A former presidential candidate of the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC), Alhaji Bashir Tofa, has said the law should be allowed to determine whether President Goodluck Jonathan could be sworn in three times or not.
Tofa made this known in a statement made available to the Nigerian Tribune. According to him, “it is not for Jonathan or anybody to decide whether he can contest or not. It is for the law to determine that. So, all this debate about what he said or what he promised are just a waste of time… in the case of President Jonathan’s ambitions for 2015, what we need to know is what the law says about the situation, not what someone else says he heard or saw. Our constitutional experts should be brave enough to speak on relevant sections of the appropriate law.
“If the law allows him to contest the election, then it is up to him and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to decide. But if the law says he cannot, either because he is now serving his second term, or because he cannot be sworn in as president three times, then he just cannot contest and must forget about it.”
Alhaji Tofa also stressed that it would be a mistake for the APC to insist on Buhari and Tinubu to drop their ambitions, adding that Buhari and Tinubu, not the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), were key factors in the merger: “Dropping Buhari and Tinubu’s ambitions will be a serious blow to the APC, in my opinion. So, they must be allowed to aspire to whatever they fancy, and let democracy determine their nomination for that position,” he said. He however, cautioned the APC over the issue of zoning, adding that no section of the country must be marginalised.
Source: Tribune
