Buhari’s Interest In 2015 Presidential Elections Unsettles APC

If reports we are following are anything to go by, the newly registered All Progressives Congress (APC) may have run into troubled political waters over who to field as its presidential candidate in the 2015 election.

It was learnt that while the party’s strategists are favourably disposed to the candidature of a younger but popular politician with national appeal to be its standard-bearer at the forthcoming presidential elections, one of the pillars of the party and three-time presidential aspirant, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), has insisted that he would not step down for any other candidate.

It would be recalled that prior to the consummation of the merger, Gen. Buhari had in a media interview said that he could step down for a better candidate and only recently, on Tuesday precisely, he told a group in Kaduna that if the APC constitution allows him, he would run again in 2015.

But the insistence by the national leader of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) to fight for the party ticket at the primaries is unsettling key leaders in the party, who it is reported, had agreed on principle to concede the presidential ticket to younger members of the party.

However, former spokesman of the defunct CPC, Rotimi Fashakin, on Tuesday denied the existence of a gentleman agreement by Gen. Buhari not to run as a presidential candidate in 2015.

Fashakin said: “Nobody can stop the former head of state from testing his popularity at APC’s presidential primary.”

Fashakin described the purported arrangement whereby Gen. Buhari and national leader of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) Bola Tinubu were made to jettison whatever ambitions they had as a ruse.

He said: “The said arrangement is mere propaganda to stop Buhari from testing his popularity again in 2015. But I can tell you that it will not work.

“Let me tell you, come 2015, General Buhari will participate at the APC presidential primary and nobody can stop him. I repeat, he will contest and no one can stop him from doing so.”