Bayo Onanuga, the President’s Special Adviser on Knowledge and Technique, has clarified that President Bola Tinubu will simplest settle on his vice-presidential pick for the 2027 election once the All Progressives Congress (APC) holds its nationwide conference.
Talking to Day-to-day Belief amid swirling rumours that Vice President Kashim Shettima would possibly perchance perhaps very successfully be dropped, Onanuga outlined that in Nigeria’s presidential system, the nominee comes first, followed by the sequence of a working mate.
“That’s precisely how it worked in President Buhari’s administration: the birthday party confirmed its candidate prior to the deputy turned into appointed,” he stated. “We don’t pick both simultaneously. After INEC publishes its election timetable, the conference will convene, and if the president secures the APC nomination once more, he’ll then pick his accomplice on the mark.”
Onanuga dismissed ideas of tension between Tinubu and Shettima as mere “beer parlour gossip.” “I’m now not responsive to any fallout between the president and his vice,” he remarked. “From everything I’ve viewed, they collaborate successfully. All this talk about Seyi Tinubu being installed as vice chairman is absolute nonsense.”
He also rejected comparisons to Tinubu’s time as Lagos governor, when he had a public falling-out alongside with his first deputy, announcing those had been pushed by issue political conditions in preference to any addiction of discarding deputies.
“In his first term, there had been disagreements with Kofo [Ikire], and later Femi Pedro left after pursuing his delight in gubernatorial philosophize,” Onanuga renowned. “But that doesn’t put a sample of dumping deputies; it shows uncommon eventualities in each and every case.”
With the APC stakeholders’ summit in Gombe temporarily descending into unrest over the omission of Shettima’s title for the length of a name to endorse Tinubu’s second term, Onanuga emphasised that the birthday party would formally verify both its presidential standard-bearer and working mate on the upcoming conference, striking the hypothesis firmly to leisure.
