Ahead of the 2023 general election, former military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB), has urged Nigerians not to vote anybody who is above 60 years of age as the president.
Babangida stated this during a television interview on Friday, August 6, IBB, adding that one of the reasons Nigeria has refused to progress and achieve the dreams of the founding fathers was because Nigerians no longer believed in the future of their own country.
According to him, the nation is endowed with both human and natural resources. He also added that the country had a few individuals who were in their 60s, and had the capacity to become president and could effectively run the country.
For many, this is a setback for both Atiku and Tinubu who would be in their 70s in 2023.
The ex-vice president Atiku, who is presently 75 would be 77 in 2023, while Tinubu, who marked an official 68th birthday in March, would have turned 70 years by the next general elections.
The national leader of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and former vice president of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar are set to contest for president in the 2023 general election.
The former leader, who accused the Nigerian people of creating and at the same time, destroying their own country, identified bad leadership as yet a major reason for the socio-economic challenges facing Nigeria.
Speaking about possible 2023 presidential candidates, IBB said there were persons in their 60s with contacts across the nation who had been traversing the geo-political zones marketing their acceptability and capacity.
He said: “If you get a good leadership that links with the people and tries to talk with the people; not talking on top of the people, then we would be okay.
“I have started visualising a good Nigerian leader. That is, a person, who travels across the country and has a friend virtually everywhere he travels to and he knows at least one person that he can communicate with.
“That is a person, who is very versed in economics and is also a good politician, who should be able to talk to Nigerians and so on. I have seen one, or two or three of such persons already in his sixties.”
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