Nigeria’s opposition picks Abubakar to battle Buhari

Bloomberg

Nigeria’s main opposition party nominated former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as its candidate to challenge President Muhammadu Buhari in February’s elections in Africa’s biggest oil producer.
Abubakar, 71, won the People’s Democratic Party’s primaries with 1,532 votes, Ifeanyi Okowa, chairman of the nomination convention committee and governor of Delta state, said on Sunday in the oil hub of Port Harcourt. He beat 11 other candidates including Sokoto state Governor Aminu Tambuwal and Senate President Bukola Saraki, who got 693 votes and 317 votes respectively. He’s been trying to win the presidency for more than a decade.
The choice of Abubakar, who hails from the northeast, could divide the vote in Buhari’s northern base. Nigeria’s northeast and northwest regions, which accounted for 40 percent of registered voters in 2015, together gave Buhari 81 percent of their ballots in the last election.
“A lot of people are rating him as the strongest against Buhari; I’m not so sure,” Amaka Anku, the head of Eurasia Group’s Africa Practice, said in an emailed response. “I think it will be an uphill battle. He represents the past, and has no real raison d’etre, and is the weakest on Buhari’s strongest suit: integrity.”
Abubakar defected from the ruling All Progressives Congress last year, returning to the PDP, under which he served as vice president from 1999 to 2007.