Four-year single term pledge smacks of desperation- Ex-APGA chair
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John AlechenuAbujaThe founder/ first National Chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Chief Chekwas Okorie, has said the pledge by Peter Obi and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to each serve only one term of four years each, if elected, smacks of desperation.
Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 election, has been at the eye of the storm since he reiterated this pledge a few weeks ago.
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has also made a similar pledge at various fora over the last couple of years.
Okorie noted that although Obi has said it time and again that he wasn’t desperate for power, his four-year single-term pledge paints a different picture in the minds of many Nigerians.
The former APGA boss expressed his views in a telephone interview with Vanguard in Abuja on Tuesday.
He said, “Everybody knows how much power can intoxicate the holder. If Obi or Atiku can walk into power from their bedrooms, then they can also walk out on their own free will.
“But getting into office with the support and help of people, some of whom can exert pressure, will make it impossible for such promises to be kept. We have seen this before. This is what happened to President Goodluck Jonathan, who, it was said, made a similar promise to the north in 2011.
“If you also remember, President Obasanjo, who wasn’t even sure when, if he would get out of prison, got out, became president for the first term, started a second one and started plotting for a third before Nigerians stopped him.
“It is when people get into office that you will begin to hear those around them say ‘any agreement or law which is inconsistent to the provisions of the 1999 Constitution is to the extent of its inconsistency, null, void and of no effect.”
Okorie further said, “Without a doubt in my mind, Obi is a gentleman and refined unfortunately political power at the highest level in Nigeria is a different kettle of fish altogether.”
Speaking in a similar vein, a former Media Aide to late President Muhammadu Buhari, Bashir Ahmed, in a veiled response to Obi’s pledge said in a tweet on his X handle: “This individual, who couldn’t fix a dot within a circle after two full tenures, is now trying to convince us that he can fix the entire circle in just one. Isn’t that so insulting to our collective memory?”
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