Nigerians must shun choice of leaders based on sentiments – Atiku’s ex-campaign DG

A chieftain of the PDP in Lagos, Chief Layi Ogunbambi, yesterday said identity politics is a serious misnomer in Nigeria’s contemporary democracy.

He said the idea that a particular candidate should be supported or not on the basis of his ethnicity or religion shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the 2023 political discourse.

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Ogunbambi, who was the Director General of the Atiku Abubakar Campaign Council in Lagos during the 2019 elections, spoke with Daily Trust over the vexatious issue of zoning.

Ogunbambi said, “It becomes a serious misnomer when you find clergymen, clerics and scholars, when you find professionals, traders and some young men or elderly men talking about ‘he is our own’.

“So identity politics as a function of Yoruba emancipation is a serious misnomer in political scenery and practice. Is that the way to transform Nigeria? I think there is a need to separate issues. The linkage with eight years of Buhari as a Fulani man with the possibility of another four or eight years of another Fulani; they said Atiku is a Fulani man, I don’t know. Let’s even say they are right that he is also a Fulani man, now PDP started the concept of zoning. On that concept, the serious distortion of that concept didn’t come from the North. It came from the South.”