Doyin Okupe

By Eromosele Ebhomele.

Dr. Doyin Okupe, former Senior Special Assistant to Nigeria’s ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on Public Affairs, has said the candidacy of his boss was not reason the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, lost the 2015 presidential election, but the refusal of the party to sack the country’s then electoral umpire, Professor Attahiru Jega.

Jega, as Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, conducted the election in which candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Muhammadu Buhari, won.

Some of the party’s chieftains have attributed the party’s fatal loss in the election to the party’s decision not to obey its zoning principle of having a northern candidate for presidency in the election.

Since the election in April, the PDP’s fortunes have shrunk with the party’s remaining members making efforts to re-strengthen the party and buy back all its aggrieved members ahead of future elections.

But Okupe does not see this argument as valid. To him, it is a mere fallacy and the party must be take responsibility for allowing Jega conduct the election.

He listed other areas where the PDP failed itself and its presidential candidate saying: “the impression created in the media recently that the candidacy of Goodluck Jonathan was an error is itself a grand fallacy which totally undermined the whole truth about the sanctity and correctness of the wisdom of the PDP National Executive Committee which made and ratified that decision,” he said in a Facebook posting.

“All over the world, when an incumbent signifies intention for a second term, it is customary that the established machinery of the party wholly backs and gratifies such intentions. If any error was made, it was firstly the failure of the PDP administration to sack the unfair and compromised electoral officer who was allowed to conduct the election in spite of his obvious and profuse partisanship,” he said.

The second error, according to him, was the inexplicable acquiescence of the PDP government to the use of the infamous card reader which was skillfully manipulated to the disadvantage of the PDP presidential candidate.

“The third error of the PDP was to have fielded a good, God-fearing and patriotic man who in spite of his enormous power, the avalanche of deployable arsenal of war at his disposal, transformed himself to be the victim and refused to fight so that his countrymen may live and his nation survived. The situation in Burundi today is highly instructive. Certainly history will treat Goodluck Jonathan as one of the greatest heroes of this generation of African leaders. I speak today not as a spokesman for President Jonathan, an episode and a proud chapter of my life which has since come to a close. Rather I speak as a student of history and a veritable stakeholder in the Nigerian project,” he said.