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2019: APC has failed, Buhari should retire- Onaiyekan

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Muhammadu Buhari, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, Onaiyekan to Buhari on Nigeria in despair, CBCN

The Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, says the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has failed, advising President Muhammadu Buhari not to seek reelection.

Onaiyekan said the APC had not fulfilled the promises that made people vote for it in 2015.

“Personally, if he (Buhari) comes to me for advice, I will tell him it is time for retirement. But as you know, constitutionally, he is free (to contest),” he said.

“He is free to go for a second term if his party gives him the ticket at the primaries and he goes out and does what it requires to campaign and Nigerians are allowed to vote and their votes are counted properly.

“The promises that I was given have not been fulfilled. The promises I was given which helped me to make up my mind, those promises have not been fulfilled.”

Onaiyekan said since the president had indicated his intention to seek reelection , he should ensure that the 2019 election was free and fair.

“We want a country where votes will count. Just as Jonathan created a situation where INEC ran election with relative autonomy to the extent that the president himself lost, the present government should run the election in such a way that even the president can lose because himself is a beneficiary of an electoral system that allows the incumbent to lose,” the archbishop said.

Read also: No president in Nigeria’s history has managed the economy better than Buhari- Ajimobi

“It is when the incumbent loses that we can really be sure that there is some amount of transparency.”

He described the ruling party as a “bundle of confusion”, saying most members of the party came together only to take power from Jonathan.

“APC is a bundle of confusion. It is a bundle of people from different, different directions. And as you can see, there are people in the APC who now find themselves almost strange,” he said.

“People came into APC with one objective to vote out Jonathan and in fact, among those who joined to vote out Jonathan were many who were working with Jonathan before. It has come out very clearly that by the time we look at the statistics, the number of former PDP people who went into APC, is preponderant. So, people went into APC because they saw it at that time as the party that was more likely to win and luckily for them, the party won and they have always been in power.

“So, politicians have been deceiving Nigerians and I say it is about time they stop.”

The cardinal expressed these views In an interview with TheSun.

 

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