By Ayo Kehinde
Dr Okupe
Ex -Director-General of the Labour Party Presidential Campaign Council, Doyin Okupe has said that he and the party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, Peter Obi, never believed in the ideology of the party.
Okupe said this during an interview on Arise Television on Tuesday ..
Okupe who resigned his membership of the party in January 2023, citing ideological differences said it was just a special purpose vehicle for the general election.
He said, “The LP for us — for Peter Obi and I — and those in the leadership of the movement, the party was a special purpose vehicle.
“I have never been a Labour person, I have never operated on the left before but we needed a platform and this was the only platform readily available to us.
“We thought that if we won the election, there are no fast and hard rules about ideologies. You can always find a shade between the left and the right. You can always move to the centre.
“We were hoping and praying that if we won we would find a way to come to some consensus with the Labour.
“Peter Obi is not a Labour person. He is not a leftist person, he is a trader, he is a businessman just like me. I am a liberal democrat, I believe in liberal democracy, I believe in free enterprise.”
In December 2022, Mr Okupe resigned as LP campaign DG following his conviction in a money laundering case.
In a sitting of the Federal High Court in Abuja, Ijeoma Ojukwu, the presiding judge, sentenced Mr Okupe to two years imprisonment after he was found guilty of 26 out of a 59-count charge preferred against him by the EFCC.
However, he was given the option to pay a N500,000 fine on each of the counts — totalling N13 million. He subsequently announced his resignation as the party’s campaign DG.
Okupe was a presidential Spokesperson to President Olusegun Obasanjo and a Seniour Special Assistant on Public Affairs to President Goodluck Jonathan. He defected to the LP in 2022 when his presidential ambition on the platform of the Peoples Democratic party failed to gain any traction in early 2022.
