Presidency not stolen, Peter Obi couldn’t have won – Okupe

A former Director-General of the Labour Party (LP) Presidential Campaign, Doyin Okupe, says the 2023 presidential election was not rigged by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).

Mr Okupe, a former spokesman for President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan, disclosed this in a statement on Thursday in Lagos.

“If Peter Obi (2023 LP presidential candidate) or the Labour Party says APC rigged elections, how come Obi was able to win in the home base of President Bola Tinubu?

“How come APC lost election in the home base of the sitting President (Muhammadu Buhari)? How come APC lost election in the home base of the secretary to that government?

“So, the accusations about rigging do not hold water; they do not hold water at all.

“The truth of the matter is that under the best of conditions, the results we got may not have been the exact results, but they will have that ratio.

“I was in the Labour Party; we couldn’t have done better than we did. I know that for some reasons but that is a discussion for another day,” he said.

According to him, the opposition PDP and LP appear to be unrealistic with their accusations that “the presidency was stolen”.

Mr Okupe added: “There’s nothing like that. No presidency was stolen. I am not saying there was no rigging.

“There was no election that we have done in Nigeria since 1960 till date that was not rigged one way or the other. Not one.

Perhaps, an exception was MKO Abiola’s election because of the unique nature of the voting pattern. You know it was Option A4, people were counted. Apart from that, every other election was rigged.”

Mr Okupe, who expressed strong belief in Mr Tinubu’s reforms, said that the president’s policies would begin to yield results from the second year of his administration.

The former LP chieftain said that Mr Tinubu had impressed him not only as a politician, but as a technocrat: “a man that is capable of deep thinking.”

He said Mr Tinubu had development ideologies and policies at his fingertips, “This thing, you don’t learn it. It’s a gift.”

The 72-year-old politician said that Mr Tinubu was like the late Premier of the defunct Western Region, Obafemi Awolowo, with great ideas about public policies.

Describing Mr Tinubu as a reformer, Mr Okupe said it was “total nonsense” to say that the president came to the office without a plan .

“I have worked with two past presidents. I have studied other presidents closely from a very close point.

“I do not know any Nigerian president from 1960 to date who has come more armed, better prepared for governance than this gentleman.

“Unfortunately for him, he has come into government at a very terrible and awful time,” Mr Okupe said.

Noting that it would be unfair to hold Mr Tinubu accountable for the ills of 40 years, Mr Okupe said that the president needed a minimum of two years for some of his policies to begin to produce results.

He said that just like Singapore and Malaysia transited from third world to first world through determination, Mr Tinubu was determined to move the country to greater heights.

“It is going to be a couple of years of pain and hardship, but he is doing what other presidents for the last 10 years or 20 years have refused to do.

“The choice he had was to run and was to come into governance and just continue business as usual.

“By the time he came to the government, 98 per cent of our revenue generated was being used to pay debt,” Mr Okupe said.

He called on Nigerians to support the president to fix the problems slowing down the progress of the country

(NAN)