Director-General of the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council, Akin Osuntokun, shares his thoughts with ADEBAYO FOLORUNSHO-FRANCIS, on 2023 post-election wrangling, the 171-day legal tussle to nullify the election of President Bola Tinubu
How does the Labour Party plan to rebuild the party and come back stronger after losing the Presidency and court cases?
Well, we have just completed the court case and have not really sat to brainstorm on the next step. But for a party that has come out strongly to establish credibility for itself in the last election, I will expect Nigerians who have been frustrated with the status quo to find sanctuary in the Labour Party, especially members of the young generation. I don’t see what the youth will be looking for in the APC, which represents all that people cannot wish for in this country. I mean it is unimaginable that some people at the National Assembly can say they want to buy N160m Range Rover for each member in this present circumstance. At a time like this when desperate measures are needed to tackle our challenges, we are hearing some people using the same loan borrowed to buy SUVs and their excuse was that the ministers have three or more. You can see the sickness we are battling. They are not even admitting that they are doing anything wrong. Instead, they are reminding you there is a bigger sinner out there. The public itself has a role to play.
It is possible he travelled as you said. I really don’t know.
There is an ongoing rumour that Obi may dump Nigeria following his loss after a frustrating 171 days legal battle in court. How true?
(laughs) Then you obviously don’t know Peter Obi. Why will he be frustrated? Tell me. After all, he is not desperate for power. He has virtually everything anybody can wish for in life. The status he has achieved is a big bonus in his life. Personally, as a person, he has grown a lot in stature for the majority of Nigerians to look to as a role model. That to me is a big deal. Why should any of that get him frustrated enough to want to make him turn his back on his country? Not at all. What Obi has achieved even in the little time he spent with the party is still there. How can he then abandon all he has done because he didn’t get judgment from the Supreme Court? Obi has no reason to be frustrated. He is not one who sees the aspiration to become the president of Nigeria as a personal acquisition. It is not a personal loss for him. It is a loss for the country. God has raised him far beyond what he was before. There is no logical basis to expect him to be alienated from Nigeria.
The LP Chair Julius Abure raised the alarm that Tinubu might come after Obi and some party chieftains after his victory at the Supreme Court. Do you nurse the same fear?
Whatever anybody may think of Tinubu, it is unfair to say he will come after anybody. From what I know of him, he is not that kind of person. He is not a vengeful politician. That is one of his strengths. A lot of people who are with him today including those from Lagos, have offended him in the past are back. Whatever reservation anybody has about him, he is not that kind of person. I must also say that attitude has helped him a lot in his political career. But that’s my own personal view.
Many of your supporters and the Obidient movement alleged LP lost out to money politics at the 2023 general elections. Do you share the same sentiment?
Of course, isn’t it obvious? When you ask them, they will tell you. Monetisation of politics is another name for corruption. They are sometimes called grand games, political structures, and all sorts. That’s what it is all about. Forget the result INEC announced. I can tell you without any fear of contradiction that the majority of votes cast were won convincingly by Obi. I see it as a heroic achievement because people mobilised themselves to go and vote. But they could not monitor or secure the votes that were cast in many places where we didn’t have agents. Even then, members of the party without reference to us played the role of agents and monitored proceedings across the country.
There is a way this election has demystified money. I am not saying money didn’t play a role at the level of inducing voters to vote. Definitely, it did at the level of INEC, security agents, and others because these are all the institutions that conspired together to rig us out.
One of your party chieftains recently lamented that your major undoing was to put too much trust in INEC. Is it right to conclude you were disappointed with the outcome of the entire 2023 polls?
What choice do we have? Where else would anybody have suggested we put our trust? It was not up to us. Besides, there was no time we said we trusted INEC. I am not surprised they did what they did. The only thing that made the difference was the BVAS, which has made it hard to inflate figures. It will report precisely the exact number of accredited voters. So the only avenue left for manipulation and rigging is to play with these numbers. In the past, if 10,000 people voted in an area, you can inflate it to about 50,000 or 60,000. This time, the BVAS has made that impossible. That’s why you discovered in places like Port Harcourt that they just put whatever they deducted from the Labour for APC. For instance, if the LP has 3,500 and the APC has 640, you can remove one zero from Labour, leaving it at 350, and add the zero to that of APC. This was basically what they did in Rivers State. They would just take something from you that was winning and add it to the person who had lost. That is because there was no room to inflate figures. In the past, they didn’t need to do that. What they simply did in the past if LP, for instance, had 6,500 votes, what they would do was to add 20,000 or 30,000 to the other party’s votes. That is no longer possible. So what they do is try to see how they can play around the figures.
However many election observers and political analysts concluded there was apathy and low turnout of voters. Are you saying otherwise?
It is not true. We didn’t have any low voter turnout. What happened was that those who came out to vote were the authentic or real voters. It was the reality of the actual people who were meant to vote. But if you were relating the number of those who voted with what you have in the register, it would look like a low voter turnout. But that wasn’t what happened at all. If you look at Lagos, I don’t know the exact figure they have in the voters’ register; perhaps two or three million or something. But what we recorded at the end wasn’t even more than two million votes, let alone three million. That is the problem.
It is the same problem we are experiencing with the population census. Nigerians will always get away with it. They will play around with the population figures just as they do with the voter register. All these figures were over-inflated. I am telling you categorically that Nigerians are not up to 200 million at all. It is fictitious. Every Nigerian community that has an opportunity to increase their data has done so. I am not happy to say so but I have participated in it before. From experience, I know they write to community leaders to contribute money during the population census so that they can give the money to those census officials who are coming to make them inflate their figures. That’s also because those figures are used at the stages of delineation wards and oil revenue distribution, especially at the local government level. So the more figures you have, the more resources that would be allocated. Until this problem is addressed, we are going to always end up with highly inflated figures. These are the same figures we will be using to deceive ourselves, saying we are over 200m people. Which 200m?
Looking at how things panned out before and after the election, are there things you think the Labour Party could have done differently?
Yes, of course. I am always of the opinion that we could have taken ourselves more seriously than we did. Part of it was going out to raise money. But the burden fell very unfairly on Obi alone. That was one grey area I think we should have made a difference. But again, the time was too short to do that.
