Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

Ezekwesili reacts to ACPN’s allegations

By Tonye Bakare, Online Editor
25 January 2019   |   6:58 am
The former presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria Dr Oby Ezekwesili has denied all allegations made against her by the party in the aftermath of her withdrawal from the presidential election. Ezekwesili withdrew from the race on Thursday citing the need to form a viable coalition viable enough to wrestle power from…

[FILE PHOTO] Obiageli Ezekwesili, Co-Founder, Bring Back Our Girls on ‘African Jihad’ at The 2016 Women In The World Summit, NYC, New York; 4/6/2016

The former presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria Dr Oby Ezekwesili has denied all allegations made against her by the party in the aftermath of her withdrawal from the presidential election.

Ezekwesili withdrew from the race on Thursday citing the need to form a viable coalition viable enough to wrestle power from both the ruling All Progressives Congress and leading opposition People’s Democratic Party.

“As for the defamatory statements made against my person by the ACPN leadership in their malicious statement, I want Nigerians to know that there is NO IOTA of truth in any of them,” Ezekwesili said in an emailed statement on Friday.

“Everything ACPN wrote or said of the campaign donations is fabrication and outright lies. Our campaign was conducted with the highest level of transparency and accountability with impeccable evidence.”

The former World Bank chief said the party’s immediate endorsement of APC’s President Muhammadu Buhari showed why she had to “swiftly depart from their midst” and that the party’s leadership was neck-deep in transactional politics.

She insisted that apart from the need to form a coalition, the difference in values and vision between her and the party informed her decision to quit the race.

“How could I upon realising the divergence of values and vision with the leadership of the party continue to stand on such a political platform? My abiding vision has been to mobilise citizens to disrupt the old order politics of APCPDP,” she said.

On Thursday, ACPN said Ezekwesili did communicate the decision to withdraw her candidature and accused her of using her presidential campaign as a bargaining chip.

ACPN said two aides of the former minister Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Maureen Kabrik – told the party that Ezekwesili was only interested in being appointed a finance minister by the eventual winner of the election holding next month.

Both Aboyeji and Kabrik have denied the allegations with Kabrik saying the party was “so unintelligent if that’s d best they could come up with.” Although Aboyeji initially reacted to the allegations against on Twitter, his account was not available on Friday morning.

Regardless of the “puerile accusations” against her, Ezekwesili said her push to form a coalition will be fruitful.

“Take it from me that WE shall definitely build the Coalition force that will terminate the poverty escalating governance of the two dominant parties in the 2019 election,” she said.

In this article

0 Comments