The health status of the All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, is not responsible for the continued delay in the commencement of the party’s campaign. The party’s Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) has said.
APC presidential campaign has been shrouded in all manners of controversies, one of such was Tinubu’s health challenge.
But reacting to it, the PCC blamed the delay in kick-starting the campaign on logistics issues. The PCC they are perfecting arrangements to roll out the drums soon as all is in top gear to commence the campaign.
A member of the APC PCC who clarified the situation to the SUN claimed that Asiwaju is physically fit to lead his campaign and not down as alleged.
He said: “we are planning to kick-off because what is the essence of rolling out and suspending it like what the opposition party did because they are still dealing with internal crisis? We want to dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s before starting.
“Asiwaju’s health has nothing to do with the delay in the commencement of our campaign. It is purely logistics like I explained earlier. It is not right to claim that he has not been attending serious functions. He was there at the launch of the women campaign council at the State House this week. He will be attending a function in Kaduna early next week.
“On Thursday he held a series of review meetings with relevant stakeholders to fine-tune his campaign manifesto. Our campaign is not going to be dictated by external forces or pressure from the media. We are not going to be stamped by any external forces.
“Yes, the delay in the kick-off of the campaign ought not affect the release of the comprehensive list of campaign council, but I am still optimistic it will be released this week.
“There has been series of consultative meetings and I can tell you that Asiwaju had met with the directorate of media and communication, the Director-General, and other leadership of the campaign council on Friday. So many administrative issues has been taken care of and we are close to hitting the street for campaign,” he assured. He equally spoke on the little controversy over campaign funding, insisting: “I want to ask, if the leadership does hot want to support the candidates, what will they use the money they got through the sale of nomination forms for?
“The money is running into billions of naira, yet they are claiming that they won’t support the candidates. It is wrong. Even if they claim that they are wrongly using it for renovation of the secretariat, it cannot gulp the entire billions they raked in from aspirants. The ideal thing is that the party must support the candidates, no matter how small especially in the states where our party does not have governors,” he insisted.
Dismissing the insinuations that Asiwaju presented a manifesto dominated with Lagos content not the achievements of the Buhari-led APC administration, he argued that the stakeholders would not have endorsed it.
“There is no iota of truth in such, in fact, it is baseless. I can confirm to you that the governors and NWC approved the manifesto," he said.
