Atiku tipped to emerge as candidate for coalition of 40 political parties

National Chairman of the National Unity Party (NUP) and a member of the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), Perry Opara, has said that the Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) will emerge as the consensus candidate. This is as the 40- member party coalition prepares to nominate one candidate in a couple of days.
Opara told BusinessDay in an interview that the former Vice President has all it takes to emerge the overall choice of the coalition to challenge President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 Presidential election.
He also predicted that Atiku will defeat President Buhari in the election even as he said that more people will dump the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) before the 2019 elections.
“In a couple of days from now we are going to do election to choose our consensus presidential candidate and I am one of those talking with other CUPP members. I am campaigning vigorously for Atiku, I want other CUPP members to vote for Atiku when we converge to do the nomination. Atiku is the best candidate for consensus presidential candidate irrespective of the fact that other political parties also have their own presidential candidate but we are urging everybody to queue behind Atiku, he will deliver, he is going to beat APC and all of us are going to smile at the end of the day. So I urge the CUPP members to rally round Atiku,” he said.
He said that another wave of defection will hit the APC saying “in APC, it has already started, people are angry, there are parallel congresses and people are complaining, even serving governors are complaining bitterly, senators are complaining, so the implosion will soon come, watch out and see, before we start the campaigns there will be more and more defections from the APC. Nigerians are people you don’t push to the wall and expect them not to react, they are going to react because things have gone wrong in the country and we need to fix it.”
Opara noted that the election of Atiku Abubakar in the PDP Primary “is a step in the right direction, it was unprecedented in Nigeria’s history, we have not seen a thing like that, where more than ten people will run for one office and at the end of the day there was cohesion, everybody accepted the result, no one has complained about the conduct, it shows that PDP has been reinvigorated and reformed,” he said.