House of Reps members Buy Presidential Form for Tambuwal

                       
The quest for top political offices in the APC ahead of 2015 has taken a different dimension. Speaker Aminu Tambuwal’s presidential aspiration has taken a new turn as 20 members of the House of Reps put money together to collect the presidential nomination and expression of interest form on his behalf.

APC’s national organising secretary, Senator Osita Izunazo, said Reps spokesman Zakari Mohammed led others to the APC secretariat where they collected the form for Speaker Tambuwal.
Recall that Tambuwal, while defecting to the APC two weeks ago, gave political developments in his home state, Sokoto, as the reason for his action.
It was taken for granted that Tambuwal would be picked as the APC consensus candidate for the Sokoto State governorship election but now all that seems to have changed...

APC Presidential Ticket: Game Plan Of Tambuwal’s Promoters Revealed
Tambuwal dramatic entry into the APC presidential race appears to be a ‘third force’ game plan to stop the older aspirants eyeing the ticket of the party, LEADERSHIP Friday has learnt.

It was gathered that, upon resumption on December 3, the APC caucus in the House would pass a vote of confidence on Tambuwal and then go ahead to endorse him for the 2015 presidential race. But whatever the plan is, the sudden drafting of the youthful speaker is already creating ripples within the opposition party.

Also, the position of APC’s presidential running mate has been zoned to South West, with Ondo and Ekiti states topping the calculation. Amid these developments, the leadership of the party has kept mum.

But speaking in confidence to LEADERSHIP, a top party official explained that dragging Tambuwal into the race would compound the problems on ground over the ambitions of General Muhammadu Buhari, former VP Atiku Abubakar, Kano governor Musa Kwankwaso, Imo governor Rochas Okorocha and LEADESHIP Group founder, Mr Sam Nda-Isaiah.

“The issue has been on since Tambuwal joined us but some of us are not happy with the idea of dragging him into the race when we are still having problems about how to handle the presidential primaries, especially the refusal of Atiku and others to step down for General Buhari.

“If I may tell you, the initial plan that gave birth to the merger was the alliance between the ACN and the CPC after the 2011 general election when the result showed General Buhari scoring 12 million votes, and the idea was that if the block votes from the South West could be added to that of Buhari, then the opposition would have won and that was how the issue of merger began.

“But the return of Atiku has compounded the problem because the initial plan was to adopt General Buhari as a consensus candidate, and now with Atiku insisting on primaries, the party leadership has bent backward, but the fear in some quarters is that, in any primary, with his experience, Atiku has what it requires to emerge the winner, but some party leaders are not comfortable with that,” He said.