Chukwudi Nweje

Pastor of the Household of God Church, Rev. Chris Okotie, has formally declared his intention to contest the 2019 presidential election.

Okotie had contested the presidency three times earlier on the platform of the Justice Party (JP) in 2003 and 2007, while in 2011 he contested on the platform of Fresh Democratic Party (FDP).
On the three occasions, he said he received a divine mandate to enter the race.

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Okotie, who disclosed his intention to contest next year’s presidential poll during a church service, yesterday, also said he received a divine message to write the national chairmen of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Adams Oshiomhole and Prince Uche Secondus, respectively, on the need for both political parties to perish the idea of fielding presidential candidates at the election next year and adopt him as a consensus presidential candidate.

He lamented the division in the country and noted that men of integrity were needed to pull Nigeria back from the precipice.

“Nigeria has become a divided and segregated society like never before. We have become polarised by ethnicity, we have become balkanised by religious fundamentalism; we have become fractured by political insensitivity and leadership disability.

“I have re-emerged from political hibernation to contest the office of president in the forthcoming election. I am fully persuaded that Nigeria needs a man who is credible, dependable and trustworthy.

“In sincere humility and deference to our democratic institutions, I appeal to the APC to subscribe its support to this ideal by adopting me as a consensus presidential candidate at the next election. I ask the APC, respectfully, within the confines of conventional propriety, to temporise and observe a peaceful hiatus in commonality of the Nigerian brotherhood and embrace me as a consensus remedial facilitator. This, of course, is tantamount to a paradigm shift and the only way forward. I have extended the same overtures to the PDP,” Okotie said.

He said Nigeria’s democracy has been hijacked by elitism, mysticism and satanism, and advocated what he called a new concept of ‘aboriginal democracy’, which would focus on cultural, historical and evolutional modernity and global relativity, adding that the country needs urgent restructuring, because ‘the federalism practiced in the country is a piece of fakery’.

“Nigeria is in dire need of restructuring. Our federalism is simply terminological in-exactitude. It is a realistic piece of fakery. The constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is obsolete. It can no longer subsist as the legal protocol that guarantees the peaceful co-existence of autonomous ethnicities. No extant or subsisting government can right these aberrations,” he said. He called for the scrapping of the National Assembly and fusion of their responsibilities with those of the judiciary to save cost as well as time wastage in the passing of bills.

“Aboriginal democracy will focus on cultural, historical and evolutional modernity and global reality as the necessary ingredients of our evolutional political indigeneisation.”