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The Presidency has welcomed former President Goodluck Jonathan to the 2027 Presidential race.
There have been speculations that the former President is planning to stage a comeback.
On Sunday, former Minister of Information and Orientation, Professor Jerry Gana, said Jonathan would contest the 2027 presidential election on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Speaking to journalists shortly after the PDP Congress in Minna, Niger State, at the weekend ,Gana said Nigerians had experienced two other leaders after Jonathan and know the difference.
“In 2015, former President Goodluck Jonathan said his ambition was not worth the blood of Nigerians. After him, another President ruled for eight years, and now another has ruled for two years.”
“Nigerians have seen the difference, and the difference is very clear. Nigerians are now asking us to bring back our friend, former President Goodluck Jonathan. I can confirm that Goodluck Ebele Jonathan will contest the presidential election in 2027 as PDP candidate, and we should be prepared to vote for him to return as President again,” he had said.
Responding in a statement on Monday, Bayo Onanuga, Presidential spokesman, welcomed Jonathan to the race, but said “Nigerians would remember his dismal record.”
“As we begin the march towards the 2027 elections prematurely foisted on the nation by the desperation of the opposition ganging up against President Bola Tinubu despite his glaring giant economic strides, we are once again regaled with a cacophony of voices, most of them full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, to paraphrase inimitable Williams Shakespeare in one of his classic works, Macbeth.”
“One recent statement that stands out in its absurdity is Professor Jerry Gana’s. The former Minister of Information and National Orientation, moving to draft former President Goodluck Jonathan into the 2007 presidential race, affirmed that the former president would contest the coming election on the platform of the discredited People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which bequeathed a legacy of economic ruins, after 16 years of bad governance.
“Gana even deluded himself, asserting that the former President would defeat President Tinubu to reclaim power after 12 years.
“Prof. Gana of the defunct MAMSER fame is free to delude himself and engage in his usual comedy; after all, Jonathan’s entering the race would provide another job for the Niger State-born former university don.
However, we should caution former President Jonathan to be wary of the PDP sugar-coated cheerleaders. Politicians of Jerry Gana’s ilk merely want to lure him into the race to satisfy their personal, political, religious, and ethnic interests. They will abandon him midstream, as they did in 2015, and leave Gentleman Jonathan in the lurch.
“Shorn of all those selfish considerations for which some PDP big guns find his candidacy appealing, President Jonathan will also have his encounter with the people as to whether he has anything new to offer after his disastrous six years, for which they voted him out in 2015.
“President Jonathan and others are welcome to the 2027 race. They broke the economy before, but millions of Nigerians, who will not easily forget the recent past, will not allow them to return and run it down again.”
