Daily Independent Online.
*
Tuesday, August 24, 2004.
Atiku’s
group urges IBB to abandon presidential ambition
By Sunny Igboanugo
Metro Editor
Former military President Ibrahim Babangida has been
asked to shelve his alleged ambition to succeed President Olusegun Obasanjo in
2007.
Reason being that he not only lacks the quality, but
his eight-year rule of Nigeria has continued to elicit painful memories in the
people.
Those currently propping up his campaigns have also
been asked to throw in the towel and stand behind incumbent Vice-President,
Atiku Abubakar, who is in a better position to lift Nigeria out of its present
economic and social morass.
This formed part of the resolutions of Atiku
Consensus Movement (ACU), a group working for the takeover of the
nation’s number one job by the vice-president, on rising from a meeting
in Abuja.
The group admonished Babangida not to waste his time
and argued that Obasanjo would not make the mistake of handing over to anybody
that would not sustain the laudable programmes he and Atiku had put in place to
pull Nigeria out of the woods.
“Therefore, those in the campaign for Gen.
Ibrahim B. Babangida, the annular of June 12 1993 NRC/SDP presidential
election, supposedly won by the late Chief MKO Abiola, to become the next
president of Nigeria should forget their desire for another enslavement, impoverishment,
destruction and dehumanisation of Nigerians by the evil genius. Rather, this
set of IBB campaigners should make bold to surrender to the general will of
genuine Nigerian democrats who demonstrated their love for the Nigerian nation
through the overwhelming vote cast for President Olusegun Obasanjo and
Vice-President Atiku Abubakar.
“Nigerians are no longer ready to welcome
oppressors, suppressors and deceitful leaders. Therefore, Gen. Ibrahim B.
Babangida should learn from the failure of a more decent General Mohammadu
Buhari of the ANPP in 2003 by resolving to withdraw absolutely from the
Nigerian political activities,” the group said.
More than withdrawing from the political scene,
Babangida, according to them, should submit himself for trials for his economic
policies that allegedly plunged the country into a mess and unquantifiable
miseries, which the present administration had been trying to repair.
The statement signed by Mr Tony Nwachukwu, national
coordinator, and Mr Ibrahim Mekeri urged Nigerians to disregard stories of a
handover pact between Babangida and Obasanjo, arguing that no party would
abandon a winning team in preference of an unsure brand, a situation that made
Babangida’s efforts a wild goose chase.
The group, which supported power shift to the North,
called on the Igbo people equally angling for the presidential office to
support the vice-president as not only the surest way of actualising their
quest to occupy the office but also a way to fully integrate the South East into
the mainstream of Nigerian politics.
They also called for the restructuring of the Peoples
Democratic Party’s (PDP) National Executive Committee (NEC) and the
National Working Committee (NWC) to reflect the zoning formula of the party,
apparently in furtherance of Atiku’s ambition, and called for the
retention of the precedent set by the party in hosting the party’s
National Officers Delegates Election Convention before the other conventions.
They called on Nigerians to continue to support the
present administration to enable it sustain the successes it had made in the
economic reform programmes and the consolidation of democratic process, adding
that they would soon organise multi-million man march rallies for Atiku across
geo-political zones of the country to garner the support of Nigerians.
