Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar has appeared to have signified interest to run for the 2023 Presidential elections according to a leaked memo seen by NewsWireNGR.
In the memo dated June 29, 2021, the Presidential aspirant expressed gratitude to the Peoples Democratic Party for their role in the 2023 elections and urged the party to gear up for the upcoming 2023 elections.
“It is with utmost respect that I convey to you, my deep appreciation and profound gratitude for the overwhelming support and massive electoral votes cast to support our Party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and my candidature for the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria during the 2019 general elections,” he said.
“Now, we are better equipped, and all our compatriots must team-up today towards a new political and economic order that should radically reinvent our beloved country.
“We are fully prepared to work in synergy to restore hope, pull Nigeria back from the brinks and relive the patriotic spirit of our founding fathers! I believe that together we would rebuild our broken fences, mend our cracked walls, restore hope, and return Nigeria to the path of greatness again. Surely, we can, and we must.”
He further claimed that the party lost the 2019 Presidential election to President Muhammadu Buhari because of the “massive fraud perpetrated by the ruling Party (APC) using its strangulating hold on the National electoral system, your efforts would have produced one of the loudest expressions of political rejection of the ravages and abysmal decadence to which our beloved nation has descended, since 2015.”
And since he lost the election, he has reflected on the country’s electoral processes and his Presidential ambition.
This reflection showed that the very issues that urged him to vie for President like, “insecurity, poverty, educational decay with an alarming rate of out-of-school children, economic backwardness, socio-economic and environmental dislocation, marked by sweltering hubs of internally displaced persons, decadent infrastructures, absence of national cohesion, leadership failures arising from lack of capacity to galvanize our peoples’ energies and restore hope,” still exists in the country.
Atiku further laid to rest speculations that he was planning to dump the party that gave him platform to contest the 2019 presidential election as a candidate. He said he had been in Dubai, UAE learning and equipping himself with skills needed to better fix the challenges the country is facing.
“Several persons, particularly associates and compatriots may have felt frustrated, some have even privately expressed so, while others have publicly complained that we have left them without leadership guidance democratic forces who have visited severe stress on our political economy. I concede that individuals are justified to hold such opinions and even more. But they are not entirely correct,” he added.
“I assuage these feelings. Yes, I may have been apparently out of regular physical presence in Nigeria. My absence was not completely deliberate. Rather, it was strategic, as I have kept close contact and monitored events in our polity, reviewing and studying the changing dynamics. In addition, I also tried to undertake personal educational improvement, equipping myself with new knowledge, capacity and skills that would methodically review the appalling situation. Our nation is indeed in the intensive care unit and would require delicate surgical procedures. We are all members of that surgical team.”
