Former Senior Special Assistant to former President Goodluck Jonathan, Dr Doyin Okupe, has disclosed that the failure of Jonathan to sack the former INEC boss, Prof Attahiru Jega, before the last general elections is the cardinal reason he lost the presidential election.
Okupe, who stated this and other two ‘errors’ in a Facebook post on his page yesterday, claimed that Jega was compromised and biased against Jonathan.
The former presidential spokesman’s comment might not be unconnected to the in-fighting within the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after some leaders of the party stated that it was a blunder to have allowed Jonathan contest the presidential election.
He wrote: “If any error was made it was firstly the failure of the PDP administration to sack the unfair and compromised electoral officer who was allowed to conduct the election in spite of his obvious and profuse partisanship”.
The PDP had before the election accused Jega of being on the side of the now ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). They also accused the INEC chairman of lopsided distribution of the permanent voter cards (PVCs) in favour of APC and against states regarded as pro-Jonathan.
For Okupe, “The second error was the inexplicable acquiescence of the PDP government to the use of the infamous card reader which was skilfully manipulated to the disadvantage of the PDP presidential candidate.”
“The third error of the PDP was to have fielded a good, God-fearing and patriotic man who, in spite of his enormous powers, the avalanche of deployable arsenal of war at his disposal, transformed himself to be the victim and refused to fight so that his countrymen may live and his nation survive. The situation in Burundi today is highly instructive.
“Certainly history will treat Goodluck Jonathan as one of the greatest heroes of this generation of African leaders; definitely not an error by any stretch of imagination.”