Elder statesman and founding National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, in this interview with LAWRENCE NJOKU, examines the ongoing re-alignment of political forces towards the 2027 general election and the challenge before President Bola Tinubu’s second term ambition.
How would you describe the ongoing re-alignment of political forces towards the 2027 general election, especially the defections to the Social Democratic Party (SDP)?
You will recall your interview with me last year where you raised the issue about people moving into the APC and whether Nigeria was tilting towards a one party state and I said no, that usually when we are getting closer to elections, there is usually realignment of political forces as a result of so many considerations. I projected that by the second quarter of 2025 the movement would have become clearer. In fact, it has turned out to happen faster than I thought .
If Nigerians would remember, there was a time the PDP was behemoth that it would appear no party was capable of defeating them in an election. They had control of everything. They controlled the National Assembly; they controlled the military, the treasury, the judiciary and what have you. It was almost impossible to dislodge the PDP and they boasted of being in power for 60 years. But as that election was coming closer, people began to coalesce; they found out that a merger would be the only thing to dislodge the PDP. By the time APC was registered as a merger, they had about 11 sitting governors before going for the election. The same thing is repeating itself.
When the APC came into power, I noticed there was no proper fusion. Inside of the APC, I could clearly see the ACN cleavage, the CPC cleavage, the ANPP cleavage, among others. Because it was a merger, all their certificates were returned to INEC as required by the law. So they no longer existed technically but those cleavages remained.
So when Tinubu became president, things got more divided inside the APC waiting for the appropriate time to surface. I have been following these events and I knew that the former Attorney General, Malami, was the anchor of the CPC group. They were calling their meetings.
So when Mallam El-Rufai made his move, many people thought it was a one man show. I didn’t think so. When he said he had consulted widely including former president Buhari, I knew he was not alone. El-Rufai is not a small man in politics to start talking anyhow. It is now becoming obvious that there are people behind him. SDP has become their preferred choice and it depends on how President Tinubu responds. If he is taking the words of his followers that nobody can beat Tinubu in an election and that he is a political guru, then he will be shocked.
I can see those in SDP playing a very strategic card. They are saying that it would be wrong to deny the South eight years of presidency and therefore, let them do what they did with Jonathan though Jonathan failed them. They are planning on taking the remaining four years away from Tinubu and giving it to another southerner, but the person has to agree that he will do four years to complete eight years in the South and power will return to the North. Many are buying into that strategic move and Peter Obi is their preferred candidate.
PDP is in disarray and not in any position to make decisions. As we speak, the PDP is helplessly waiting for the Supreme Court to make a decision on who will be their Secretary. If the Supreme Court says it is Samuel Anyanwu, the rest top northern PDP members would vacate the party without notice. But if they say it is Ude- Okoye, they will remain because it will mean the control of the party is in their hands. So, the Supreme Court holds the ace for PDP. So the CPC, which is basically Buhari’s party, is emptying itself into the SDP and if they are able to strike a deal with Peter Obi, it would be difficult for Tinubu in 2027.
Are there indices to justify your position, knowing that the president also has in his kitty relevant institutions that would help him return to office?
Go and check the statistics of the 2023 general election. President Tinubu had the highest number of votes from the North West of over five million votes; South West, which is his place, gave him over two million votes; just about half of what he got from the North West. So, he should be studying the statistics to know whether he should be sitting comfortably to assume that as an incumbent nobody can defeat him or be strategic in his planning. Majority of those who were instrumental in that victory from North West are coalescing into the SDP and the tendency that they would combine with other zones should not be undermined.
When you talk about a strategic move, what specifically do you expect the President to do?
He should engage; he should not wait and say we are the ruling party anybody that wants should come. That will be an arrogant posture for a country like Nigeria. He should start engaging. There are political parties and political blocs and he should engage both. He should engage political parties that have areas of strength and certain leaders that control certain political blocs. If you talk about political blocs, the Middle Belt is a bloc; the South-South is a bloc; Wike has drawn a battle line between himself and that bloc. So, if Tinubu is relying on Wike in that axis, then it is a problem. There is the Igbo bloc, which is a formidable bloc. A bloc that could defeat the president in Lagos is not a bloc that can be toyed with. Tinubu won in Plateau State narrowly. In the South East, Peter Obi won 88 per cent of the votes cast; Tinubu had about five per cent and Atiku about four per cent. In Abuja, there is a powerful Igbo bloc there, where Peter Obi made about 58 per cent of the votes, leaving the rest to Tinubu and Atiku. So, he should start engaging quickly.
One would have thought that this coalition against Tinubu should not have been so since the rotation arrangement granted southern Nigeria eight years?
The issue of fuel subsidy and merging of the exchange rate market; in order words allowing market forces to determine exchange rates, were policies that could have waited for a while. Tinubu went into those things believing that things would turn around within a short time. And remember he continued to liken it to labour pain. But this has turned into a labour that is long. These things would not happen overnight. Although things are beginning to take shape but the pains are there and the opposition are cashing in on it as part of their game plans.
The other critical area is the issue of ethnicity. There is more ethnic consciousness in Nigeria at the moment than even religious consciousness. People of the same religion, whether Christian or Muslim, differ when it comes to who gets power in line with where the person comes from. You can see that no president in Nigeria has tried to manage our diversity well. Each president worsens our diversity. I said that former president Buhari took nepotism to a height that was unprecedented but President Tinubu has gone higher than Buhari and should he continue this way, Nigeria may explode. He has demonstrated that every person who comes to office should move all critical positions to his own people. So this attitude of mismanaging Nigeria’s diversity is what is fuelling the desire for change of power.
There are still worries that nothing has been done about electoral reforms and the judiciary?
Honestly, the judiciary has become the biggest disappointment to most Nigerians. They have made themselves look like commodities that can be purchased off the shelf. When a country is in that type of situation, only God will save its people from resorting to self help.
Now you go to the issue of our elections, the National Assembly seems to be too much of a rubber stamp that it is finding it difficult to come up with electoral reforms that will give a legal framework that will deliver credible elections. If we have electoral law that says all votes should be transmitted to the IReV from the polling unit at an agreed time within the election; that glitches suffered during voting should be addressed immediately; that winning election should exclude the issue of one-quarter against two-third that was brought by the military that does not exist anywhere in the world, it would help our elections. So I would want our electoral reforms to do what others are doing by saying that for you to win the election, you must have 50 per cent of the votes plus one. I can tell you that no president in Nigeria can emerge without campaigning vigorously so as to make this 50 per cent vote. If they are not able to make it, the first two will now be called for runoff and this can elicit a coalition to enable them to make it. Coalition of parties has always been the in thing in the multiparty system. They should also ensure that elections are held in one day since the technology that could support it is there. So, if our National Assembly is not able to do this and we go back to the elections with this kind of electoral laws we have now, it will be a disaster.
Is the President moving the country towards regionalism going by some of his policies such as the new tax bill?
I look at the tax bill differently and as a way of bringing in true federalism. It is a new tax regime to make all the federating units look further inwards on how to generate income. I said this because I have also seen that (maybe for political reasons) he doesn’t want to go into the issue of wholesale restructuring, which some of us are asking for. I think he wants to go it piecemeal. So, this tax regime is an aspect of fiscal federalism. Luckily, it is marketed even better than his other earlier reforms which Nigerians seem to have embraced.
How would you react to the situation in Rivers State?
It is a very unfortunate development. Nobody is in doubt about what is playing out. From day one, the former governor, Nyesom Wike, has continued to claim that he delivered the president in Rivers State and that taking his structure away from him will mean that he does not wield that power again to decide how Rivers votes will be calculated and reported. So he needs to control it. It is all about structures in Rivers State and 2027 and the President in his wisdom seems to believe in Wike.
But if you go back to the election of 2023, you can ask yourself the number of votes that really came from Rivers State to determine the president. If Wike has gone to the point of having a faceoff with PANDEF, a regional bloc that should be respected in the South South; and having a face-off with major stakeholders in Rivers State, what does that tell the president? That is why I said the president must have to engage. The president should begin to review his engagement for the next election; building around individuals will not help him.
The South South leaders have come out as a group to intervene in the matter of Rivers but they didn’t seem to have been well respected in that engagement and shortly after Wike started making utterances that denigrated those leaders including late Chief Clark. So building hope on individuals will not help him. The president is the Commander-in-Chief; he should be mindful that attempting to protect one man might lead him into making a mistake that he would live to regret.
Towards 2027, what role do you advocate for the Igbo?
It’s unfortunate that my people in the South East, especially the political leaders, are so naive to their effective political participation in Nigeria. Way back at the inception of the political party system in Nigeria, Herbert Macaulay had seen the need to form a political party called NNDP in 1923 and Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe came back from abroad and joined. The NNDP metamorphosed into NCNC and Dr Azikiwe became the secretary. At the death of Macaulay, Azikiwe became the leader of the party because of his own political stature. So, Igbo people didn’t see the need any more for a political party they could control.
They coalesced using the Igbo State Union and it turned out as if NCNC was an Igbo party. At a time, the Yoruba founded the Action Group and Ahmadu Bello founded the NPC in the North; at that same time Aminu Kano, who wanted to assert the identity of the Hausa, founded NEPU and in the Middle Belt, Joseph Tarka called his people and founded UMBC. What was founded in the Eastern Region? Nothing! And this continued for nearly 80 years (if you include the period of the war) until I got worried that we needed a political platform for engagement.
So I began the effort in 1996 and by 2001 and 2002, we had founded APGA. It was celebrated. It became the first time a political party was registered in Nigeria founded by an Igbo man. I was the first person that founded a party and did not use it to run for president. I didn’t think it was for me. I went and fished out Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu, who vied for the presidency. We felt we had taken off but today this party has been confined to Anambra State. So how will Igbo people engage?
They are being invited to all these conspiratorial meetings here and there because they are just like fish in the water. Our people are good in so many things – business, academia and what have you. But in politics, we have failed and we are not even about to make any change. If you see what Soludo did to corner the soul of APGA, you would think that he had a plan to make it a national platform but he has dumped it at Awka.
