A high-powered delegation of governors elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, APC, met with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday, ostensibly to get him to make a U-turn and support the party’s Muslim-Muslim ticket which the VP has stood against on several occasions since 2014.
There is nothing to suggest that the Vice President has changed his stance on the party’s Muslim-Muslim ticket, which necessitated the APC governors to desperately seek Osinbajo’s endorsement through a facade visit.
One of those who attended the meeting, Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, posted on his Twitter account with a rare picture of himself with Osinbajo at the meeting saying: “We assured the President that we are ready and solidly behind our Presidential candidate and his running mate, Senator Kashim Shettima. We will work hard to ensure our party becomes victorious.”
A source close to Sanwo-Olu said Tinubu’s camp had mandated the governor to do the tweet with Osinbajo’s picture, to give the impression that the revered Professor of Law is in support of the controversial Muslim-Muslim ticket, which has been rejected by large sections of Nigerians including the influential Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), and several people of conscience including Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka.
During a recent appearance on ChannelsTV, Soyinka had said: “In this country, even the military seem to recognise the need to express the plurality of faith. Even under some military dictatorships. There is an unspoken arrangement to recognise the peculiarity of this particular society.
“So, it shouldn’t surprise you or me that a number of people find the Muslim-Muslim choice very questionable and unwise especially at this time,” Soyinka queried.
Soyinka added that; “We are in the midst of a crisis with faiths of distrust – ethnic distrust, religious distrust, class distrust and anything which can be done or any action which can be avoided so that this kind of distrust is not exacerbated, I think politicians should seize the opportunity of not exacerbating the debate.”
It was earlier reported that 11 governors, on Tuesday, filed into Osinbajo’s office after seeing President Muhammadu Buhari, but the discussion was not unconnected to news making the rounds that APC aspirants were expected to meet with the party’s presidential candidate on Wednesday, August 31, 2022.
Also, a chieftain of the party had stated that Dr Nicholas Felix, a former APC presidential aspirant, does not have the capacity to initiate such a meeting on behalf of the Vice President, or any of the leading presidential aspirants, especially with the claim that it was to adopt strategies for the 2023 election. The source said such a meeting idea should have been routed through the party chairman or the NWC.
“Would the party chairman be invited into a meeting he was supposed to initiate?,” the chieftain who spoke on condition of anonymity, asked.
Independent investigations have revealed that some of the aspirants were not formally informed nor invited to the meetings, which is now expected to be aborted.
In fact, one of the aspirants was not in the country, the aide said.
Another top party member explained that the APC governors’ romance around the Vice President is to convince him to work with same religion candidates, knowing that he has been canvassing for equal representation of all religions and ethnic groups.
“The Vice President is not likely to support a Muslim-Muslim ticket and his silence in not openly endorsing the ticket is unsettling some top persons in the party.
“They have been trying to lobby him to support the race despite publicly accepting the result of the APC primaries. They still want to see more from him, knowing he is not likely to support same religion ticket,” said the source.
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A tweet by the Vice President’s spokesman, Laolu Akande, after the meeting said the 11 Governors were “on a felicitation visit to the Vice President as he recovers from the surgery done last month.”
Efforts to get him to speak on the Muslim-Muslim ticket reports proved abortive as his numbers were not reachable.
But it would be recalled that a previous news story before the selection of APC’s Presidential running mate had reported that the VP had strongly advised against a Muslim-Muslim ticket, just like he and the President did in 2014 ahead of the 2015 election which they went on to win.