Vice President Yemi Osinbajo of Nigeria has announced that he will compete for President of the country next year, when incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari is set to end his last term.
Mr. Yemi Osinbajo is the latest member of Africa’s two major political parties to enter the contest to govern the continent’s most populous country and largest economy.
Yemi Osinbajo stated, “which is why I am today, with utmost humility, formally declaring my intention to run for the office of the President … on the platform of our great party, the All Progressives Congress.”
Moreover, he vowed to maintain Buhari’s policies and programs, which include massive road and rail construction.
Nigeria’s military forces are fighting an armed campaign in the northeast, violent criminal gangs in the northwest, and separatist tensions in the southeast ahead of the February 2023 election.
Mr. Osinbajo is one of a slew of APC candidates vying for the party’s presidential nomination.
Bola Tinubu, the APC leader and former governor of Lagos, has already declared his candidacy.
For eight years, Osinbajo served as Lagos’s judicial commissioner under Tinubu.
Yemi Osinbajo lacks a political base of his own and would need to assemble a powerful coalition of backers with significant finances to take on Tinubu’s political machine, which assisted Buhari in campaigning and delivering victory in the 2015 and 2019 elections.
President Buhari hasn’t indicated whether he’ll back Osinbajo or Tinubu.
Rotimi Amaechi, the Transport Minister, and Yahaya Bello, the governor of central Kogi state, are two other APC candidates.
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By June, the ruling party should have decided on its presidential candidate, who would contest whomever emerges from the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Atiku Abubakar, the 75-year-old former vice president who has stood for president five times, said last month that he will run on the PDP platform again.
In order to divide power more evenly, Nigerian politics has an unwritten rule that the president would “rotate” between the mostly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south.
Many southerners believe the presidency should rotate back to their area once Buhari, a Muslim from the north, completes his two terms next year.
