.

Was this why the leadership of the party threatened to suspend him recently?
It is all in account of this because when you have become a clog in the wheel of the progress of a political party that helped you to achieve your long-term ambition of being a governor, then you could be sanctioned. Don’t forget that Prof. Soludo had tried on two occasions to be governor and failed. When he eventually got the ticket on the platform of APGA, he succeeded. That alone would have made him see APGA with a certain level of sentiment and attachment. And for me to speak to him, no matter what anybody may say, whoever has become something in APGA without giving credit to me as the initiator and founder of this platform, which the Igbo people celebrated so highly when it was registered, is very uncharitable and an ungrateful soul.  I will come out and make such a passionate appeal for Soludo to allow peace to reign and he will rebuff me and other people. What will the party do except to tell him that the party is supreme? In any democratic practice, the party is supreme. But what has happened really is that many well meaning Nigerians have appealed for an additional window to be given to him to see whether he will come around. He was not suspended. We only suspended some of those whose activities were very disruptive. But all those elected on the platform of the party including himself were given little time to redeem themselves after which the party will take a more disciplinary action. Nobody can claim to be higher or bigger than the party. It does not happen anywhere. He has not been suspended. The ball is still in his court. There is a window for reconciliation and we think he should embrace it.

Are there no other issues bothering the party than Soludo’s attitude to the leadership?
  It is not as if we are exerting much energy on Soludo. Don’t forget that the momentum that APGA got when I was there was lost. We won elections in Bayelsa; we won State Assemblies seats up to Oyo and Yobe states. We won places where we didn’t even have candidates because as at that time, it was a movement. We won Suleja Federal Constituency; the record is with INEC. We won one constituency in Lagos State without a candidate. People voted where they had the cock symbol. But this crisis brought APGA to a situation where it became more or less moribund.
 
The reason Anambra issue is contentious is because only the national chairman and national secretary of a political party will sponsor candidates to an election. The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is clear that only a political party will sponsor candidates for an election in Nigeria. The Electoral Act that derives from that constitutional provision made it clear that the chairman and secretary of the party will now represent the party in sponsorship of candidates. So, in these other places you mentioned, since Edozie Njoku became the authentic chairman, the party did not have parallel candidates. We didn’t have any issue with their governors. But in the case of Anambra State, look at what happened.
 
The governor sponsored a bill that took away the power to nominate from the national chairman and national secretary of the party and that is why the APC has taken the state government to court; the PDP has done the same and LP has done the same. The IPAC has done the same. Our own APGA has not even sued Soludo.

All we did was to nominate and field candidates in everything and those candidates are the legitimate candidates of the party. So, it is not about Soludo. You must know that something is wrong about Anambra and that thing that is wrong derives from the governor of Anambra State.

The crisis that led to your exit as national chairman of APGA started from Anambra. Now you have become the BOT chairman and you are at loggerheads again with Anambra governor. Don’t you think that you should be more careful this time around?
  The party has never been free of crisis. Even when I was not there, APGA was derided as Agulu Peoples General Assembly simply because the governor came from Agulu and took his own man, Victor Umeh, and sponsored him to become chairman. Umeh was the treasurer of the party and was never in the line of succession. Then when Governor Obiano was there; his own case was more ridiculous. He went and brought somebody who was never a member of the party and made him national chairman. Victor Oye became the chairman of the party before he was registered as a member of the party. What can be more ridiculous than that? That people who were in the party from its formation were abandoned and the governor went to PPA and brought somebody to Alex Ekwueme Square and announced him chairman of a party before he was registered as a member and that took a national party to a small town called Aguleri and the next name of APGA turned to Aguleri Peoples General Assembly.

Now, Prof. Soludo has come. What did he do? He took his own Personal Assistant from his local government and made him national chairman of a political party and today APGA is called Aguata Peoples General Assembly. If you were somebody like me, wouldn’t you be crying everyday from the inside that this national party that spread like wildfire within a short time of registration is now confined in one state? Are you aware that 70 per cent of the NWC of APGA comes from one state of Nigeria? Are you aware that since I left the party, no national event of the party had happened at the Federal Capital Territory? All had been in Awka. So, why would it be like that? Which other party is handled the same way in Nigeria? It is unfortunate.
  
Now, the difference between when I was there and Chief Edozie Njoku’s time is that Njoku has the judgment of the Supreme Court. In my own case, there was no judgment that said I was no longer chairman; there was no judgment that said that Umeh was chairman. So, we continued moving round and round the court for eight years until I took a decision to voluntarily discontinue litigations. In 2012, I voluntarily, with a forwarding letter, returned the APGA certificate to INEC, the issuing authority, and went ahead to register UPP. Genuine Anambra political leaders are embarrassed because what these people are doing is to almost make APGA a state party instead of a national party and you think we should just fold our hands and submit to that malfeasance? No! APGA has been recovered.

So, what is the next step since you have recovered APGA?
  Massive consultations are going on all over the country because in the course of the quarrel and dispute, there were people who are foundation members of APGA who left and joined other parties, including UPP (now defunct).  We are planning a meeting or get together where all these people will come back because they are expressing the desire to come back to the party and from there, they will return to their states to begin to harmonise positions. We are also planning in the next few months to return to Enugu as we did in 2002 to rededicate APGA. The party was dedicated to God at Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium on December 2, 2002. So, this year 2024, in the same Enugu State, we will rededicate APGA to God, because but for His grace, the party would have died long ago. We are already planning on that. As soon as that is done, the next thing is to resuscitate its nationwide structures. APGA is a party that has a very strong Diaspora presence. We will return to the international community and have those who made APGA tick to return.

APGA was in crisis and the inroads it made were taken over by APC and even the Labour Party. How feasible is this recovery plan?
  Let me remind you that when APGA was registered, the whole of Southeast was PDP. All the governors were PDP; Senate and House of Representatives members were PDP. Southeast invested 100 per cent of their political capital in the PDP. That was the situation by the time APGA was registered and for us to break through this kind of iron barricade to make the kind of impact we made, to be able to come third out of the 35 political parties that went for that election in 2003 is a feat that will be repeated in a short time. APGA is already a household name. It has a governor and has had governors since inception. It has senators, House of Reps and state Assembly members. It is starting from somewhere and I can assure you that before the 2027 elections, a minimum of three governors will be part of APGA. That arrangement is already on. What we need to do is to make APGA sufficiently attractive because we have already seen what will happen when the realignment of political forces will commence and APGA will be thoroughly positioned to take advantage of that.

How can APGA have national spread when you and the national chairman are from the same zone?
 It will only take somebody like Chief Edozie Njoku to fight for the soul of the party in a successful manner that he has done. It is not something you will throw in the air and say who can come and fight for it. I have been the founder of the party and it was in the wisdom of the NWC to say this is the position you will occupy. If they had not given me that position, I would not have minded because there is nothing like a former founder. So, being the founder of APGA is sufficient for me to do what I am supposed to do to leave a legacy that will outlive me. But when we now rebuild the party, Chief Edozie Njoku, like anyone else, will not be chairman forever. The chairman of the BOT is the easiest thing I can relinquish to make the party more national. God has already used me mightily to do what others could not do. This is the first national party founded by an Igbo man in a long while. The question people should be asking is why can’t Soludo go to INEC and register a political party if he cannot submit to the leadership of APGA?