Tobi Adebayo
A former member of the National Assembly, Honourable Patrick Obahiagbon has reacted to the controversy surrounding the search for a running mate to the presidential flagbearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu.
In a statement personally signed by Obahiagbon, he stated that there was nothing wrong with the APC fielding a Presidential candidate and a running mate who are Muslims.
He added that no APC Northern Christian had the political requisite to deliver the much-coveted votes from the region.
The statement read: “It’s not bewildering or politically discombobulating in the least, that the search for a Vice Presidential running mate to the Presidential candidate of the APC has assumed the rancorous decibel of one of our centrifugal national fault lines, which is religion.
“Would you blame those who have decided to reduce an otherwise elevated matter of statecraft like the choice of a country’s Presidency to the prism of religious bigotry?
“It’s only a stranger from planet Uranus who has been completely oblivious of a viscerally and gangrenous religious and ethnically divided Nigeria in the last couple of years that would not take into immutable cognition the objurgations of the likes of the Christian Association of Nigeria and other persons against a Moslem/Moslem Presidential and Vice Presidential ticket.
“But the truth of the matter is that if APC and our Presidential Candidate want to be in serious contestation at all for Presidential power, the impelling dictates of realpolitik is only propitious to the choice and emergence of a Muslim Vice Presidential candidate from the North-West or North-East.
2023: PDP committee to screen Wike Thursday
“Who is that APC Nothern Christian just now, with the requisite political biceps and biceps to garner into the electoral kitty the much-needed complementary Northern votes that our Presidential candidate will need so badly to run away with the victory for our party. I can’t see any with the greatest respect and deference.
“I don’t care much whom our Presidential candidate consults in so far as he realizes that the buck stops on his table.
“Finally, I do hope that all those concerned truly know that the Presidential contestation ahead is not a tea party.”
