2023: Atiku a total failure, we’d retire him to Dubai permanently – Shettima

CenturyPost September 12, 2022

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Kashim Shettima, vice presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has all but dismissed Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), as a total failure for lack of impact in the lives of his people, a total opposite of his APC counterpart, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu.

For this reason, he says the APC candidate would not only trounce the 75-year-old former Vice President, who would be eyeing the nation’s highest office for the sixth time, at next year’s presidential election, but retire him permanently from politics.

He said Atiku would be made to return to Dubai, where he retired and resided for months after he failed to win in the last attempt after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared President Muhammadu Buhari, and affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Shetttima, who hosted visiting APC National Integrity Movement, a support group, in Abuja on Sunday, told the delegation: “Atiku Abubakar is like a father to me and I hold him in high esteem. But he is a political tourist who is only in this country’s electoral circle and we are going to retire him back to Dubai to go and relax.

“In every situation, for people to see your worth, they need to see your output at home. I am from the North East – he is from the North East. Atiku cannot point to three projects that he brought to the North East or to Northern Nigeria for the eight years that he served as the Vice President. He cannot show us three people that he has mentored.

“The trajectory of global growth is facing Africa and Nigeria will make or mar that transition. That is why I will rather be a small fish in a big pond than be a big fish in a small pond. I supported Asiwaju out of a moral obligation, out of a moral conviction. What we have seen is his opportunity for national collaboration and national cohesion. When the frontlines that divide us were being manipulated for political ends, Asiwaju refused to swallow the pill.

“Nigerians of the younger generation must know Asiwaju’s history of two decades past when he stood firm as the fulcrum to a despotic PDP government in this country when he was viciously maligned and ostracised and that was when he laid the foundation for modern Lagos state.”