Coalition of 39 parties can’t beat Buhari – Gen. Okoloagu
General JOJ Okoloagu (retd) is a Board of Trustees (BoT) member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), three-time senatorial candidate in Enugu State and member of the Buhari Support Group in the South East. In this interview, he speaks on the 2019 polls
Daily Trust:
Gen. Okoloagu: Well, everybody is entitled to his opinion. Governor Ortom is still in the APC. Governor Tambuwal is still in the APC, everybody is free to romance with anybody, but honestly speaking, I don’t think there is a serious thing there. The only thing I believe the new leadership of my party is doing is to find out the leakages because as human beings, there are bound to be disagreements. My only worry is that Governor Ortom has spoken out too loud and too early. Even if he decides to leave, where he made his intention known was not the proper forum for him to announce it.
I disagree completely with him that the party has not been fair to him or to anybody. He had not sought anything and was denied yet as far as I know. We have not yet started the primaries. It is when we go to the party primaries and the party leadership says he cannot go for a re-election that his claims will begin to make meaning.
My problem with the Nigerian democracy is that whoever losses cries fowl. I ran for senate three times and I am going for the fourth one in 2019. If it doesn’t work, so be it because power comes from God. There is no way you can satisfy everybody at the same time. Were they (PDP and other political parties) worried about the number of security personnel that manned the Ekiti poll exercise? That is Nigeria for you. If the government did not bring sufficient security personnel, they would still accuse government.
Yes, it is very unfortunate that some elements have been perpetrating this kind of mindless killings in the country; but l don’t think that alone can sufficiently affect the chances of the APC retaining the presidency in 2019. Yes, people are likely to judge us by our party’s failures and successes. I am not saying that we have succeeded in everything. We are human beings, we are not God, and I want Nigerians to understand it from that perspective. We have succeeded in infrastructure development, youth empowerment and so many other things. In fact, we have even succeeded in starting restructuring and in tackling the Boko Haram menace. I believe in the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari and there is no pretence about it. I am not defending Buhari for the killings. We have not done too well in the area of internal security due to some handicaps that are being seriously tackled by the leadership. That does not mean that we have failed as a party. But you can also remember that when this government came on board, almost a whole state was taken hostage. But I believe that Mr President needs to rejig our security architecture; he needs to do it urgently as a compliment to his commendable efforts in degrading Boko Haram. The security lapses in Nigeria today is as a result of total failure of the police, immigration and customs to do their job effectively. So if Mr President does not help in saving this situation now, we will likely be embarrassed in the future.
Yes, state police is the solution to the problem because this country has gotten more complicated than I even imagined, coming up as a young man or while in military service. So l will go for state police. There is no alternative to it. The Nigeria Police as presently constituted cannot handle the country’s internal security challenges. By 2019, we may have more internal security challenges than we have now. Anybody saying the security problem is religious is far from reality, at best, it is political, because I don’t see what is religious about the killings in Zamfara or Sokoto.
There are people who are sponsoring violence in this country for political reasons and Mr President must get his team to identify the people who are doing this. Do you know how much weapons they are using for violence in this country cost? Do you know how much one bullet is? So who is buying them for the killers? So re-jigging the security apparatus in the country now is very important. But if you say President Buhari has not done well, I will totally disagree with you because he has laid a good foundation for this country, it doesn’t matter whether he wins the 2019 election or not, but I believe he will win again because he is popular. It is not the social media that will vote him. This man doesn’t play politics with human lives. He is only overwhelmed by the security problems. When he is blocking one loophole here, it will be leaking there. But he is making very serious and commendable efforts in this regard. For now, there is no alternative to President Buhari in the 2019 presidential election for goodness sake.
The shortest route to Igbo presidency in Nigeria is through the APC. I saw a coalition of political parties. I have equally seen the number of people who are indicating interest to challenge Buhari come 2019. By political birth right, it is the turn of the Southeast. Any sensible Southeast man will not gang up against the APC when you know that the APC by our zoning will be beaming its searchlight on the Southeast come 2023. Whoever engages in any gang up will be deceiving himself. You don’t give power on the basis of tribal or ethnic nationality. If a political party has overwhelming majority and all of them come from the same tribe, they will govern the country. The constitution is there. That is why I am calling on my brothers from the south-east zone to see reasons with me in this regard. Forget about religious sentiment. There is no religion there. The situation in Sokoto and Zamfara has provided light to what some people have been calling the killing of Christians in other states of the country. What is going on is the killing of Nigerians! In fact, most of the victims in the North now are Muslims. If you do a census of the dead, you will discover that more Muslims have died. So it is not religious killings. It is also instructive to state that anybody taking over from President Buhari will do eight years. So any sensible politician should know that the shortest cut for him is the APC. But tragically, so many Igbos are in the PDP today and no amount of gang up against President Buhari will work. He will win the presidency again in 2019. The problem is that when you get much money in this country today, you underrate the intelligence of the poor man. Yes, there is money in the hands of the PDP, but Nigerians cannot forget in a hurry what they did while in power. They messed up the entire country in every ramification. The point is that President Muhammadu Buhari or any other person the APC fields for the presidency in 2019 will win the election. So for the Igbos, they must embrace the APC because there is an understanding. I am a chieftain of the APC, in January this year, we met with Mr President and expressed our desire to take over from him and he never said no. But you cannot take over just because you are Igbos, you can only take over if you belong to the party, the APC.