Adamu Garba, aspirant who had declared his intention to contest the presidency on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has stated that he will not purchase the nomination form for his party.
He disclosed his decision at a media briefing on Tuesday.
While criticising the APC over the N100 million fixed for the nomination and expression of interest forms, Garba stated that although he got N83 million in donations, there were issues on the forthcoming presidential primary, which he didn’t agree with.
“This conference to notify Nigerians and my supporters all over the country that after high-level deliberation with our internal campaign team, we have concluded that we will not be obtaining the expression of interest and nomination form for the office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria under the platform of the APC,” he said.
“Our generation should not set an example as part of the people that supported the financialisation/commercialisation of our political space, especially the public office, considering the prohibitive cost of the nomination forms. The highest in the world.
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“We believe this action is capable of over-financialisung our political space, institutionalising vote-buying, encouraging corruption, and complete obliteration the youth and the poor from participation.
“When we raised this concern on several media fora, the party, however, believed the high cost of form will separate the serious contenders from unserious ones.
“This goes contrary to our belief that you can only separate serious contenders from unserious ones by the competency, capacity, credibility, strength of the programme, workable solutions, and sellable candidate to Nigeria through rapid intraparty debates and other high-level criteria reviews that can ensure we present a better leader for future for Nigeria.
“We further discovered that even if we went ahead to obtain the form, the party has foreclosed the plan for primary election because of the presence of the request for a Letter of Voluntary Withdrawal on page 18 of the nomination form.
“I cannot, in all honesty, rally funds from my supporters in the hope that we will be having a primary election, then sign a postdated letter of voluntary withdrawal from the contest.”
