Okupe : It’ll take 2yrs to ‘enjoy’ Tinubu’s govt, says 2023 election rigged

Renowned politician, Doyin Okupe, says it will take a minimum of two years for President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms to manifest positively in the country.

Okupe, who was the Director General of the Labour Party’s presidential campaign council in the 2023 election, said Tinubu deserves all the support to reposition the country after years of mismanagement.

The Ogun-born politician stated this in an interview with Vanguard, even as he said that the 2023 presidential election, like many previous polls in the country, was rigged.

On his recent public support for Tinubu, Okupe said : “Those who see what I’m doing with Bola Tinubu today and thinking that it was for personal gain, I told you, they can only be young people who do not know. They don’t know the history; they don’t know what my pedigree is. I am a man that supports what I consider to be fair and just even if it is to my detriment. I met the president, Tinubu, about a week ago. I had not seen him for seven or eight years. I had not spoken to him on the phone. He didn’t talk to me. But he’s somebody I know very well politically.

“We have never been on the same side before in politics but we’ve always shared a relationship since our NADECO days. From that time, till when he was governor and left as governor, I’ve had opportunities to sit with Bola Tinubu for hours unending. And he has impressed me, not only as a politician, but as a technocrat, a man capable of deep thinking. He has developmental ideologies and policies at his fingertips. This thing, you don’t learn it. It’s a gift. The last time we had anybody close to him was Awolowo (Obafemi). Awolowo was a very serious-minded politician, but who had ideas of public policies that would benefit the masses. That is what Bola Tinubu is today. Bola Tinubu, you know, in the Villa, we have a reformer, a president who is a reformer. I’ve heard some people saying that Bola Tinubu came to the office without a plan, he has no clue, that is balderdash, that is nonsense. I have worked with two past presidents.

” I have studied other presidents closely from a very close point. I don’t know any Nigerian president from 1960 to date who has come better prepared for governance than this gentleman.

” Unfortunately , he has come into government at a very terrible and awful time. And when I met him, I told him, “Are you out of your mind? How would you want to succeed a Buhari (Muhammadu) administration, eight years of total abandonment, decadence and retrogression?”

“He said he was driven by passion to help Nigeria. Having been part and parcel of those who brought Buhari, you can’t blame somebody for bringing a leader. If the leader does not perform, it’s unfortunate. But if you are brave enough to say, yes, you know; whatever the leader has done wrong, “let us put our necks out and correct it”. And this is what this guy is doing. How can you hold President Tinubu accountable for the ills of 30, 40 years? And for the two-terms of national abandonment of the last eight years, it’s unfair, it’s unrealistic. And go and check it, being a reformer, you know, he didn’t ask me to say this, but I’m telling you from commonsense and my understanding of how government works, Bola Tinubu will need a minimum of two years for some of his policies to be properly established and to begin to produce results. I have gone to read history, I read about Lin Kuan Yew. Lin Kuan Yew had, you know, Singapore, and at that point in time, the other country next to it, Malaysia, before they pulled out. He had those 31 years to rule that country, to transform that nation from Third World to First World. He said, “I did certain things that were not okay”.

“He was even almost draconian at some point, but, you know, he was focused on what he wanted to do, just like Bola Tinubu today appears to be very strong-minded, very focused, and determined to pull this through. It’s going to be a couple of years of pain and hardship, but he’s doing what other presidents for the last 10, 20 years had refused to do. The choice he had was to run, come into governance and continue business as usual. By the time he came to government, 98% of our revenue generated was being used to pay debt. Arbitrage on the foreign exchange was at an alarming rate. We were subsidising power, subsidising virtually everything. We had over-borrowed and we were now going back to the nefarious and condemnable, financially undisciplined act of printing currency. We printed more than N21 trillion. If we had continued like that, we would have become a failed state by now. So, we should commend him, support him, pray for him, cooperate with him, and endure the hardship for this short period and wait for the results.”

Asked on his take on the opposition claim that the 2023 presidential election was rigged, Okupe said the poll was rigged in some parts of the country but the presidency was not stolen.

His words :”The opposition is running helter-skelter, talking about all sorts of things. The real opposition is Abubakar Atiku, and maybe Peter Obi. In the first instance, the opposition appears to be unrealistic, saying the presidency was stolen. There’s nothing like that. No presidency was stolen. I’m not saying there was no rigging. There was no election that we have done in Nigeria since 1960 to date that was not rigged except maybe Abiola’s election because of the unique nature of the voting pattern at that time. You know it was Option A4 that was used for the June 12 election and people were counted; apart from that, every other election was rigged. We were in this country when a sitting president (Umar Yar’Adua) said the process that brought him into power was flawed. That was when he set up the Uwais Committee. I was involved in the process that brought Obasanjo into office. I was involved in the process that brought in GEJ. I knew about the process that brought in Buhari. All without exception were flawed.

“So, talking about rigging, that’s not the issue. You only rig where you are strong. So, if you look at it properly, when three major candidates emerged for that election, it was obvious that we would have a minority administration. Obi was substantially supported by the South-East. And if the Labour Party or Obi think that people rigged, APC rigged, how did Obi win the stronghold of Bola Tinubu? Why didn’t Bola Tinubu rig Lagos for himself? How come APC lost the election in the home base of a sitting president? How come APC lost the election in the home base of the Secretary to that Government? The accusation about rigging does not hold water. I was in the Labour Party. We couldn’t have done better than we did, but that’s a discussion for another day. And in any case, when you look at it today, critically, Bola Tinubu came into this government with a better policy document than any of these two rivals.

“Atiku is a magnificent, experienced, knowledgeable, and thoroughbred politician. I am telling you that I know that for a fact. He also came with a testament. But when we put the testament side by side, which is the correct reality we have on the ground today, it’s not applicable. The testament, the policy document, and his preparation were hinged mainly on obtaining some funds, $10 billion and $15 billion or so loans, which he intended to inject into the economy. But that was theoretical because at the time Buhari was leaving, nobody was going to borrow Nigeria money. And if people were ready to borrow Nigerian money, Buhari would not have had to go and print money. We were no longer credit worthy in the eyes of the majority of the international financial institutions.

“The premises and the pillars on which Atiku placed this testament are what you call sinking sand, they can’t work. As for Peter Obi, he has not given any policy document to Nigerians on what he was going to do. I can tell you that for a fact. I’ve admitted Atiku’s own, but in the Labour Party, we did not have a document that we could adopt as our panacea for what was going on.

“All we were saying was that we wanted to take Nigeria from consumption to production. Good rhetoric but it’s not grounded either in policy development or in principle application. I never supported Bola Tinubu, he’s not my person and we’re not in the same party. But in retrospect now, his reform, I mean, his Renewable Hope Agenda is the most credible document that can address and is addressing the current situation. And as you can see, it is being meticulously applied.

” First of all, he came and not only removed petrol subsidy, but announced that Buhari had already removed the subsidy. From June 1, 2023, there was no subsidy provision in the Budget. So, the statement that “subsidy is gone” was just an acceptable confirmation of an event that had happened. This was superfluous, but the subsidy had actually been removed before he came into office. Next, he attacked the arbitrage in the foreign exchange market. And this is what I commend Bola Tinubu and his government for. Unknown to many Nigerians, some people were feeding fat on Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings. There were people who didn’t do any job. They just used contacts in the CBN, and collected millions of dollars every week and got the difference, and made stupendous wealth. All that is gone, this man has stopped it. After that, I mean, see, he has now implemented the student loan program. Then he implemented this consumer protection thing, providing money for low-income earners and all that, in a systematic manner.

“The Ways and Means of N21 trillion has also been liquidated. And you say that the man does not have a plan! Now, two months after coming to government, he raised a committee to look into the problems in our tax system through reforms which was in his agenda. So, this man has a systematic, reliable, focused, applicable agenda that can take Nigeria out of the woods.”