Atiku formally announces his defection from APC to PDP via Facebook live
Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has used the social media platform to announce his formal return to the Peoples Democratic Party.
Atiku was a member of the All Progressives Congress until last week when he announced his departure. The party said he would not be sorely missed. The PDP has a national convention scheduled for 9 December in Port Harcourt.
He read a statement live on Facebook and photographs later distributed by the Atiku Media Office showed the former Vice President fiddling with his smartphone as he responded to questions from his Facebook followers.
Atiku, who is very active in the social media, including Twitter has 580,111 people following him on Facebook. On Twitter, he has 1.06m followers, which is below the fan base of Vice President Yemi Osinbajo who has 1.32m followers on Twitter alone. He has another 432,000 on Facebook, about 150,000 lower than Atiku’s fan base.
Atiku’s statement read, “Hello, my name is Atiku Abubakar.
I am speaking to you today on Facebook Live as I want to reach as many of our young people as possible as I have an important announcement to make about the future of Nigeria.
As it is you, our youths, who represent the future of our nation.
I have found in my travels across the country that whenever I get into conversations with young people their number one concern is whether they will be able to get a job for without a job they have no means of sustaining themselves or begin a family.
And without the security of a job we cannot have security in our country.
So without jobs there is no future for you or for Nigeria.
And I also know as a parent that the older generation is also concerned about jobs for their children and, too often today, for themselves as well.
Creating jobs is something I know about as I have created over 50,000 direct jobs and 250,000 indirect jobs in my own State of Adamawa.
And I also know how the Government can help create the right environment for businesses to create jobs. When I was Vice President in 1999 I was responsible for liberalising the telecoms sector which enabled us to increase the number of people who could access a phone from less than 1 million then to over 100 million today.
This transformation resulted in the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs from the top-up card vendors you see on every street corner to the many new businesses that fed off the mobile phone revolution.
Some of you may know that I was elected Vice President under the banner of the PDP, which is the political party I had helped to found some ten years before.
