ABUJA
(Reuters) - Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s supporters got a boost on
Wednesday when a key ally of the elderly leader announced he would head a group
campaigning for him to seek re-election next year.
Buhari, 75,
has not publicly said whether he will take part in the February 2019 election.
Political insiders have privately questioned Buhari’s willingness, or ability,
to keep the top job after he spent much of the past year in Britain being
treated for an undisclosed ailment that left him visibly weakened.
But Adebayo
Shittu, Nigeria’s minister of communications who played a prominent role in
Buhari’s 2015 campaign, said he would chair a group to support the re-election
of the president and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
Campaigning
for the re-election of a president in Nigeria has often started with such
support groups before the incumbent declares his intention to run again.
“We, his
ardent supporters who appreciate his worth on behalf of millions of Nigerians,
would urge him to recontest,” Shittu told reporters in the capital Abuja after
informing Buhari of his plans to head the group.
“I know he
has not made up his mind but I can say that some of us can assist him in making
up his mind,” he added.
The fact
that Shittu discussed campaign arrangements with Buhari and then told reporters
is a sign that the president may have given his approval.
DISENCHANTMENT
On Jan. 20
an office for the organization of the campaign will be set up in Nigeria’s
southwest, Shittu said.
The
southwest is a key region in Nigerian elections, home to the sprawling megacity
of Lagos, where widespread support for Buhari in 2015 is credited with helping
him defeat the incumbent Goodluck Jonathan.
But while
Buhari in 2015 rode a wave of resentment against Jonathan over endemic
government corruption, a struggling economy and a failure to defeat the
Islamist Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast, much of public opinion has now
turned against Nigeria’s incumbent leader.
Many
Nigerians complain that Buhari’s government is also corrupt, pointing to the
president’s sacking of his top civil servant and the head of the National
Intelligence Agency in October after highly-public graft scandals.
Others
dispute how well the economy, Africa’s largest, has recovered. Nigeria exited
its first recession in 25 years in the second quarter of 2017, but growth
remains sluggish and the country continues to depend on oil, while unemployment
and underemployment have increased.
Boko Haram’s
deadly attacks also continue to plague the military and civilians in the
northeast almost daily, despite the Buhari administration’s insistence over the
past two years that the insurgency has been beaten.
In a blow to
the president, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and key Buhari ally,
quit the ruling All Progressives Congress and said he was prepared to run in
2019. Last month he joined the opposition People’s Democratic Party.
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