Osita Okechukwu, Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), says he fully understands the grief of the opposition parties over the judgement of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC).
According to Daily trust, Okechukwu, also a foundation member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), said this when he spoke with journalists in Abuja.
He claimed that, while the main opposition PDP had a good chance of winning the 2023 presidential election, the political greed of the party’s nominee, former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, prevented the party from winning.
Okechukwu stated that Atiku’s failure to seize the golden chance and play the role of a statesman by supporting his former running partner Peter Obi or any other Southern presidential candidate divided the opposition party.
“Atiku dealt the PDP a devastating blow from which it may be difficult to recover.”
According to Daily trust, He disregarded the petitioners’ assertions that President Bola Tinubu was unqualified to run, and he ruled that charges of irregularities in the election’s conduct, as well as the refusal to electronically transfer results in real time, were fatal to the respondents’ argument.
“Those intricate webs could have been resolved if Atiku had followed the zoning convention, supported Peter Obi or any other Southern presidential candidate; otherwise, it could have been an all-Southern fight.”
“There might have been no Wike Masquerade. That would have meant that the majority of his votes may have been attributed to the PDP. Atiku irreparably divided the PDP’s votes; all of the votes Labour Party received came from the party’s stronghold, minus votes warehoused by the former Vice President, who “naively forgot that northern voters are among the most sophisticated in the country, but believed that northern electorate would behave like children in a dormitory waiting for directives on how to vote,” he said.
Okechukwu praised Tinubu for salvaging the zoning convention, which ensures equity and natural justice between the north and south.
Lukundu (
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