Chekwas Okorie, founding chairman of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), has returned to the party after 20 years.
Okorie, in an exclusive interview with BusinessDay, said he left the party because of internal crisis and twisting of the law, but pledged to assist APGA for a better outing in the 2023 election.
Speaking during the event held at his Enugu residence, Okorie called on Ndigbo to see APGA as an opportunity they must grab with both hands, saying that every party is owned by a group. “PDP was not owned by G34, PDP is owned by military men who retired, removed their uniforms and put on Agbada. They are always implementing their agenda and for APC, why do you think that in APC it will take one word from Buhari to give them the national chairman after so many other people have paid their fees and were campaigning”.
He said that such a thing will still play out in the presidential race when the successor of the president would be named.
He said that APGA has remained the only truly progressive political party in Nigeria, not only because of its name, but in the constitution used in the registration of APGA.
He lamented that APGA has not taken its rightful position in the national political calculations. “We are in great pains when the platform we used to give Ikemba Ojukwu the opportunity to flag a presidential fag in Nigeria and used to adopt Jonathan in 2011 and 2015 has crumbled”.
Okorie maintained that the founders of APGA were never happy seeing Ohaneze Ndigbo going cap-in hand begging APC or PDP that the presidency should be zoned to South East when they are supposed to have a political party that would of necessity give it to our people.
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“Nigeria has come to a point where the social contract of the political parties with the Nigerian people must be interrogated to know what they mean and separate it from what they say.”
Speaking about his ordeals in APGA and his political journey thereafter, the Igbo leader said that they “didn’t just run away when the problems started, we struggled to save the soul of the party. We were in the court for eight years, we were in the Supreme Court three times and no court ever recognised any other person as APGA national chairman except me.
“We tried reconciliation, there were over 20 attempts to have peace and reconcile all sides but these efforts were frustrated by only one side and we left to try our hands elsewhere and founded another party.
“In 2012, we founded the United Peoples Party and eventually, UPP couldn’t move forward. In 2020, we decided to try our hand with the ruling party, we collapsed our structure into the All Progressives Congress that was a difficult decision to make but at the end of the day, we weren’t too comfortable with the APC because having been in opposition for several years and decades, it wasn’t so easy to change from the way we were made.
Even as a member of the ruling party, he was still not comfortable because he discovered that he couldn’t change and criticized government policies on appointments of the president and could not help insisting that the only way to solve the insecurity in Nigeria and South East in particular was to release all those prisoners of concise based on political negations and considerations, which many other members of the party objected to.
“There was pressure from everywhere for us to return to APGA and help rebuild the house, especially when I reconciled with Peter Obi quietly more than five years ago, but I said to myself and associates that we can’t return via the backdoor”, he said.
On May 26, 2022, he formally resigned his membership with APC in his ward in Bende Local Government Area of Abia State and also the same day re-registered with APGA in the same ward.
“I Chief Chekwas Okorie, with all my associates, those present here and outside, we have today, formally returned to APGA under the chairmanship of Edozie Njoku.”
As a grassroots politician and leader of the Igbos, he presented to BusinessDay archival pictures he took with Ojukwu and other political leaders from other parts of the county that have the same political ideology on how to save this country from collapsing and promise to meet with them.
