ATIKU Abubakar, former Vice President, has emerged the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) after he defeated eleven other aspirants at the party’s presidential primary election in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. 

He defeated his closest rival, Aminu Tambuwal, the current governor of Sokoto State, who was believed to have been supported by the governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike.

A total number of 3,274 accredited delegates from the 36 states and FCT  voted in the election .

Here are the results of the poll.

In the presidential election next February, Atiku will face President Muhammadu Buhari, who was earlier today announced the candidate of the ruling party.

After parting ways with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku promised to restructure Nigeria within six months if he is elected Nigeria’s president in the 2019 elections.

Arguably the only veteran for the presidential election in Nigeria among other aspirants for the 2019 general elections, Atiku, 72, made his first attempt at becoming Nigerian president in 1993 under the then Social Democratic Party (SDP).

He placed third in the party’s primaries behind late MKO Abiola and Babagana Kingibe.

In 2007,  he contested the presidential election as the candidate of Action Congress (AC). He ran against the eventual winner, late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and came third behind Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP).

Before then, after leaving the Nigeria Customs Service as a Deputy Director, Atiku first ran for the office of governor in the old Gongola State (now Adamawa and Taraba States) in 1991 but did not win.

In 1998, he was elected the Governor of Adamawa State.

But he was picked by Olusegun Obasanjo, the PDP presidential candidate in 1999 as his running mate.

On Saturday, July 21, 2018, the Turaki Adamawa as he is fondly called stood before a cheering crowd in his home state of Adamawa, announcing he will seek the PDP ticket for president in 2019.

For his education, Atiku had his primary education at Jada Primary School and in 1960 was admitted to Adamawa Provincial Secondary School in Yola.  He graduated with a Grade Three WASC/GCE Certificate in 1965.

Following secondary school, he also studied a short while at the Nigeria Police College in Kaduna . He left the College when he was unable to present an O-Level Mathematics result. He worked briefly as a Tax Officer in the regional Ministry of Finance, from where he gained admission to the school of Hygiene in Kano in 1966.

He graduated with a Diploma in 1967, having served as Interim Student Union President at the school. In 1967 he enrolled for a Law Diploma at the Ahmadu Bello University Institute of Administration, on a scholarship from the regional government. After graduation in 1969, during the Nigerian Civil War, he was employed by the Nigeria Customs Service.

History of defections

Seeing largely by many Nigerians as a ‘serial political defector’, the former Vice President has left the PDP twice and also returned twice to the party after failed attempts to actualize his presidential ambition.

Before the end of his second term in office as the Vice President to Olusegun Obasanjo, Atiku left the PDP for the first time in 2006 and joined the defunct Action Congress (AC) after years of internal battle with Obasanjo.

Atiku was in AC between 2006 and 2009 when he returned to the PDP, following a rumour of disagreements with one of the leaders of the AC and former governor of Lagos State, Bola Tinubu.

In 2010, he ran for the PDP presidential ticket prior to the 2011 election and lost to the then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan.

In August 2013 during the party’s national convention, he alongside seven governors staged a walkout, accusing the leadership of the party and then President Jonathan of impunity and formed a faction of the party called the ‘new PDP’.

He and five disgruntled governors of the PDP moved to the APC where he again, contested the party’s primaries and lost the ticket to President Muhammadu Buhari.

Atiku would later quit the party on November 24, 2017, arguing that the party has failed the people.

For his desire to rule the nation which has taken him in and out of PDP, ACN and APC, the former Vice President is seen largely as a ‘political prostitute’ who crosses from party to party for selfish ambition.

He recently told Nigerians that he was not desperate to become Nigerian president. “I am not desperate and if I were desperate, I would have taken the Presidency in 2003. If I were desperate, I would not have stepped down for (late Moshood) Abiola. I am not desperate,” Atiku said.