Osinbajo didn’t sign pact with Tinubu — APC

Alhaji Lai Mohammed

The major opposition party in Nigeria, the All Progressives Congress, has described as sickening and outlandish the claim by the Presidential Campaign Organisation of the Peoples Democratic Party that its chieftain, Bola Tinubu, plans to become vice president through the back door.

The APC said the claim was designed to divert attention from the "runaway success" of its presidential candidate, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd), at the Chatham House in London last Thursday.

The PDP-PCO Director of Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, had said on Friday that skeletal information available to the PDP suggested that the Vice Presidential candidate of the APC, Prof. Yemi Osibanjo, was picked by Tinubu and forced to take an oath to resign his appointment six months into the new cabinet should the APC win the elections.

The PDP-PCO further alleged that the party would field Tinubu as Osinbajo's replacement after the alleged resignation.

In a statement issued in London on Saturday by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, the APC said the PDP and President Goodluck Jonathan administration "still do not have any answer to what has now become an epochal moment that has separated the wheat from the chaff."

Mohammed said the claim was the latest in a series of desperate moves by the PDP and Jonathan since the emergence of Buhari as a presidential candidate.

He alleged that the ruling party had "thrown everything imaginable at Gen. Buhari."

"They said he was not qualified, that he was too old, and then they fabricated a medical report of an illness of their own choice, sponsored death wish adverts against him and instituted a myriad of court cases to stop him. After they failed to stop him, they went after the election itself, using the Permanent Voter Cards as a tool to launch a campaign for postponement and, when they realised that would not work, came up with the bogey of insecurity in the North-East to force a postponement of the election, hoping they can buy enough time to revive their electoral misfortune.

"With everything working against them, they engaged in a show of shame at The Chatham House that backfired badly, on the heels of their bare-faced lies that Gen. Buhari was hospitalised in London. The preposterous claim of a secret oath – reminiscent of what they do in their own party – by the apparently ailing spokesman of the Jonathan Campaign Organisation, Femi Fani-Kayode, is their latest desperate act," Mohammed said.