■ Berates Obasanjo over letters

Ahmed Abubakar, Dutse

Former governor of Abia State, Dr Orji Uzor-Kalu, has declared that President Muhammadu Buhari is the candidate to beat in the 2019 presidential election, saying that he would not support any other candidate o‎ther than the president.

Kalu who made the declaration yesterday while on a state visit to Jigawa told the governor, Alhaji Muhammed Badaru Abubakar, that he was on tour of the country to sensitize Nigerians on the dire need to allow President Buhari to continue in 2019.

The ex-Abia governor noted that Nigerians have the moral obligation to choose their leaders through a democratic process, advising them to go ahead and vote for President Buhari and Muhammed Badaru as Jigawa State governor.

Kalu insisted that voting for another candidate other than Buhari would result to giving an opening for the continued looting of the country’s treasury by ‘looters.’

He said that he would not support his friend, Alhaji Sule Lamido, if he decides to run against President Buhari.

His words: “Although Alhaji Sule Lamido happens to be my bosom friend and an aspirant for Nigeria’s president‎ in the PDP, I told him that I won’t vote for him if he is running against President Muhammadu Buhari.”

Dr Kalu also blasted former President Olusegun Obasanjo over‎ the letter he wrote to Buhari, advising him not to seek re-election, saying that the former president lacks the moral right to decide who becomes what in Nigeria.

“People seem to have forgotten when former President Obasanjo was literally absent for about three years, travelling all over the world‎ when he was president and then nobody told him not seek re-election.

“He does‎ not have the moral right to decide for Nigerians who becomes president even though when he was president no one wrote him letters, advising him against seeking re-election”, he pointed out.

His host, the Jigawa State governor, Alhaji Badaru, who expressed excitement over the visit by the former Abia governor, ‎ said that his (Kalu) choice to project reasons for the re-election of President Buhari was apt and unprecedented.

Badaru said that although Buhari has constantly won elections in Jigawa, there was, however, the need to re-educate and re-energize the electorate for them to see reasons they should give t‎ he president another chance to run for the presidency in 2019.

The governor who went down memory lane‎ on how the APC government met the already ‘battered’ economy by the PDP said: “Jigawa people are better informed and educated on how we met the state treasury and economy and that is why no one can disillusion them at this moment.”