2019: Okotie Wins FDP Presidential Ticket, Urges APP, PDP To Adopt Him

Ahead of 2019 General Elections, Pastor turned politician, Revd Chris Okotie, on Saturday emerged the presidential standard bearer of the Fresh Democratic Party (FDP), urging both the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to boldly come out to endorse him as the next president of Nigeria and support his plan to set up an interim government.

He said the interim government should be one whose mandate would be to resolve all the perennial structural and socio-economic problems plaguing the nation.

Okotie emerged in the direct primary exercise which took place at the Lagos Country Club in Ikeja and attended by hundreds of party delegates nationwide.

Seven governorship candidates of the party from Jigawa, Ogun, Kano, Plateau, Katsina, Imo and Akwa –Ibom states were also in attendance.

Revd. Okotie was nominated unopposed after his only challenger, James Pam from Plateau State stepped down for him.

INEC officials, Mr Adekunle Ogunmola, who is the Resident Electoral Commissioner in charge of Ogun, Lagos and Ondo, and Mrs Nkechi Abu, were on ground to monitor the exercise, which went without hitches.

The FRESH presidential candidate was later formally handed over the party flags, just as the party governorship candidates also received theirs.

Speaking further, while delivering his acceptance speech, Okotie made it known that what he was demanding of APC and PDP was already contained in recent letters he wrote to their leadership, saying an interim government of National Reconciliation and Reconstruction was the most realistic way to re-engineer the political system and give the country a new direction.

Okotie, who said he was not out to condemn other political actors but expressed the need for a paradigm shift in the governing process if the country was to make a headway.

According to him, a home-grown initiative, called Aboriginal democracy, could bring permanent peace to the country, just as he reiterated his long-held view that only a properly restructured Nigeria under a focused, God-fearing leader could take her to the promised land.

Quoting extensively from his letters to the APC and PDP, Rev Chris Okotie said with his nomination as the flag bearer of the Fresh Democratic Party (FDP), the two top parties should boldly come out to endorse him as the next President of Nigeria and support his plan to set up an interim government whose mandate would be to resolve all the perennial structural and socio-economic problems plaguing the nation.

Part of his letter to the National Chairman of PDP, Prince Uche Secondus reads:

“My mandate, therefore, will be to set up an interim government which I have christened Government of National Reconciliation and Reconstruction as the mechanical instrumentality for the crystallization of the new Nigeria of our dreams. It would be predicated on a new concept of Aboriginal democracy. Our current democracy has been hijacked by elitism, mysticism and Satanism. Aboriginal democracy will focus on cultural historicity, evolutional modernity and global relativity as the necessary ingredients of our evolutional political indigenisation. Under this system, the current legislature would merge with the judiciary to create a unique judicature that administers justice and shares the enactment of legislative responsibilities with the Presidency. This would save us the huge cost of running the National Assembly and obviate all the paralyzing debates that often stalled the passage of bills.

“In sincere humility and deference to our democratic institutions, I appeal to the PDP to subscribe its support to this ideal by adopting me as a consensus presidential candidate at the next elections. I ask the PDP, respectfully, within the confines of conventional propriety, to temporize and observe a peaceful hiatus in the 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 All Progressives Congress (APC).”