Olusegun Ariyo
An erstwhile Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria, VON, Osita Okechukwu, says the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, should be held responsible for Nigeria’s slide towards becoming a one-party state, not the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.
Okechukwu made this statement on Sunday in Enugu while reacting to insinuations that APC and, by extension, President Bola Tinubu, were responsible for the weak opposition in the country.
The former VON boss described the insinuations that the ruling APC was the architect of the emerging one-party state as misplaced.
According to him, PDP members had been inflicted by the same ‘humongous culture of impunity’ it planted in the country’s political culture in their 16 years of being power.
Okechukwu, a founding member of the APC, said Nigeria will naturally slide into a one-party state, as PDP, the country’s major opposition party with more than 10 governors, has been afflicted by the stomach infrastructure syndrome.
“One, without being immodest, can recall how Alhaji Buba Galadima, the then National Secretary of CPC, was arrested and hounded on eve of the 2007 general elections and offered all manner of carrots to abandon CPC and, by extension former President Muhammadu Buhari,” he said.
He reminisced that since the APC merger in 2013, PDP members had converted APC to a rehabilitation centre instead of adopting the prerequisite ingredients of opposition – resilience, grit and patience.
He stated that it was the culture of impunity that made PDP to off-handedly jettison the rotation convention of President from the North to the South and even Section 7 of its Constitution, which made rotation mandatory.
“Imagine the breach of rotation convention by the PDP leadership, not minding the unintended consequences, with the erroneous thought that His Excellency, Atiku Abubakar, will unlock the northern electorate from their dormitory to vote PDP in the 2023 presidential election.
“This is a misjudgment, pure and simple, with its collateral damage, one of which is one-party state.
“They (PDP) are at it again with fake arithmetic of South’s 17 years and North’s 11 years rule since 1999, as if Nigeria got independence in 1999,” Okechukwu said.
