Why Atiku needs to step down, become a statesman – APC chieftain
A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Osita Okechukwu, has called on African Democratic Congress presidential candidate and former Vice President Atiku Abubakar to withdraw from the 2027 presidential race and embrace the role of a statesman.
Okechukwu stated that his decision to contest the 2023 presidential election against the Peoples Democratic Party’s zoning arrangement weakened both the opposition and Nigeria’s democracy.
Okechukwu made the appeal while speaking on Prime Time on Arise Television on Monday.
According to him, Atiku’s emergence as the PDP presidential candidate in 2022, despite calls for the party to zone its ticket to the South, triggered a crisis that continues to affect the party.
Expressing admiration for the former vice president, Okechukwu urged him to put national interest above personal ambition.
“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 stalwart maintained that Atiku’s decision to contest the PDP presidential primary in 2022, rather than allowing the ticket to shift to the South, had far-reaching political consequences.
According to him, the fallout destabilised the PDP, weakened its position as Nigeria’s main opposition party and had a lasting impact on the country’s political landscape.
He also faulted Atiku’s criticism of President Bola Tinubu over alleged moves to create a one-party state, insisting that the PDP’s internal decisions played a major role in its current predicament.
“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.
Recall that Atiku’s emergence as the PDP’s presidential candidate in 2022 sparked controversy because many party members insisted the ticket should have been zoned to the South after President Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office.
The dispute led to the G5 governors’ rebellion, deepened divisions within the opposition party and was widely seen as a factor in the PDP’s defeat in the 2023 presidential election.