Afenifere’s Endorsement Of Peter Obi A Ruse, Says Tinubu Campaign Spokesman

The Director of Media and Publicity for All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council, Bayo Onanuga, has described the endorsement of the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, by the Yoruba socio-political group, Afenifere, as a ruse.

The Afenifere leader, Pa Ayo Adebanjo, had endorsed Obi and described him as the man that can restructure the country and bring back federalism.

But Onanuga in a Facebook post on Tuesday said the endorsement of the Labour Party presidential candidate was done by somebody without electoral value.

Adebanjo had said at a press briefing in September that, “The South-West has produced a President and currently sits as Vice President; the South-South has spent a total of six years in the Presidency, but the Igbo people of the South-East have never tasted presidency in Nigeria, and now that the power is due back in the South, equity demands that it be ceded to the Igbo.

“We cannot continue to demand that the Igbo people remain in Nigeria while we, at the same time, continue to brutally marginalise and exclude them from the power dynamics.

“Peter Obi is the person of Igbo extraction that Afenifere has decided to support and back; he is the man we trust to restructure the country back to federalism on the assumption of office.”

There have been reports online that the endorsement of Obi by Afenifere had created a division in the South-West which is the stronghold of the APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

But while reacting to the alleged division, Onanuga, in a terse statement on Facebook on Tuesday described the report as false

He added that Afenifere’s endorsement of the Labour Party presidential candidate was done by one man with no electoral value.

He said, “This story is not true. There is no division in the South-West over Tinubu’s candidacy. The Afenifere endorsement of LP’s candidate is a ruse. It was an endorsement by one man with no electoral value, either in his Ijebu Igbo village or Lagos.”