Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, has described the failure of former President Olusegun Obasanjo to endorse the Peoples Democratic Party’s Presidential flagbearer Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as a signal that something is wrong with the candidate.
And he had a word of advice to the Atiku camp, leave Nyesom Wike and the G5 alone and battle with his ebbing goodwill as the presidential election draws near.
Wike said: “I was praying that Obasanjo should not say anything. When I saw the letter last night, I was touched.
“If your principal cannot recommend you, then there is something fundamentally wrong.
“After all, you people went to see your principal to lobby him to recommend you.
“It took your principal a long time before he now wrote a letter to all Nigerians, saying, ‘Look, I am not too comfortable’. This person worked with you and he knows.”
The governor asked Atiku, who was Obasanjo’s Vice for eight years, and his co-travellers to leave him and the G-5 governors out of their problems and face the failure of his former principal to recommend him to Nigerians.
The governor spoke at Itu Bridge Head, the venue of the flag-off of the Akpabu- Odido Road in Emohua Local Government Area on Monday.
Wike argued that a bad product was always difficult to sell and wondered why Obasanjo after working with Atiku could not recommend him to Nigerians.
He insisted that if Obasanjo, who understood Atiku very well could not endorse him for president, then something must be fundamentally wrong with the PDP candidate.
Wike asked Atiku to be more concerned about the loss of confidence from his former boss and the forthcoming election.
The governor lambasted persons accusing him and Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State of frustrating the micro-zoning of the presidential ticket of the PDP to Southeast.
Wike said he had always been the advocate of zoning the presidency to the South unlike Atiku and others, who took steps to frustrate it.
He said: “I was one of those who led the campaign that the party’s chairmanship should go to the North because I believed the presidency should go to the South.
“I attended meetings of southern governors of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and other parties from Delta to Lagos to Enugu states, where we agreed that presidency should come to the south.”
Wike recalled that while southern cross-party consultations were going on, there were people in the PDP who were bent on frustrating the zoning of the party’s presidential ticket to the South.
He said such persons could not turn around to cast the blame on him and Governor Ortom to hide their scheme thinking they could deceive the people.
He said: “I woke up this morning and read where they said, how Wike and Ortom frustrated PDP’s micro-zoning of the presidential ticket to Southeast. That was what the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku said.
“I keep on saying, they’ll be contradicting themselves, telling lies up and down, thinking that Nigerians don’t know. How can they say that I influenced Ortom, told him to allow and throw the ticket open?
“Nigerians know those who are opposed to the zoning of the party’s chairmanship first.
“And when the zoning committee was set up, this time, Atiku had gone to buy form to frustrate the recommendation of the zoning committee.
“So that when they have bought form, they could say, oh, there is no need of zoning, will you tell people to withdraw?”
Wike said their plot was haunting them because they were unfair to Nigerians.