Tuesday, January 27, 2015

I Helped Make APC Popular – Okupe


 Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, Dr Doyin Okupe yesterday admitted that he expected the All Progressives Congress (APC) to be a dead party by now.
Doyin Okupe
Doyin Okupe
Okupe had in december 2013 said that he would change his name if APC still existed after one year due to what he described as lack of leadership deficiency shortly after it was founded.
Okupe had said: “What kind of political party is that and you are taking them seriously,” he continued, “It is a politically defective and weak organisation, and by coming to the national stage, the wind is going to blow them open. If they don’t crumble and disappear by 2014, don’t call me Okupe. The APC boat is destined for the Red Sea.”


Some reports published around that time also suggested that Okupe would change his name to “bastard” if APC lasts more than a year, this he has denied saying.
Okupe during yesterday’s programm on Silverbird Television congratulated the APC and said that his criticism had helped the growth of the opposition party.
Okupe corrected that, “I said if APC survives for a year, I would change my name. People have said I meant bastard, but I never said so. What I said as a political pundit was that if APC survives, I would change my name.”
He continued, “If Manchester United want to play with Man City, and I say Man United would score three goals in first half, if they don’t score three goals in the first half, it means that my statements were wrong.
“Maybe I have actually helped them, because they were very annoyed at my predictions and they tried to make sure that they remain the same.”
He accused the media of not being fair and being heavily pro Buhari and he also rated the Jonathan administration very high and then called on Nigerians to support his re-election bid.
He said: “This government has achieved so much and we are not deceiving people because our achievements are verifiable,” he explained that “All the 24 airports in the country have been remodeled. The Benin-Ore road used to be a death trap and people used to spend 24 hours on it, but now they spend three hours.
“The Lagos-Ibadan has been built since 1976 and since then nobody has done anything about it until this government decided to extend it to seven lanes.
“If people deliberately refuse to see and the media continues to underpin the achievements of this government, we would keep trying and God will justify us. We don’t have the media behind us but we have God behind us,” he said.
Okupe contradicted himself and said: “It’s not that the opposition has taken over the media, no!”
He said “But the elements within the opposition and the sentiments concerning the opposition have dominated the media prior to this event of Jonathan coming into power. Which media organisation in Nigeria can you say the government owns? The government does not own any media but the opposition has tremendous influence in the media and that’s unarguable.”
Okupe was spokesman for former President Olusegun Obasanjo and a former governorship aspirant of the Peoples Democratic Party in Ogun State in 2003.

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