Bola Tinubu, former Lagos governor and national leader of the All Progressives Congress, says he will run for president in 2023 to build on President Muhammadu Buhari’s legacy.
Mr Tinubu, who visited Mr Buhari to discuss his political ambition on Monday, made this statement after meeting with the president.
“I have the confidence, the vision, the capacity to rule, build on the foundation of Mr President, and turn Nigeria better. I have done that with commitment and unyielding, you know, in Lagos state,” Mr Tinubu said. “You’ve seen that experience and the capacity to turn things around, and that is what we are doing.”
Under his regime, Nigerians witnessed the massacre of Shiite protesters in Zaria in 2015, with over 300 members of the Islamic group killed by Nigerian soldiers and buried in shallow graves.
Similarly in 2016, Amnesty International condemned the Buhari regime after soldiers killed over 150 unarmed Indigenous Peoples of Biafra. On October 20, 2020, soldiers fired shots on #EndSARS protesters, mostly youths remonstrating against police brutality and extortion.
Though Mr Buhari promised to combat insecurity during his campaign in 2015, under his watch, insecurity has taken a more dreadful trajectory with bandits, Boko Haram, kidnappers, and unknown gunmen killing and kidnapping for ransom across the country.
Like Buhari, Mr Tinubu’s frail health remains a sticking point against his touted ambition to direct the affairs of Africa’s most populous nation. The politician only recently returned from the UK after months of undergoing major surgery and post-surgery therapy.
Mr Tinubu will have to convince his critics and Nigerian electorates who do not appear ready to have another leader spending more time attending to his health challenges than the nation’s gruelling affairs succeeding incumbent Mr Buhari, who has spent over 200 days in the hospital attending to his health since his time at the reins.
The former Lagos governor will also likely be bogged down by corruption allegations, accused of tilling his hands into the commonwealth of Lagos, which he ruled for eight years.
Peoples Gazette had published a series of damning reports on Mr Tinubu’s corrupt enrichment via questionable Lagos tax administration via Alpha Beta. The newspaper also uncovered how Mr Tinubu’s Alpha Beta siphoned billions to shell companies.
Already, there have been plots to indict Mr Tinubu for corruption. In March, The Gazette reported how the EFCC requested Mr Tinubu’s asset declaration documents from the Code of Conduct Bureau in an apparent move to establish infractions committed by him.
The former Lagos governor’s decision to order bullion vans bearing cash into his private residence on the eve of 2019’s general elections has continued to haunt him, with Deji Adeyanju and other anti-graft campaigners describing it as primitive and petitioning the EFCC to go after him.
