Former Kaduna Central lawmaker, Senator Shehu Sani, has urged ex-President Goodluck Jonathan not to consider returning to the presidential race in 2027.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, Sani argued that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), on whose platform Jonathan once contested, no longer has the unity and structure it once did.
READ ALSO: I could have stopped the election – Jonathan recounts 2015 card reader incident
“Each time there is an election, the name of Jonathan comes up, but it is his volition to contest, but I advise him not to do that. The reason is very simple: the PDP he used to know is not the PDP now. The PDP in the South-West is endorsing the president. Some members of the party are in the coalition. So, it is the party he used to know so he shouldn’t waste his time,” Sani said.
Jonathan, who first assumed office in 2010 following the death of President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, served until 2015 when he lost re-election to Muhammadu Buhari of the APC. While he is still constitutionally eligible to serve another four-year term, he has not indicated any interest in returning.
Nonetheless, debates around his possible candidacy have intensified, particularly in the context of discussions on rotational presidency and the emergence of a new opposition coalition led by the African Democratic Congress (ADC).
Sani, however, dismissed the coalition’s ideological strength, saying: “We are in a democracy, and it is within the right and ambit of our democratic experiment or law to have an opposition that will give an alternative, but if their only cause for power is to remove Tinubu without providing any alternative to governance and his style, then, they have no agenda.
“The people that constitute the coalition today are not ideologically and philosophically different from the programmes which the Tinubu administration is prosecuting. So, it’s not like we have a Marxist and a Capitalist or a Neo-Liberal and a Conservative. During their campaigns and in their dear lives, you can see those liberal values of devaluation and removal of subsidy and some other party.”
