The Director-General of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, has announced that President Bola Tinubu will flag off his 2027 re-election campaign in Kaduna on October 24
Yari, a former Zamfara State Governor, disclosed this on Friday after briefing Tinubu at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja, on the council’s campaign preparations.
Speaking to State House correspondence, Yari said Tinubu asked for updates on where the council stood.
He stated that he discussed the timetable of state visits with the president during the campaign.
Yari announced, “By God’s grace, his team, I, and Mr President himself, we have agreed on how it’s going to be done.
“We have put forward a proposal. The inaugural meeting [of the campaign council] is going to be done on the 14th of this month. That’s next Wednesday at the State House banquet hall, and by God’s grace, on the 24th of October, we’re going to do our flag-off campaign in Kaduna, inshallah.
“Then we outlined our state visits to each and every place where we will go, and the President has approved them. So we are going to hit the ground running by the 24th of October, inshallah.”
On the states the campaign would visit after Kaduna, Yari said the campaign will hit Port Harcourt, Rivers State, followed by Maiduguri, Borno State, adding that the full timetable would be released after the council’s inauguration.
He said, “We have the timetable, and we are going to make it available after the inauguration. But this has all been understood and approved by the team of Mr. President and me.”
Asked about the challenge posed by the presidential candidates of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Peter Obi and the African Democratic Congress (ADC), former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Yari argued that Tinubu could not be unseated because God had used the President to support both men in the past.
Yari said, “We are talking of the President of the country, and this President, who, by God’s grace, Almighty God, used him to support Atiku some time back and at the same time to support Peter Obi.
“So if Allah uses me to support you, there is no way Allah will use you to bring me down.”
He stated, “Can the ADC candidate today in the southern part of the country beat his chest and say he has control of one state in the South? And I don’t think Peter Obi, who used to be my colleague, can beat his chest. Can he say he has control of one state in northern Nigeria?
“So this calculation shows us that even if you have control of 80 per cent of the South, if you don’t have anything in the North, you cannot make it.
“If you have 80 per cent of control of the North, if you don’t have any state in the South, you can’t make it, and that’s what it is.”
He cited the late former President Muhammadu Buhari, saying he “had control of over 70 per cent at that time, over 11 states in the North and had no control of one in the South,” and “couldn’t make it all the way.”
By contrast, Yari argued that Tinubu controls “more than 10 states in the South, in the conservative estimate” and more than 10 states in the North.
“This is calculation; it is not rocket science,” he affirmed.
He added that Tinubu has turned around the situation that he met on ground, and the economy is moving.
Yari said, “So I think we have done enough that we can tell our opponents about what we did. We are not promising. We are doing it, and we are going to continue.”
