Adamu Garba withdraws from presidential race after raising N83.2m donations

Adamu Garba, a presidential aspirant on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, has withdrawn from contesting the presidential ticket of the party.

Garba while addressing newsmen on Monday in Abuja, the country’s capital, said his withdrawal from the presidential race was due to the high cost of picking the presidential forms and the cost of running for the office.

He predicted the high cost of presidential forms as an attempt to commercialize the country’s politics.

He said his decision not to obtain the party’s presidential forms, was an outcome of due consultation with his campaign team, which he said had raised N83.2 million in private and via online donations.

He noted that the donations would be sent back to the donors.

He said his next political endeavor would be revealed very soon.

He said, “We believe this action is capable of over financialising our political space, institutionalizing vote-buying, encouraging corruption, and complete obliteration the youth and the poor from participation.

“When we raised this concern on several media fora, the party, however, believed the high cost of form will separate the serious contenders from unserious ones.

“This goes contrary to our belief that you can only separate serious contenders from unserious ones by the competency, capacity, credibility, strength of the programme, workable solutions, and sellable candidate to Nigeria through rapid intraparty debates and other high-level criteria reviews that can ensure we present a better leader for future for Nigeria.

“We further discovered that even if we went ahead to obtain the form, the party has foreclosed the plan for primary election because of the presence of the request for a Letter of Voluntary withdrawal on page 18 of the nomination form.

“I cannot, in all honesty, rally funds from my supporters in the hope that we will be having a primary election, then sign a postdated letter of voluntary withdrawal from the contest.”

He remarked that the party had taken many steps that may likely dent its democratic image.

“These steps, if not changed, could reverse the gains we make over time and return us back to centrist, sycophantic, patronage-driven unitary systems, a situation we have to avoid at all costs in the interest of the future of Nigeria,” he said.