A top chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party and former Minister of Special Duties, Tanimu Turaki has disclosed that the main opposition party will look outside of the Northern region for a presidential candidate to field for the 2019 elections.
Turaki, in an interview with Premium Times said the Muhammad Buhari administration had shut out other regions of the country in governance, and PDP would seek to ameliorate that injustice.
He said, “We want people that will not have been part of the so-called impunity that have played out in the party before. People that will raise that hope among Nigerians. People that will inspire members of the party to go that extra mile in canvassing support for the party. So that at the end of the day, we will come up with men and women of proven integrity that will stand anywhere and that would be the first step that PDP will use in telling Nigerians that we have changed, this is a new PDP.
“By the time we get to the point of selecting our party’s presidential candidate, I assure you that Nigerians will be proud of PDP. We will come out with a man or woman of high integrity, somebody who is unassailable, whose integrity is beyond reproach, somebody that Nigerians will have confidence that even though we are going to bring a northerner, we are not going to bring a northern president.
“I want to assure Nigerians and it is important that Nigerians take note of this. Even though the presidency has been zoned to the north, we are not going to give Nigerians a northern president, we are going to give Nigerians, a Nigerian president of northern extraction. Somebody when he thinks, he thinks Nigeria; when he wants to act, he acts Nigeria. Somebody when he wants to move, he moves Nigeria.
“Not somebody that will begin to discriminate among Nigerians, not somebody who will want to treat Nigerians differently on the basis of their support, their thinking, their beliefs and attitude. Somebody who will build strong bridges of friendship across the divide. We will bring somebody who is a unifier.”