A leader of the All Progressives Congress, Osita Okechukwu, has asked the African Democratic Congress presidential candidate and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to pull out of the 2027 presidential race. Okechukwu wants Atiku to take on the role of a statesman instead.
Okechukwu said that Atiku’s decision to run in the 2023 presidential election against the zoning plan of the Peoples Democratic Party weakened both the opposition and Nigeria’s democracy.
Okechukwu made these comments while discussing on Prime Time on Arise Television on Monday.
He pointed out that Atiku’s selection as the PDP presidential candidate in 2022, despite calls for the party to give the ticket to the South, caused a crisis that still affects the party today.
Okechukwu praised the former vice president and asked him to prioritize the country’s interest over his personal ambitions. “I have great respect for His Excellency Atiku Abubakar. He was very close to some of my late senior colleagues, Dubem Onyia and Chuba Okadigbo. I have great respect for him.
“My appeal to him is to consider the interest of the Nigerian state and our fledgling democracy. About three years ago, he did the same thing by breaching the rotation convention, and the collateral damage is heavy.
“Heavy in the sense that, luckily for the Nigerian state, democracy remained and the country remained, but the destabilisation of the PDP had its own collateral damages that cannot be quantified. In fact, the damages got to his backyard because if in 2022 he had acted like a statesman, which I’m pleading with him to do because it’s not too late to become one in a country like ours…
“If he had said that in 2014 I walked away from the PDP, telling them that it was the turn of the North, joined the APC and contested for the presidency…I think it was when we were less than one year old when they joined us in protest, and he contested for president with us, came third and returned to the PDP. And in the 2018 presidential primaries of the PDP, no southern aspirant participated.”
The APC leader insisted that Atiku’s choice to run in the PDP presidential primary in 2022, instead of letting the ticket go to the South, had serious political effects.
He said the fallout weakened the PDP’s position as Nigeria’s main opposition party and affected the country’s political scene for a long time.
Okechukwu also criticized Atiku for blaming President Bola Tinubu over alleged plans to create a one-party state. He stressed that the PDP’s own choices contributed a lot to its current situation.
“So what am I saying? I’m saying that when he breached it in 2022, the consequences in the PDP…
“Most of the time, I see him talking about one-party state, accusing President Bola Tinubu of generating a one-party state. He forgot, or maybe deliberately, glossed over and swept under the carpet the fact that if he had allowed a Southerner to contest against President Tinubu, even if the PDP had lost, the party could have remained strong,” Okechukwu said.
Atiku’s selection as the PDP’s presidential candidate in 2022 caused a stir because many party members believed the ticket should have gone to the South after President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office. This argument led to the G5 governors’ rebellion, increased divisions within the party, and was widely seen as a factor in the PDP’s loss in the 2023 presidential election.
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