A former Director-General of the Labour Party Presidential Campaign, Dr Doyin Okupe, has stated that the 2023 presidential election was not rigged by the ruling All Progressives Congress.
Okupe, who previously served as spokesman for Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, made this assertion in a statement on Thursday in Lagos.
“If Peter Obi (2023 LP presidential candidate) or the Labour Party says APC rigged elections, how come Obi was able to win in the home base of President Bola Tinubu?
“How come APC lost the election in the home base of the sitting president (Muhammadu Buhari)? How come APC lost the election in the home base of the secretary to that government?
“So, the accusations about rigging do not hold water; they do not hold water at all.
“The truth of the matter is that under the best of conditions, the results we got may not have been the exact results, but they will have that ratio.
“I was in the Labour Party; we couldn’t have done better than we did. I know that for some reasons, but that is a discussion for another day,” Okupe said.
Okupe criticised the opposition People’s Democratic Party and Labour Party, describing their claims of a “stolen presidency” as unrealistic.
“There’s nothing like that. No presidency was stolen. I am not saying there was no rigging.
“There was no election that we have done in Nigeria since 1960 till date that was not rigged one way or the other. Not one.
“Perhaps an exception was MKO Abiola’s election because of the unique nature of the voting pattern. You know it was Option A4; people were counted. Apart from that, every other election was rigged,” he added.
Okupe expressed strong confidence in President Tinubu’s reforms, asserting that the president’s policies would yield results starting from the second year of his administration.
He lauded Tinubu as both a politician and technocrat, describing him as “a man that is capable of deep thinking.”
“Tinubu has development ideologies and policies at his fingertips. This thing, you don’t learn it. It’s a gift,” Okupe said.
Drawing a comparison with the late Premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Okupe called Tinubu a reformer with transformative ideas for public policies.
“It’s total nonsense to say that the president came to the office without a plan.
“I have worked with two past presidents. I have studied other presidents closely from a very close point.
“I do not know any Nigerian president from 1960 to date who has come more armed and better prepared for governance than this gentleman.
“Unfortunately for him, he has come into government at a very terrible and awful time,” he said.
Okupe argued that it would be unjust to blame Tinubu for the problems accumulated over 40 years. He emphasised that the president needed at least two years for his policies to take effect.
“By the time he came to the government, 98 per cent of our revenue generated was being used to pay debt,” Okupe noted.
He compared Tinubu’s determination to reform Nigeria with the transformations seen in Singapore and Malaysia, urging Nigerians to endure the hardships as part of the process.
“It is going to be a couple of years of pain and hardship, but he is doing what other presidents for the last 10 years or 20 years have refused to do.
“The choice he had was to run and was to come into governance and just continue business as usual,” Okupe added.
Okupe appealed to Nigerians to rally behind the president’s efforts to address the nation’s longstanding challenges.
He added, “We must support Tinubu as he works to fix the problems slowing down the progress of this country.”