The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has described Atiku as Africa’s most famous election loser over claims that he won the 2023 presidential election.
Atiku had replied to the rejoinder issued by President Bola Tinubu over the weekend claiming that Nigerians who voted in the 2023 presidential candidate knew that he won the election.
Tinubu had dismissed Atiku’s negative assessment of his administration, noting that his postulations that he would have done things differently for the growth and development of the country without inviting hardship as it is being witnessed as fallacy, empty and unworkable.
The APC wading into the contest on Monday through a statement by its spokesman, Felix Morka, described Atiku’s response to the president as nothing but rants.
The APC chided Atiku, saying since serving as vice president (1999–2007), he has lost election to every single president that has been elected to office.
The party said six times in the last 17 years, “Nigerians have declared their verdict of untrustworthiness, incompetence, chronic corruption, visionlessness, uncanny desperation, and lack of sportsmanship on Atiku’s presidential candidacy, and roundly rejected him at the polls.”
The party noted that Atiku’s long record of electoral defeat was serially certified by Nigeria’s highest courts, sealing his rejection by the electorate with judicial and constitutional finality.
According to the APC, a clearly unabashed Atiku has continued ”to lay a bogus claim that he did not lose the 2023 presidential election. That is beyond comical.
“Just as he probably believes that he was cheated out of all previous 5 presidential elections that he also lost.
“Atiku’s inability to come to terms with the reality of his rejection cuts an ominous portrait of extreme and disturbing political desperation,” the statement said.
Continuing, the party said Nigeria’s intelligent and discerning electorate will not act against their own best interest by “electing into office a man with some of the most obscene record of breach of public trust, so odious that, former President Olusegun Obasanjo reportedly stated that ‘if I support Atiku for anything, God will not forgive me’.
“Atiku is a central and recurrent player in some of our country’s most vile roll call of corruption scandals perpetrated by PDP administrations.
“Atiku was the Vice President in the government that created crooked and viscerally corrupt petrol subsidy hydra-headed dragon that has crippled our country’s economy, and laid the foundation for the endemic corruption and inefficiency that have undermined our power sector through the years.
“Atiku’s desperation to be president can only be understood in the context of his determination to complete the full subversion of Nigeria’s economic life from where he left off as Vice President.
“Nigerians will not entrust their country to someone who puts his selfish interest, and the interest of his cronies over and above the national interest.
“Having now demystified himself with the release, last Sunday, of ‘What I Would Do Differently’, it is now settled that Atiku has nothing to offer Nigerians but his stale, tired, tested and failed economic ideas that are at polar relevance to the current existential economic challenges facing our country,” the party added.
It stressed that Atiku had a chance to execute whatever economic ideas he may have ever had.
Rather, the party said he failed fantastically to do so as vice president and also “failed to get his forlorn PDP to do so in all of their 16 profligate years.
“Atiku thinks himself capable of fixing Nigeria but cannot fix the rot and hopeless dysfunction in his PDP.”
The APC urged Nigerians to stand fast in support of the APC-led administration and valiant effort to restore vitality to our economy for the good of all Nigerians.