A former Nigerian Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, generally perceived as a leading ally of President Muhammadu Buhari, has quit the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC. In a statement in Abuja, last week, his media aide said the decision was reached after a prolonged and painful consideration of the issues at stake.
Political watchers immediately termed the development a blow to government unity ahead of the general elections scheduled to hold in early 2019. Some of them have described the timing of the action as deliberately calculated to hurt the government’s preparations for the coming polls.
The general impression is that the veteran politician would return to the PDP, from where he decamped to join forces with General Buhari in 2014.
Atiku Abubakar said the ruling party “has failed and continues to fail our people,” complaining that the APC had instituted “a regime of a draconian clampdown on all forms of democracy within the party and the government that it produced”. A presidential spokesman in Abuja has, however, said the presidency was not worried at Atiku Abubakar’s moves.
Although the allegation that President Buhari totally shunned Atiku Abubakar since coming into office, was not specifically mentioned, many people believe that the former Vice-President had felt totally marginalized by the federal government.
The former Vice-President’s departure from the ruling party is one of the first major fractures to emerge publicly in President Buhari’s APC, which was formed from a coalition of smaller parties to contest the 2015 election against the former President, Mr. Goodluck Jonathan.
According to insiders, the two major parties, the APC and the opposition People’s Democratic Party, PDP, are struggling to maintain their unity in the run-up to Nigeria’s next presidential elections in February 2019.
The APC was put together chiefly to elect General Buhari, who campaigned on a platform of reviving Nigeria’s flagging economy, wiping out the country’s endemic corruption and defeating Islamist insurgency Boko Haram in the northeast.
In Atiku Abubakar’s view, whatever the Buhari administration considers as its successes have been limited, although he hailed the government when Nigeria climbed out of recession in the second quarter of 2017.
President Buhari is reported to have jokingly sent a note to the APC Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, sympathizing with him on the decamping of one of the party’s senior members.
