2023: Tinubu, Shekarau alliance rocks APC

A serial presidential-election loser and PDP drop-in has hinted at the cause of internal wrangling in the ruling APC, and the architects of the crisis rocking the six-year-old party.

Attahiru Bafarawa made a claim which has a connection to the 2023 presidential election and the hopeful cutting across the north and southwest.

According to the Sokoto former governor, the APC national leader Bola Tinubu is to blame—for his secret agenda to have the party in the hollow of his hand.

“Tinubu decided on admitting erstwhile state governors elected on the platform of the PDP with the provision that the entire structure of the new party in their respective states should be handed over to the newcomers,” he told the Guardian.

He was recalling the journey towards the formation of the APC, where he was among the founders.

He added that the decision to reward the five defecting PDP governors from Adamawa, Kano, Kwara, Rivers, and Sokoto with APC structures in their states was taken to strengthen the party’s financial capacity to match the then ruling political grouping.

“It later became obvious that the ploy was targeted at himself (Tinubu) and Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau,” said Bafarawa.

He noted the on-going subterranean move to reconcile warring parties in the APC has also been described as a strategy to nudge out other party heavyweights flexing for 2023.

Bafarawa dumped the APC for the PDP to contest for the presidential ticket in the lead-up to the Feb 2019 election.

He lost, like he did earlier, when he founded the Democratic People Party to vie for the presidency when he left office as Sokoto governor in 2007.

Shekarau, too, also a former governor of Kano, wandered out of the APC, returned in 2018 to contest and win a Senate seat.