The national chairman of the United Progressives Party (UPP), Chief Chekwas Okorie, in this interview with MIKE UBANI, predicts that the 2015 general elections would be deadlocked as no political party would win enough votes to either produce the president or control the National Assembly
What is the leadership of United Progressives Party (UPP) doing to put the party firmly on the ground five months to the general elections?
The UPP is about two years old as we speak, and knowing that up till this moment, we don't have any person with executive powers who controls any form of budget to be able to support the party financially, we decided that the best bet is not to spread ourselves thin all over the country in the preparation for the 2015 general elections. But there is no doubt that we have executive officers in the thirty-six states of Nigeria, including the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), as required by law at the time of registration. And we hold our regular meetings, so the structure nationwide remains there. But considering the general elections which are five months away, we have considered a couple of strategies. The first thing was to look at Nigeria the way it is structured, and we chose a space to occupy, and that space is the South-East, because for us there was a void.
Is it politically expedient to occupy the South-East given the fact that there are five other geo-political zones in the country?
Yes. Political wisdom suggests that the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) would again field the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan for the 2015 presidential election. And the All Progressives Congress (APC), which has a strong intention to replace President Jonathan or PDP at the centre, would definitely get its presidential candidate from the North. Then, of course, for UPP, we have to take cognizance of these two political parties and how they are positioned. So, we quickly zoned the presidential ticket of our party to the South-East and this was a decision of the party's NEC. That immediately gave us an area to build our foundation. And now we have started our sensitisation campaign, and naturally the sensitisation tours will be in the area that we are bringing our presidential candidate and this is the South-East zone. And we have practically covered the South-East. Lagos is another place of interest to us and then of course,
any other state we have a strong candidate. So, that is the kind of preparation we are making.
What are the results of these sensitisation campaigns?
I can tell you that the sensitisation campaigns are yielding tremendous results. Without firing a shot, without yet casting any vote, UPP today is seen as the third in line out of the 26 registered political parties.
What made UPP third in the line up?
It is one of the three political parties that will be contesting for the presidency of this country in 2015. The All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) has already collapsed into Jonathan's ambition. The Labour Party has done the same. And so there is no other party fighting for space with UPP in the South-East. And whatever you say, everybody knows that Igbo people are very emotional and sentimental when it comes to any of their own standing for presidential election. We expect an epic encounter – an encounter that will see three political parties locking horns for the presidential race. And that presidential race is going to determine so many other things down the line – governorship, national and state assembly elections. So, we are hoping for a better outing than we had in APGA because I am in a position to make an objective assessment of the two, being the founder of the two parties.
Do we have a personality like the late Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in UPP that could swing the votes in favour of the party?
Igbo people respect their leaders, but they respect them for what they stand for, not just for the names they answer. I want to buttress this by reminding Nigerians that Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu had me as one of his most ardent followers and I followed him for over two decades. I followed him to all the political parties he journeyed to. And I can tell you that he was still Dim Odumegwu Ojukwu. The Igbo people did not respond to those parties because he was there. At a point, I was the only one standing beside him. So, having said that, how did he now shine like a thousand stars? He shone like a thousand stars when a political party called APGA was founded which zoned its presidential candidate to South-East. And he (Ojukwu) became the beneficiary of that initiative and so he shone like a thousand stars. Now UPP was designed to draw the attention of Igbo people. The party logo which is the head of the tiger is of special
significance to Ndigbo and you know we also brought the cock as the symbol of APGA because it was necessary at that time to wake up the people. The zoning of the UPP presidential candidate to the South-East has made Ndigbo to appropriate the party as their own.
Where do you place the PDP in the forthcoming general elections, particularly the presidential race?
There is a formidable opposition facing PDP which the party never had since its existence and that is the APC. So, this is what I call balance of terror between PDP and APC. Whatever this one has in terms of capacity for mischief, rigging or violence, the other one has an equal strength. They may likely cancel themselves out. APC and PDP are two sides of the same coin. We are the face of Nigerian progressives. After the presidential election, either there is a stalemate which will be resolved by way of a run-off election or there will be a conclusion of the election without any particular party being as comfortable in the National Assembly as to run government all by itself. So, an alliance will come in and we will be open to such alliance. What we will not do is a pre-election alliance.
So you do not foresee a situation where one political party would win the presidential election on the first ballot?
No. Before now, PDP was the only party and all the other parties were too small to be any meaningful challenge, and then of course, the system was so fluid and easy to be manipulated that certain funny results were announced where most of those people who registered in a particular state like Ogun at that time, were said to have voted for the PDP. But now we have a better funded and focused INEC; a formidable opposition in the APC squaring up with PDP; then we have this UPP coming up with its own new brand of ideological offer to the Nigerian people.
APGA seems to be losing its identity as a political party. Did you foresee this kind of situation?
I didn't just foresee it, I said it. It wasn't even a prediction. It was a pronouncement because a father has spiritual authority over his children. I am the founder of APGA and God knows that; everybody knows that, so nobody can take away my spiritual influence over APGA from me
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