Head of Legal Directorate of the Tinubu Campaign Organisation, Babatunde Ogala SAN has said that APC National Chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu’s announcement of a consensus candidate on the eve of the party’s presidential primary was the greatest hurdle Tinubu faced.
He stated this in an interview published by The Punch on Friday.
Recall that Adamu had announced Senate President Ahmad Lawan as the consensus presidential candidate of the party at a meeting of the National Working Committee (NWC), causing a disagreement.
Tinubu later won the primaries with 1,271 votes.
Asked what was Tinubu’s greatest hurdle on the way to victory, Ogala said, “The most difficult was honestly the speech by the APC Chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu announcing that they had arrived at a consensus candidature (of President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan). It is difficult to do that because this also has a political colouration.
“Of course, that announcement could well have been made and some people could get away with it. But what we immediately did was to go through the enabling statutes and we established that by law, we have passed that stage of (declaring) a consensus candidature which a lot of people use very loosely because consensus in itself is an option out of three.
“Consensus, direct and indirect primary are the available three options that we have. Yes, consensus may be adopted. It is only when it fails that you resort to direct or indirect primary.
“However, in this case, you have started indirect (primary) and it simply meant that you had foreclosed consensus. And even if we were going to have a consensus, consensus is a process that is driven by a process and implemented by the aspirants. Only if they can agree to step down for one of them and they must put it in writing with their signature, and go to the convention to announce that they have stepped down for a particular person and they have agreed that it should be by consensus, and the convention will vote on whether to accept or not.
“But here we were, without following the law at all, somebody who was not entrusted with powers to either coordinate on the path to the consensus now announced that one person must become the consensus candidate. We had to quickly advise the party that going that route was just preparing and inviting a disastrous consequence on the APC not even participating in the election at all.”
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