*Teco Benson, Uchenna Agbo
…AS TECO BENSON, UCHENNA AGBO BATTLE TO SUCCEED VICTOR OKHAI
By Charles Nwagbara
It is no longer news that the Directors’ Guild of Nigeria, DGN, is set to elect a successor to the outgoing president, Dr. Victor Okhai.
Right now, the raging battle over who steps in Okhai’s shoes, is between veteran Nollywood practitioner, Mr. Teco Benson, MFR, and the incumbent Vice president of the association, Mr. Uchenna Agbo.
The election will also see the emergence of a new exco comprising of the Deputy National Secretary, National Treasurer, Public Relations officer, Provost, Director of Social/Welfare and Financial Secretary.
What is news however, is the palpable tension in the association over who is eligible to vote at the June 15, 2025 general elections of the body.
Thebladengr.com gathered that the tension came about following an internal memo signed by the president, Dr. Victor Okhai stating that all members inducted in 2023, we’re not eligible to vote at the polls. According to the memo, “In view of the fact that the issue of the Original Handwritten Score sheets of the 2023 Screening Exercise was not addressed by the Investigative Committee, there is presently no way to determine what actually transpired during the screening exercise and who passed the screening…Due to these ambiguities, the Executive Committee has decided to Temporarily Suspend the membership of the 2023 Inductees and set up a competent expanded committee to exhaustively investigate the 2023 Screening process and make recommendations to the Executive Committee based on the above stated terms of reference.”
This reporter gathered that in the build up to the new elections, a petition was sent to the exco alleging that the list of members who were inducted in the 2023 convention in Benin City, was manipulated. Dr. Okhai and his exco it was gathered, promptly set up an Investigative Committee to look into the allegations and make recommendations to the DGN exco.
The committee ably led by foremost director and filmmaker, Chief Zeb Ejiro, OON, reportedly looked into the matter and recommended that the affected members be allowed to participate in the upcoming election while their case will be decided at a latter date. Precisely, the committee suggested that the call to invalidate their membership after they have been inducted does not arise.
Following on that recommendation, the DGN electoral committee DGNEC, headed by Mrs. Pat Oghre Imobhio, has also asked the affected members to furnish the committee with receipts of payment of their annual dues to enable them participate in the election.
But the Dr. Victor Okhai led exco is not having any of that. The exco quickly rejected the recommendations of the Investigative committee and insisted that ‘ALL’ 2023 inductees will not vote in the coming election, hence the presidential memo.
The exco’s stance has since launched the association into turmoil as the affected members are crying foul and insisting that they must vote on June 15th. They argue that Dr. Okhai after benefitting from their votes to return for a second term at the Benin Convention only turned against them because their votes will certainly defeat his (Okhai’s) preferred candidate.
Some of them who spoke to thebladengr.com insisted that it was hypocrisy on the part of Dr. Okhai to profit from their votes in 2023 only to discard them in 2025 because the election may not favor his alleged preferred candidate.
They questioned why Dr. Okhai went ahead to sign their membership certificate and personally inducted them when he knew that their membership was not properly documented.
But in a telephone interview with the DGN president, he dismissed the claims that he was acting in favour of a preferred candidate.
According to him, their induction has “Q” leg. Said Dr. Okhai, “We discovered that there was fraud and abuse of office from the Secretariat in the process leading to their induction. It is a case where 19 persons passed the exams and over 100 persons were magically given membership. That massive promotion is suspicious. Mind you the members we are talking about are not supporters of one candidate. Both candidates’ support bases are affected. But if they are telling you that we’re targeting a particular candidate, it means our suspicion is correct. It means some people in the Secretariat manipulated the list”.
Asked why he allowed the list to be used in his second term election only to condemn it now, Dr. Okhai replied, “If you sleep on your rights, the tendency is for people to trample on it. Some people sent in a petition alleging this irregularity, so we had to look into it. I can’t sit on such complaints. You want to say that if a man has been reported to be a fake doctor after he has practised for 10 years, the authorities will clap and say, let’s let him be, after all he cured several people during that time?, he asked.
On the issues that he neglected the recommendations of the Chief Zeb Ejiro-led committee and is interfering with the guidelines of the DGNEC, Okhai said, “Every committee or panel have their terms of reference. You cannot leave your terms of reference and start making recommendations outside your reference. The committee clearly went outside their mandate. The electoral committee also does not have separate powers outside what is in the Constitution of the Guild. And let me say this here, the memo you are referring to is a collective decision of the exco. When we received the report of the committee, the exco looked into it, we collectively agreed to discard it, we voted and the majority won, that is, the majority decided it was not what we asked them to do. For your information, one of the presidential candidates, Mr. Uchenna Agbo is a member of the exco, he was there, he voted”.
