Senate chief whip Orji Uzor Kalu has warned APC and its presidential candidate Bola Tinubu that a Muslim-Christian ticket will make it difficult for Mr Tinubu to be president in 2023.
Mr Kalu worried that Mr Tinubu “is a minority Muslim” from the South.
“Do you want me to speak the truth? If I am Bola Ahmed Tinubu, whose wife is a senior pastor at a Pentecostal church, I will go for a Muslim-Muslim ticket,” the former Abia governor pointed out.
He added, “After all, if we win, the wife is already a pastor. This is my own opinion, and you cannot deny me my opinion.”
He argued that a southern minority Muslim and a northern minority Christian could not win a presidential election in Nigeria, insisting that it would be almost difficult for the APC to win the election in 2023 if Mr Tinubu did not go for a Muslim-Muslim ticket.
“I know the church I go to. There is nothing wrong with a Muslim-Muslim ticket, just as there is nothing wrong with a Christian-Christian ticket,” noted the senator. “Tinubu is a minority Muslim from the South, and if you pick a Christian from the North, it will be a minority Christian, and you cannot play two minorities. It is difficult.”
However, he said his submissions were not those of the APC.
“I sit with Tinubu’s wife in the Senate, and the wife is a pastor, and I have known Tinubu for long, and he is a man who can do the work. He is a man who goes with everybody and can do the work,” Mr Kalu further explained. “I know that most Christians will be hurt by what I am saying, but picking a Muslim or a Christian will not make him the best president. It is his conscience which is an open wound that only truth can heal, that matters.”
The senator believed that his constituency and the South-East that gave President Muhammadu Buhari 68 per cent votes in the 2019 presidential election would also extend the same percentage vote to Mr Tinubu in 2023.
(NAN)