A report indicates that President Bola Tinubu will finally announce his running mate for the 2027 presidential election this week.
Sources who spoke to Nigerian Tribune claimed there was a slight fallout when Tinubu submitted his Expression of Interest and Nomination forms for the All Progressives Congress (APC) through the chairman of the Progressive Governors’ Forum (PGF), Senator Hope Uzodinma.
The source claimed that Uzodinma had taken the forms to the vice president, Kashim Shettima, and that they had both headed to the APC national secretariat to submit them.
Investigations by the aforementioned publication indicated that Villa operatives were not happy with the involvement of Shettima in the process of submission of the forms and that it made it look as if all the dust raised over his eligibility for the position in the 2027 elections had been settled.
With Shettima stealing the show at the form submission venue, some Villa operatives were said to have gone to work and were permitted to shake the Imo State governor a bit, to ascertain his loyalty to the system.
Although Uzodinma was said to have also tried to involve Senate President Godswill Akpabio in the forms submission process, a source said Akpabio escaped the show by telling the emissary that he was already on his way to plenary.
A fallout from the development for Uzodinma was a bid by some members of the PGF to unseat him, an uprising that was thwarted after what sources called a quick intervention by President Bola Tinubu.
It was learnt that the presidency did not call for the total removal of Uzodinma, but the plan was to “shake him small.” Although reports later indicated that an enquiry was sparked over funds traced to the PGF, it was learnt that the main issue behind the pushback against the Imo State governor was the vice president’s involvement in the submission of nomination forms.
According to a source, “The involvement of the vice president in the form submission process made things look as if the president had settled for him, whereas discussions were ongoing at the time.
“Some sources believed that the Imo governor might have taken a deliberate step to create that impression, and it was decided that he should be investigated.”
It was confirmed that the chairman of PGF made what a source described as an “inadvertent error,” and it was decided that he should be spared from any further action, sources further said.
Though sources said President Tinubu was about to yield to pressure and allow Shettima on the ticket, there were still some ‘T’s to be crossed and some ‘I’s to be dotted before the conclusion.
Outside Shettima, it was also gathered that the feud that nearly claimed the position of PGF from the Imo State governor is also a source of the tense moments being experienced by the camp of the Rivers State governor, Siminalayi Fubara.
Fubara faced an uphill task of scaling the screening process for the APC early last week, but was eventually cleared to partake in the primaries, which appeared skewed against his loyalists.
It was gathered that with the dust settling on Uzodinma’s saga, Fubara too might start to heave sighs of relief.