Olusesan Oba
The 2023 presidential elections may have come and gone with the candidate of the All Progressives Congress Bola Tinubu emerging as the winner but facts have emerged about how the APC flag bearer plotted his victory months before even his party’s primaries by engineering a division within the ranks of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party.
Our correspondent reliably gathered that the intelligence report available to Tinubu showed that the PDP would likely present a Muslim candidate from the North knowing full well, he, a Southerner, could become the flag bearer of the APC given the rotation agreement within his party.
He also considered Atiku as the most likely individual to be considered by the PDP for the presidential ticket and the former vice president has a strong political structure to snatch the northern votes hitherto controlled by President Muhammadu Buhari. The preliminary political assessment Tinubu made also revealed that the PDP would still retain its stronghold in the south should it maintain the 2019 ticket that had Atiku and Peter Obi.
Hence his decision to destabilise the opposition and weaken it ahead of the 2023 polls.
“The first thing Tinubu did was to find a way to lure Obi out of the PDP. He enlisted the service of his friend and a great ally a fair-complexioned political economist who approached Obi to tell him that some wealthy Nigerians had found him worthy to lead Nigeria and were ready to sponsor his presidential bid should he decide to join the Labour Party and run on its ticket.
“You can remember that Obi did not only buy the presidential forms of the PDP, he actually participated in the screening exercise which was conducted on April 29, 2022, and was cleared; he even displayed his clearance certificate on social media. He knew that even if he didn’t get the ticket, he could get the VP slot again.
“However, Tinubu sent his friend, who later became the lynchpin of Obi’s campaign, to the former Anambra State Governor telling him that some wealthy Nigerians who preferred to be anonymous were willing to support him all the way without knowing that it was Tinubu who is the so-called ‘sponsors’. Obi left the PDP to join the Labour Party on May 27, 2022, about one month, after he had been cleared by the PDP. Utomi worked for his emergence as LP presidential candidate on May 30th, 2022, with everything pre-arranged,” a very reliable source within Tinubu’s camp said.
Meanwhile, our source revealed that Obi found out much later that Tinubu was behind his move to the Labour Party but couldn’t back out because he thought with the support he was getting from the youths and the Christian community he could actually win the polls.
“Atiku knew Tinubu instigated Obi’s ouster from the PDP and that was why one of his spokespersons, Daniel Bwala, alleged on national television during an interview that it was Tinubu sponsoring Peter Obi,” the source added.
Another source also added that Tinubu had a hand in the protracted feud between the leadership of the PDP and five aggrieved governors led by Nyesom Wike of Rivers and Nigerians should not be surprised that Tinub u won in three of the states governed by the governors.
Results showed that the over 13 million combined votes of Atiku and Obi would have been enough to send APC out of power.
Atiku indeed won in nine states including those considered Buhari’s fortress; Tinubu only managed seven, four of them in the north-central while Obi took the two Christian states in that region.
