2023: Why Atiku should have been disqualified – Kenneth Okonkwo

Kenneth Okonkwo, a chieftain of the Labour Party in Abuja, has said Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the 2023 election, should have been disqualified “for making a genocidal statement” in Kaduna recently.

POLITICS NIGERIA recalls that following an interactive session with Arewa groups in Kaduna State earlier this month, Atiku came under fire from a majority of the public for his advice to Northerners that they should vote for him in the 2023 election because he hails from the northern region.

He told his audience not to support a Yoruba or Igbo candidate in reference to the presidential candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, and his Labour Party counterpart, Peter Obi.

For Okonkwo, that statement alone should have “disqualified” Atiku from the 2023 presidential race.

“He went to the North, and made a genocidal statement. This was what cause genocide in Rwanda. When Hutus were told that they should not support Tutsis because they are cockroaches,” Okonkwo said in an interview on Channels TV’s Politics Today on Thursday night.

“Atiku Abubakar went to the North and said northerners should support only the people from the North, not Yoruba, not Igbo. That is ethnic profiling. That’s genocidal statement.”