I’m not after Osinbajo’s job, says Tinubu

National leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, says he is not planning to replace Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo.

Tinubu said this in response to a report that he may be picked as the running mate of President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019.

Buhari and Tinubu fell out shortly after the 2015 election but both men have been holding frequent meetings of late.

Tinubu was in the president’s delegation to the AU-EU summit in Cote d’Ivoire. During a meeting with Nigerians resident in that country, Buhari said the APC national leader gave him a “beautiful piece of information”.

Denying eyeing the job of Osinbajo, whom he nominated, Tinubu said, “The people of the south-west have absolute confidence and are exceedingly proud of the excellent job Professor Osinbajo is doing as Vice President of Nigeria”.

“The attention of the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu Media Office has been drawn to the front page lead story of The SUN newspaper of yesterday, December 13, 2017, which sensationally and ridiculously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari may pick Asiwaju Tinubu as his running mate for the 2019 election. This is a classic case of utterly and irredeemably fake news,” read a statement which Tunde Rahman, Tinubu’s spokesman, issued on his behalf.

Tinubu described the report as an attempt to distract the current administration from its “yeoman’s job” and instigate crisis in the APC.

“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 revitalization of Nigeria,” the statement read.

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“There is greater sanity, accountability and transparency in the management of the country’s finances. The Boko Haram insurgency has been substantially contained. We should not allow ourselves to be derailed from the job we are effectively undertaking in fulfilling our campaign promises anchored on the tripod of containing insecurity, taming the scourge of corruption and resuscitating the economy.

“The Buhari and Osinbajo-led Federal Government is deftly steering the country out of an economic recession that was the result of the ineptness of the PDP years of the locusts. Asiwaju Tinubu will never support any attempt to distract Buhari and Osinbajo from the job they are passionately doing through the kind of false report.