Atiku Not Destined To Be Nigeria’s President – APC
The ruling All Progressives Congress APC has reacted to the loss of the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party PDP, Atiku Abubakar in last weekend’s election, saying the former vice president was never destined to be Nigeria’s president.
This was as the APC also expressed its readiness to meet with Mr Atiku and the PDP in the law courts should he make good his threat to challenge the results of the presidential election.
National Chairman of the party, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole stated this at a news conference Thursday in Abuja.
“Rather than Atiku thinking that rigging has come to stay and could not understand why the numbers can’t add up in the absence of massive rigging, he should be reminded that the essence of the collective effort that has been made and the intervention of genuine friends of Nigeria has been to try to improve the electoral process such that rigging can be eliminated or reduced to a tolerable level. “We have a petition that we have written to INEC – how we were rigged out in Akwa Ibom state and it is interesting that it is PDP that is complaining about the outcome of the election in Akwa Ibom state. “How do you explain that INEC cancelled so many units not only in Akwa Ibom state but so many other states in other to be able to declare PDP candidates as winners? That is how Senator Akpabio was rigged out in Akwa Ibom state.
“When he said even if he would die, he would sell NNPC, many believed that he had already collected deposit and so if those depositors now see that it cannot be business as usual and decide to take their flight, we don’t even want them to come back. Was he going to rule Nigeria against our wish? Citizens must hold their leaders accountable for their policy choices.
“I think it also borders on arrogance for Atiku Abubakar to suggest that our future is tied to his presidency. Atiku is destined never to be president of Nigeria and I ask you to review his character during the election. Leadership is about character. Atiku’s desperation is so obvious, so desperate that in 2003, it is on record, he challenged his own boss, President Olusegun Obasanjo not to do a second term and in the end, they fought naked at Wuse market.
Subsequently, Atiku decamped to join ACN. I was in ACN then. We offered him a ticket. Like Father Mbaka would say, Atiku became like a big bird, like a vulture that couldn’t fly and he lost that election. Once the most, he returned to PDP.
He contested again the primaries against Jonathan and he lost the nomination. Because of his sole interest, he decamped again from PDP and returned to APC. He joined us in Lagos, rolled out the dollars and President Muhammad Buhari had to say to APC people, myself inclusive, that he had no dollars to give, that he does not have Intels or Itel.
That he did not have a foreign account and that even if he had, he would not give. The APC guys who couldn’t resist Atiku’s dollars collected those dollars and voted for Buhari as our candidate. Once he lost the nomination and he did his calculation and realized that it was highly improbable that he would be able to defeat President Buhari in our primaries, he again took flight and went back to the PDP. Can you recount how many times he has camped, revamped, decamped? Now, such a political rolling stone, does he think that Nigerians are so insane as to think that a man who is not stable, who has no conviction, whose interest is about himself and who has confessed that he was going into this race, according to him, to enrich his friends, is the credible candidate to be elected at a time like this? So, what is it that makes him have that sense of entitlement that he must be president of Nigeria?”, he queried.
“You cannot possibly deny anyone the right to dispute the outcome of an election, however free and fair, but like myself, when I believed I was cheated out, I went to court and I mobilized my pieces of evidence, I had the benefit of very resourceful. So, we hope and we are looking forward to meeting Atiku Abubakar in court. We might also choose to also cross petition because there were many areas we can dispute. In Adamawa state, he had already lost the election before he did some magic that gave him that narrow victory in Adamawa state”, he stated.