The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday gave an insight into how it intends to undermine the fortunes of the presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar ahead of the 2019 poll.
Spokesman of the party, Malam Lanre Issa –Onilu, told reporters that President Muhammadu Buhari’s integrity, coupled with his performance in the last three years would form the major plank of the APC campaigns against the PDP and Atiku.
Issa-Onilu, who faulted the notion that the bickering amongst chieftains of the APC was responsible for the lull in party’s campaigns, flayed the PDP for making an issue out of the biting poverty amongst Nigerians.
“We don’t have any problem at all with our campaign. We are very okay. When you say campaign, rally is just an aspect of it. There are many other platforms we use to engage with the people. It is not that we will not hold rallies, we will go round the country unlike what the PDP is doing. We expect the PDP to go to the zones and apologize profusely and demonstrate remorsefulness which they have failed to do. And they keep going to the zones to organise campaign rallies to insult the people.
“ But when we go, we will be doing two things. The campaign for the APC is about two issues. The character of persons who have come forward to say they want to rule us. We are going to bring character into focus. And for the candidate of PDP, we won’t go too far. The best person to review who you are is your boss, the person under whom you worked. President Olusegun Obasanjo is the best person to review the character of his vice president, Atiku Abubakar. And he copiously did that in his book.
“We would bring that into focus. He told us he found him to be a very unreliable person, somebody that cannot be trusted, somebody who compromises the system for personal gains and we have evidence of that. So we must bring that into focus.
“The second leg of our campaign would be stewardship. We have been in government for over three and half years. We are going to give stewardship. Every kilometer of road that we have done is a reminder to the 16 years of waste under the PDP. Every kilometer of rail track we have laid is a reminder to the 16 years of wastefulness under the PDP.
“All the abandoned projects that we have finished, the issue of diversification that for four decades, including 16 years of PDP, became mere mantra has become a reality now. Check our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is no longer a mono-product economy. It is now an economy that you have contribution from agriculture and from solid minerals, making solid impact in our GDP. That is diversification.”
