Tinubu Debunks Reports On Plans to Replace Osinbajo as Buhari’s Running Mate in 2019

Tinubu Debunks Reports On Plans to Replace Osinbajo as Buhari’s Running Mate in 2019

National leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has rubbished insinuations in some quarters that he planned to replace Vice President Yemi Osinbajo SAN as running mate to President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2019 presidential election.

Tinubu was reacting to a report in a section of the media which claimed that the APC leader had indicated interest in the position weeks after declaring that there was no automatic re-election ticket for Buhari.

It will be recalled that shortly after the 2015 general elections, some aggrieved members of the APC including Senate President Bukola Saraki revealed that they were being sidelined for frustrating a plot to present a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket for the 2015 election. The statement was a veiled reference to Tinubu’s plan to contest the poll as Buhari’s running mate.

Prior to the 2015 election, a former running mate to Buhari at the 2011 presidential election, Pastor Tunde Bakare, claimed Tinubu withdrew his support for the Congress for Political Change (CPC) after he (Bakare) refused to sign an agreement that he would quit office as vice-president after a year to allow Tinubu be appointed into the position. The APC leader denied the claims at the time.

While reacting to the latest insinuations, Tinubu described the reports as a “classic case of utterly and irredeemably-fake news.”

A portion of the statement read:

“There is no empirical or logical basis for this mischievously speculative story. Is it even conceivable, as the story recklessly insinuates, that Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo would be considering returning to full church work rather than run with his boss, President Buhari, for a second term if the latter so decides without as much as discussing such a sensitive issue with his party and with Asiwaju Tinubu?

“In any case, is this story not entirely unwarranted and indefensible as the Buhari/Osinbajo ticket has an electoral mandate of four years out of which it has spent only over two and a half years?

“This is clearly an attempt to distract the APC Federal Government from the yeoman’s job it has been doing in rescuing the country from the deep rooted socio-economic, political, security and moral mess inherited from the PDP’s 16 years misrule of Nigeria, instigate crisis within the party, stoke dangerous embers of religious disaffection within the party and the country generally and stem the remarkable progress being made in the reinvention and revitalisation of Nigeria.”

In the statement published by The Nation, the APC leader praised the Buhari administration for putting an end to the haemorrhaging of the national economy through corruption and for promoting greater accountability and transparency in the management of the country’s finances while addressing the threat posed by terrorist group, Boko Haram.