From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) yesterday dismissed insinuations that the health status of the party’s presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was responsible for the continued delay in the commencement of its campaign. APC presidential campaign has been shrouded in all manners of controversies, including the rumour that Asiwaju’s fragile health has been largely responsible for the delay.
But reacting to it, the PCC hinged the delay in kick-starting the campaign on certain logistics issues, explaining that while the list may still be released this weekend, they are however perfecting arrangements to roll out the drums soon.
Setting the records straight, a member of the APC PCC who confided in Saturday Sun claimed that Asiwaju is physically fit to lead his campaign.
He said; “we are planning to kick-off because what is the essence of rolling out and suspending it like what the opposition party did because they are still dealing with internal crisis? We want to dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s before starting.
“Asiwaju’s health has nothing to do with the delay in the commencement of our campaign. It is purely logistics like I explained earlier. It is not right to claim that he has not been attending serious functions. He was there at the launch of the women campaign council at the State House this week. He will be attending a function in Kaduna early next week.
“On Thursday he held series of review meetings with relevant stakeholders to fine-tune his campaign manifesto. Our campaign is not going to be dictated by external forces or the pressure from the media. We are not going to be stampede by any external forces.
“Yes, the delay in the kick-off of the campaign ought not affect the release of the comprehensive list of campaign council, but I am still optimistic it will be released this week.
“There has been series of consultative meetings and I can tell you that Asiwaju had met with the directorate of media and communication, the Director-General, and other leadership of the campaign council on Friday. So many administrative issues has been taken care of and we are close to hitting the street for campaign,” he assured. He equally spoke on the little controversy over campaign funding, insisting: “I want to ask, if the leadership does hot want to support the candidates, what will they use the money they got through the sale of nomination forms for?
“The money is running into billions of naira, yet they are claiming that they won’t support the candidates. It is wrong. Even if they claim that they are wrongly using it for renovation of the secretariat, it cannot gulp the entire billions they raked in from aspirants. The ideal thing is that the party must support the candidates, no matter how small especially in the states where our party does not have governors,” he insisted.
Dismissing the insinuations that Asiwaju presented a manifesto dominated with Lagos content not the achievements of the Buhari-led APC administration, he argued that the stakeholders would not have endorsed it.
“There is no iota of truth in such, in fact, it is baseless. I can confirm to you that the governors and NWC approved the manifesto,” he said.