2019 Elections: Chris Okotie declares Intention to Run for President

Reverend Chris Okotie of the Household of God Church has declared his intention to run for president in the 2019 elections.

Punch reports that Okotie revealed this during his church service on Sunday.

Okotie, who has run for president three times – 2003, 2007 and 2001 – told his congregation that he’s reemerged from his political hibernation.

Okotie revealed that he’s written to both the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to not field any candidate in the election and come together to adopt him instead.

I have re-emerged from my political hibernation to contest the office of President in the forthcoming elections. I am fully persuaded that Nigeria needs a man who is credible, dependable and trustworthy.

A God-fearing man who is embroidered with compassion and love for (this) country. A man who will be readily accepted as a symbol of national unity, who can bring genuine reconciliation and guarantee peace and tranquillity in our nation.

A man who is completely insulated from the variegated conflicts that mark the antecedents of our major political actors. A man who can apply the principle of malice towards none and charity for all; who can invoke a pan-Nigerian philosophy to reject the partisan provincialism of finger pointing at this time when Nigeria is threatened by existential adversaries.

A man with the requisite intellectual capacity and moral perpendicularity. I believe that the benevolent grace of God has telescoped these virtues into my person, to prepare for such a time as this.

Nigeria is in dire need of restructuring. Our federalism is simply terminological inexactitude. It is a realistic piece of fakery. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is obsolete, retrogressive and subversive to the Nigerian cause.

It can no longer subsist as a legal protocol to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of autonomous ethnicities. No extant or subsisting government can right these aberrations, for obvious reasons of parochial party considerations and entrenched partisan rivalries within the polity.

According to TheCable, Okotie continued:

A few days ago, the Lord asked me to write a letter to the chairman of the APC and the chairman of PDP, asking them not to field any presidential and that they should adopt me as their consensus candidate.

In sincere humility and deference to our democratic institutions, I appeal to the APC and PDP to subscribe to this ideal by adopting me as a consensus presidential candidate at the next elections.

I ask the APC and PDP, respectfully, within the confines of conventional propriety, to temporise and observe a peaceful hiatus in the commonality of the Nigerian brotherhood, and embrace me as a consensus remedial facilitator.