Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has described how he turned down the opportunity to be his running partner in the 2007 Presidential Election from Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the National Leader of the All Progressive Congress, APC.
At a meeting of the Peoples Democratic Party’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday, Atiku stated the opposition party should not be forced to adopt zoning in the 2023 presidential election.
He said, “Some say the South-East have not been given the chance. When I joined the Action Congress (AC) which my friend Bola (Tinubu) set up, he gave me a set of conditions for giving me the ticket, one of which was that I should make him the Vice President. I said no, ‘I’m not going to make you Vice President,’ instead, I took Senator Ben Obi,” Atiku said.
Tinubu is one of the ruling APC’s presidential candidates, whereas Atiku is a leading contender for the PDP’s presidential nomination.
Atiku went on to say that when he got the ticket to run again in 2019, he took another Obi by chance.
“So, there is absolutely no reason they should say that there is a deliberate attempt to exclude the South-East in political participation or power sharing.”
“So I thought I should disabuse your mind and of course, as an enlightened political class, I don’t think there’s any deliberate policy to exclude anybody in this country,” he said.
