Chief Chekwas Okorie, pioneer chairman of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and current chairman, Board of Trustees of the party, speaks with TAIWO AMODU on recent development in the polity, among other issues.
The entire South-East region was calm during the recent #EndBad Governance Protest.What informed this? Was it an affirmation of support for the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration?
Well, you can look at it from both sides. In the first place, the South-East, the Igbo people generally, having witnessed war and having seen what insurrection means would want any government that has been elected and confirmed to have been elected to govern and finish its tenure. Whether the Igbo people like the government or not, they believe that it is only a democratic process, through the ballot box, that is the most peaceful, acceptable way of expressing whatever feeling.
Since the present government has gone through the process and the politicians who challenged his victory did so on the strength of their right to express their feelings through the court and the Supreme Court confirmed the president as being duly elected, the average Igbo man will accept that and wait for the next election. The average Igbo man will protest peacefully, either by way of petitions or any other peaceful means if the government isn’t favouring him or affecting him negatively. That is one side.
In other words, I can tell you that the Igbo people are democratic in nature. I tell people, who cares to listen, that the day God created the Igbo people was the day He created democracy.
If you go to the primitive Igbo setting when the word democracy hasn’t been brought down by the white man, the way Igbo people arrived at decision wasn’t by any one man occupying any seat and dishing it out to the people. We don’t know what is called monarchy; it wasn’t in our place. The people will gather at the play ground, as we call it, to decide on what to do. Even if it is to go to war, it has to be decided and at that meeting, every man will be given the opportunity to express himself. In fact, if he is a very poor person in the society, the first thing he will say to give background to whatever he will say is that whatever he will say here, if it isn’t good, throw it away, don’t throw me away. And having laid that foundation, he will proceed and make his remark and then at the end of the day people will reason that it could be what that one lonely person has said that would make more sense. And once a decision is taken, it is binding on all. So, what else is democracy? That’s the way the Igbo society lives up till today. So when they say that Igbo has no king, it is just about this way of arriving at decisions.
Now to come to the second leg of your question: for as long as the records can show, from 1947, Igbo people have been victims of sectarian crises, religious crises, all manner of crises that they have nothing to do with and their places of business and their persons will be targeted and blamed. Even domestic quarrels within where they are living, an Igbo man could be blamed for that domestic quarrel and these have happened so many times. And as we begin to hear very prominent people who ought to know, who have exposures, who travelled abroad, read extensively, lose their guards and make certain unguarded statements about the Igbo and incite people to carry out actions against the Igbo, then you begin to ask yourself, which other way do we approach this thing to reduce our losses and the hatred?
One would have expected that if somebody like Bayo Onanuga, a very senior person in journalism, I used to enjoy his articles, if he could be in that position with the president and said the things he said and even when many people, including his colleagues said this is unlike you, why did you say this, he said he has no apology!
If a respected traditional ruler in Lagos State who retired as a very senior police officer, sitting as the father of his domain, could, because of what he perceived was the outcome of an election, or the way Igbo people were likely to vote during the election period, threaten that if Igbo people didn’t vote for [their candidate], he would throw them into the Lagoon and if the wife of the president could say the things credited to her, I watched the video clip of what she said about Igbo people, we needed to ask, what did we do to these particular persons in these high places that they would be making these kind of incendiary statements? What do you expect those at the lower ladder of the society to do? They will say that if their leaders have seen these people as the problem they have, then they must be their problem. Yet, nobody has asked that the internally generated revenue that has placed Lagos where it is in world economic map, making Lagos richer than so many African states, where is that revenue coming from? Whether it is based on property rate or taxes they pay, or based on what is imported and exported or whatever it is called, the South-East people continue to make contributions wherever they live and what they get in return is this type of hate.
All along, since 1999, Igbo people have hardly voted for their own people. I led Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu to presidential election in Nigeria; how many votes did he get in Igboland? Others defeated him in Igboland. He came third, meaning that two others defeated him. And nobody cared. That was Igbo man exercising his franchise. They weren’t thinking of whether he was the one that led them during the war or not. War has passed. It was in Igboland that a man called Umaru Altine from Shifawa village in Sokoto State came to Enugu, stayed in Enugu and contested election. The NCNC, the ruling party in the area, gave him nomination; he won election in Enugu and became the First Mayor of Enugu State. Nobody said because he was Fulani, why should it happen? In the next election, NCNC denied him nomination; he ran as an independent candidate and won again! How many Fulani people were in Enugu to have voted for him? Igbo people found him that he could deliver; since he did well in the first term, so whether you gave him nomination or not, for as long as there is room for an independent candidate to contest, they voted for him a second time. Igbo people voted for M.K.O Abiola massively. The same thing for Obasanjo. So, why should it be [this time] that Igbo people found something good in Peter Obi and they voted for him then they have committed an unforgivable offence? Except that it is rooted in deep seated animosity that can’t be explained.
So, because of that the people decided, I was part of Ohanaeze leadership, the innermost council that decided that we must call on Igbo people not to participate in any public protests, because even in the EndSars protests, it was the same Oba of Lagos who claimed that it was Igbo people that came and razed his palace. But as God would have it, the police in Lagos arrested the young men who dit it and published their names— not one name was Igbo name. But they have already been branded as one that came to raid the oba’s place which ordinarily will be considered as sacrilegious. If the police had not arrested those people, and their names published, that one would be counted against Igbo forever. So we looked at all these and told our people, keep away. When the battle comes to your doorstep, you defend yourself. But if it is this general thing they are doing, the only thing you can exercise is your franchise to vote. We can’t ask you not to participate in an election, that’s your right. But this one that they will put a tag on you, and blame you for what you did not do, and take disproportionate action against you, we should stay back. And our people obeyed. So, when they say Igbo has no king, they still know how to obey instruction or directives if it is coming from the quarters that they respect. They respect their leaders. The level of compliance by Igbo, even when Ajaero, an Igbo man, led the NLC to shut down the country, Igbo people didn’t participate. That was the first compliance..
Was that an affirmation of support for Tinubu’s administration?
I have told you that the issue of support for Tinubu is that he has won the Presidency . It isn’t beyond the fact that he has won as president, because Tinubu himself has not done enough to win Igbo’s support. If I tell you here that it is an affirmation of support, I am being hypocritical. What you can relate it with is that Igbo people have accepted that he is the president and that they can’t be part of anything to destroy that Presidency until he presents himself again to them. Then, they will be able to look at his scorecards.
South-East is the base of APGA. Don’’t you think the wide acceptance of LP is a threat to APGA, the region being your stronghold?
APGA swept the votes in 2003, its very first attempt in the South_East. The only thing you could compare to it was when Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe became a presidential candidate on the platform of the Nigeria Peoples Party (NPP). The voting that time was also massive and what Dr Azikiwe did with NPP was exactly what he did with NCNC and that is to use the party to go into a coalition with the one that has defeated it, instead of going into open opposition. It became a constructive engagement and it benefited Igbo people both in the First and Second Republics. But the victory in 2003 was so manipulated that PDP swept everything, so there was no room for that kind of engagement for a coalition and all that. In
2004, barely two years after the party was founded, crisis hit the leadership and it was orchestrated by the Obasanjo administration. He sponsored it . They were the ones that brought Peter Obi to Victor Umeh through Andy Uba to do what they did. They were the ones that compelled Maurice Iwu, the INEC chairman then, to recognise a treasurer. It is not done anywhere in the world, that a treasurer who is not in the line of succession will take over. Even if the chairman died, even if the chairman resigned or incapacitated, the next person to take over won’t be the treasurer. It will be the deputy chairman, according to APGA Constitution, from the zone where the chairman came. So that that zone can continue with that tenure should his term be cut short by any of these circumstances. But here was a political coup detat within a party and INEC was compelled to give recognition to this treasurer as the acting chairman of the party. And what did we do under the circumstance? The only choice was to go to court and we were in court for eight years. In that eight years, no court declared Victor Umeh as national chairman. The court only struck out our case on technical grounds because they could not see how they could declare a treasurer as national chairman because there was no law to back it. So, in eight years of APGA struggle, I held on to the certificate; nobody said to me, “return it. You are no more the national chairman.”
So you can imagine a new party that just had one governor being in this type of crisis and the governor was supporting his kinsman because Umeh is from the same community with Obi. He was funding him. My leader whom I brought back into politics; I brought him into APGA and rehabilitated him politically, the late Ojukwu, was also convinced to be on the other side. So, the Presidency was on the other side; INEC was on the other side. I was the only one with my followers. Yet we survived the onslaught for eight years until I decided that we have had enough, that I can’t be fighting this battle to recover the soul of the party with my little resources, with Obi as governor supporting the other side with resources from Anambra State. That wasn’t on equal level of financial capacity. In 2012, I voluntarily wrote a letter to discontinue the dispute and we decided to form another party with people loyal to me. That was how we handed over APGA certificate with the forwarding letter to INEC. Again, I became the first politician to return the certificate of a party to the issuing authority without being compelled to do so. I did that because I needed to file an application for another party and that was how UPP was registered.
But you are back in APGA now
Yes, the point I am trying to make is that between that time, APGA remained in crisis; it never knew peace and those who hijacked it confined it to Anambra State. 22 years of its existence, it has remained in only one state and that one state, it wasn’t even in total control. Sometimes, they won’t have a senator. Like now, they don’t have any. Sometimes, they will have a few members of House of Representatives. There was a time they didn’t have a single member of House of Assembly and that was why it was easy to impeach Peter Obi.
So, instead of growing in strength, it continued to lose space, capacity and all of that. So when Peter left and went to PDP, it didn’t make much sense. What did he attract to PDP? Nothing. But when he now went to Labour Party and became a presidential candidate and Buhari had gone so far in running roughshod over Igbo people, coupled with the Muslim- Muslim ticket of APC that aroused the fears in Christians, including Middle Belt, Peter cashed in on that sentiments and so he shined like a thousands stars meanwhile APGA was still in the doldrums. Now, the situation has changed. The vision bearer, the bearer of the party is back in the party he founded and I have tremendous, without being immodest, I have tremendous support, loyalty and love of Igbo people. I have earned it; I did not buy it with anything and I haven’t even occupied any elective office, no political appointment, but I have earned tremendous loyalty, support and trust .
So, you don’t see Obi and LP as a formidable threat to APGA in South-East?
No, the reign of LP is over.
How do you mean?
It was happenstance. I just explained the circumstance that created a void and Buhari heightened it by his attitude to the Igbo. He even said we are a dot in a circle. You don’t talk to people as sophisticated as the Igbo like that and expect that they will gravitate towards you. No, they won’t come fighting you; they have seen war but they don’t want another war .
In essence, are you saying Peter Obi isn’t strong in the South-East, just a creation of anti-Igbo sentiment foisted by Buhari?
Yes, it was Buhari and the Muslim-Muslim ticket that aroused Christian sentiment, because you know the way the Middle Belt voted for Obi; it was because it was predominantly Christian part of the North and that was why they did that. So, it wasn’t just Igbo. The way he garnered votes, including Lagos, it wasn’t just Igbo votes but they are now blaming us for it. All the Christians in Lagos saw Peter Obi as the only one who will represent them and defend their faith because they saw their faith as under threat. So those two things combined.
In other words, Obi isn’t well grounded in the South-East?
APGA is back now. Obi has done whatever he did. There is no structure of LP in South-East to build on and Peter Obi himself has said that he never believes in structure, that what he believes in is human beings. But you need human beings in having political structures. APGA is back now and there is nobody who is going to be struggling for space with APGA, not only in the South-East but also in the hearts of Igbo people in Nigeria and abroad. Those Igbo people abroad played a significant role in directing the attitude of those at home because most of those abroad are the breadwinners of many families at home. When they tell them,this is where you vote, they will rather believe their benefactors than whatever you say on the soapbox.
APC is sounding confident in uprooting APGA in Anambra; it has been saying the state and the region deserve to be in mainstream politics. Do you have any fear that APGA will lose Anambra next year?
As a matter of fact, the reason APGA is still alive is by the special Grace of God. If it is based on what the governors from Anambra have done, APGA would have died long ago. But now that APGA’s spirit is back, the soul of APGA is back. For instance, if Peter Obi returns to APGA, we will accept him back. But if he doesn’t return to APGA, he will see that what he enjoyed was the void that the crisis in APGA created for him. Do you know that if there was no crisis in APGA, there would have been no IPOB [Indigenous People of Biafra]? The reason is that those who formed IPOB in the United Kingdom, all of them were members of APGA in the UK. But when the crisis of APGA could not be resolved peacefully, they lost interest in the political process and went and founded IPOB.
The crisis in APGA threw up a lot of crises many people didn’t even know. Now, we are back and fully back for that matter. There is no space, not just in Anambra. We are going to sweep the South-East as we did before, but then it was manipulated. But now, for as long as there is the law that makes it mandatory for people’s votes to be transmitted from the polling units, you will see the impact APGA will make. And APGA will never merge, take that from me too, with any party. But APGA will go into coalition if the need arises. It will go into alliance, if the need arises. But merger, to lose our identity? No, that isn’t what we promised God when we were going about seeking to register the party.
You are saying this with passion and much confidence that the South-East is for APGA. But Senator Hope Uzodinnma and others are saying the best arrangement for the region is to come to APC, the mainstream party. What is your take?
Well, without any disrespect to the Imo governor that I have immense respect for, I can tell you that Igbo people have tested mainstream and got nothing out of it. They have also tested coalition government and they got much out of it. So, Igbo people say when a lady marries two husbands, she will know the one that is a better husband.
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