El-Rufai and Saraki persuaded Buhari not to pick me as his Vice Presidential candidate- Bola Tinubu

Thursday, 27 April 2017

In the yet to be launched book ‘Against the Run of Play,’ written by the Chairman, Editorial Board of ThisDay, Olusegun Adeniyi, National Leader of APC, Bola Tinubu, alleged that Senate President Bukola Saraki and Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, persuaded President Buhari from picking him as his running mate in the 2015 presidential election.

Tinubu alleged that Saraki, El-Rufai and some other politicians who defected to APC just before the elections, worked against the plan of the party to make him the running mate of President Buhari.


According to him, the politicians argued that running with President Buhari would form a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket which could cost the party victory at the polls. “What they did behind my back was wrong. We always do things as a group. By the time they joined, we were already too far ahead in our processes but we accommodated them. We agreed to take their state structures and subsume them into the part and they all had their opportunity to nominate the candidates of their choices for different political offices. But they went behind to instigate Buhari and some other people in the party against me on the pretext of religion. That was not right. They were canvassing arguments that the Christians in the North would not vote for a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

Nasir el-Rufai was also selling the same argument within the CPC (the defunct Congress for Progressive Change) because at that point, he still wanted to have Pastor Bakare brought in as Buhari’s running mate.”

Tinubu is quoted to have said that Buhari later requested him to nominate three persons for the Vice President's ticket but he presented only Yemi Osinbajo as his ultimate choice. “I backed down because I did not want to be depicted as causing a problem. I backed away from the position in order to offer Buhari a name I once raised with him in 2011: that of Professor Yemi Osibanjo".