UPP Will Work With Buhari’s Government-Okorie

Okorie

 

Chief Chekwas Okorie is the national chairman of United Progressive Party (UPP) and the presidential candidate of the party at the 2015 general election. He spoke with PAUL UWADIMA on the performance of the party in the election and his expectations from President-elect General Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.

The President-elect General Muhammadu Buhari has promised to work with all Nigerians including other political parties in his administration, will the UPP be ready to work with him?

If we are invited by his government as a political party we will readily accept the invitation. We have many reasons to do that. First of all, there is some ideological affinity between APC and UPP. If you read my revolutionary agenda, the agenda for which I went for the election you will see the similarity. I was the only presidential candidate that published his agenda, deriving from the party’s manifesto. The president-elect is making statements that seem to be in consonant with some of the things in our agenda. For instance he has said that public officers will declare their assets compulsorily and publicly, that is what is contained in our agenda, and secondly he said the asset declaration will be repeated when they are leaving office, that is closer to what we said that the declarations will be done compulsorily annually as long as the officer is in government. Secondly, we said in our own agenda that we are going to query every wealth. We need to recover our commonwealth in private hands, so that we can use it for the common good. Earlier General Buhari said he was not going to probe anybody in the past but in his new government he will not tolerate corruption. But recently he said he would look into the missing $20billion, we are comfortable with that. We are more comfortable with that than his earlier position. What is going for Buhari is his well-known high moral standard, so he should not shy away from querying any person that acquired wealth illegally. As it is, our wealth in private hands, one-quarter of it, is more than enough to implement his agenda for the country. The Swiss ambassador visited Buhari and told him that another $370 million dollars of Abacha loot has been discovered in their banks. Nobody is talking about all these people who have acquired private jets all over the place. Nigeria is known to have over 200 private jets. Going after our money and recovering it is also part of our agenda. On the international scene he said he is going to remove the Afro-centrist position of our foreign policy, that is exactly what we have in our manifesto, we said that Nigeria will be the centre piece of our foreign policy and not Africa as obtained before. Because we are now in a global village, so we will make Nigeria the centre piece of our foreign policy and in that way we will be able to take adequate care of Nigeria’s interest including its citizens wherever they are in the world. 

 

How would you assess the performance of UPP in the general election? Were you disappointed by your party’s performance?

Definitely I would not be celebrating the fact that we didn’t win anything. But I have to also give kudos to all those who flew the party’s flag as candidates. UPP is a new party, it is one of the newest parties in the country. We did not go to that election with war chest like some other parties. It was our first ever general election as a party. And we were able to make some impact at all levels. Nobody expected UPP to fly presidential flag when many older parties were busy stepping down for one person or the other or not even fielding a presidential candidate at all. I was the presidential candidate and I carried the banner of the party effectively. You also consider the fact that in 2007 APGA had a governor Peter Obi and still recorded zero result in the election of that year. So if we had any governor at all our performance would have been far better. But having started we have learnt some lessons. Other people that ought to have embraced our party that didn’t have also learnt some lessons. And this is the time to return to the drawing board. What is reassuring is that UPP has come to stay. Its existence is not affected by the outcome of the election. So we are moving on. Now more people seem to have understood what UPP represent after the election than before the election. So the future is very bright.

What is your assessment of the election because your party was among the parties that insisted that card readers must be used for the election?

The first election, the presidential and National Assembly elections went very well. It may be because the international community and the whole world have their eyes on that election. The military, the police and other security agents knew that they are being watched by the world so they performed their roles creditably. And to underscore the acceptability of that election, President Jonathan accepted the outcome. I believe that I was the second person after him to congratulate General Buhari and at the same time I commended President Jonathan for accepting the outcome of the election. That is as far as that first election is concerned. The second election, that is the one conducted on April 11, governorship and state assembly elections, all hell was let loose. The international community had withdrawn, the military, INEC officials, the police turned 360 degrees and brought out the worst in them. Election hardly took place anywhere. What used to happen in the past was repeated. The result that came out of what was regarded as the collation centre differed so much from what was collected at polling booth levels. The worst hit area was the south east zone. INEC officials compromised themselves, while security agents are the ones that openly carted away ballot boxes. It has only gone to justify our earlier insistence on electronic voting. Even Rochas Okorocha after winning his election began to preach that we should go electronic. Our support for the card readers was because of the assurances that INEC gave to us, and to us that was the nearest thing to electronic voting. Unfortunately the card readers failed. The moment it fails INEC now allowed manual accreditation before voting, that was when the damage was done. You will see that if the tribunal judges decide to do a good job, some of the declared results would be overturned. The centre of corruption has now shifted to the tribunals. It is a very bad system to have somebody whose election is being contested sworn into office and he will be using the state resources to fight his legal battles. These are some of the things we still need to look at in the future election. We will be urging the incoming administration to go a step further than Yar’Adua-Jonathan era in terms of electoral reform. The use of electronic voting ought to start immediately. We expect that INEC would begin to experiment on the electronic voting system with the local government elections that would have come once or twice across the country before the next general election. So that by then all the loopholes on the system would have been taken care of. In India they have more than 600million eligible voters for every general election and it is only the electronic voting system that can guarantee that each vote counts. Ghana is also using electronic voting. Because of the use of card readers I predicted that there would be upsets and there have been upsets. Less than 30 per cent of members of the National Assembly members are returning. Over 70 per cent lost their seats. That is a little improvement in the system. If you now have electronic voting system there will be no use for military people; there will be no use for thugs as was deployed in the last election; there will be no need to declare public holiday on election day; there will be no need for ballot papers; the issue of late arrival of sensitive electoral materials will no longer arise. And the participation will hit all time high because people can vote from the comfort of their homes.