Magnus Eze, Enugu
A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the South East and Director General of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), Mr Osita Okechukwu, has dismissed Dr. Doyin Okupe’s assertion that Northern leaders frustrated ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo from recognising June 12 as the nation’s Democracy Day while in office.
Earlier, Okupe had, at a recent function commemorating 26th anniversary of the annulment of the June 12 presidential election in Abeokuta, Ogun State argued that only a powerful president from the North could have declared it Democracy Day without a backlash.
But Okechukwu insisted that Obasanjo was more preoccupied with his plan to actualise his third term pet project than giving attention to issue that would have edified Nigeria’s freest, fairest and most credible election and its presumed winner.
He described the statement credited to the former Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Communication as a futile attempt to revise history. “It is arrant nonsense to say that Northern leaders frustrated totalitarian Obasanjo from recognising June 12. Baba was solely engrossed with his pet project – the 3rd term,” he said.
“He loathed MKO Abiola from their childhood days in Abeokuta. He was busy weaving his life president project. How can somebody revise the history of a former autocratic president who captured National Assembly, was changing Senate President like wrapper? Obasanjo held the governors under bondage, muscled the press and used the EFCC as attack dog. Who on earth could have stopped him if he wanted to declare June 12 Democracy Day?” he queried.
While the DG VON agreed with Okupe that Nigerian politics was so intricate, he however, maintained that it was not true that Obasanjo only avoided the controversy and furore that would have greeted recognising June 12 as Democracy Day, while in office.