Nigeria’s former vice president Atiku Abubakar is prepared to run for the presidency in 2019, Reuters reports his spokesman to have said on Friday.
The former ally of President Muhammadu Buhari quit the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party on Friday, saying it had “failed” the people of Nigeria.
Abubakar’s decision to quit the party is seen by many as a major blow to its plan to remain united ahead of elections slate for early 2019.
Her said the ruling party “has failed and continues to fail our people,” adding that the APC had instituted “a regime of a draconian clampdown on all forms of democracy within the party and the government it’s produced”.
The former vice president’s departure is one of the first major fractures to emerge publicly in Buhari’s APC, formed from a coalition of smaller parties to contest the 2015 election against then-president Goodluck Jonathan.
Both major parties, the APC and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), are struggling to maintain their unity in the run-up to Nigeria’s next presidential elections in February 2019, according to party members and experts.
The APC was brought together chiefly to elect Buhari, who campaigned on a platform of reviving Nigeria’s flagging economy, wiping out the country’s endemic corruption and defeating Islamist insurgency Boko Haram in the northeast.
Buhari has not said whether he will seek re-election in 2019, but some quarters in his administration have urged him not to do so.
The President this year spent more than 100 days in London on two separate medical leaves, as he sought treatment for an unspecified illness.
