Former Vice President and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has dismissed as ‘a load of hogwash’ a newspaper report alleging that he has formed a new political platform under which he will run for President in 2019, with Ondo State Governor, Dr. Segun Mimiko, as his running mate.
A statement by his Media Adviser, Mazi Paul Ibe, says the report bears all the features of a political hatchet job planted by his opponents who have desperately tried to invent events to draw a wedge between him and President Muhammadu Buhari on one hand and APC leadership as a whole.
According to Ibe, the “report was an incompetent product of fiction, so shallow and vacuous that even its authors could not validate its credibility with reliable and verifiable sources.”
The statement alerts Nigerians and APC leadership that there are “some people of bad faith trying tooth and nail to spread the seeds of discord in the party, and destroy the much needed unity, harmony and cohesion, which are the pillars of strength for every political organisation.”
Ibe says despite all these smear campaigns and reputation lynching and sponsored falsehoods, ‘Turaki Adamawa’s loyalty to President Buhari and the APC leadership would not be shaken an inch’.
He explains that Atiku would ordinarily have ignored the malicious report, but chose to react, lest his silence would be mistaken as an admission of the falsehoods published against him.
