After Ezekwesili withdrew from the 2019 presidential race on Thursday, January 24, 2019, in order “to focus on helping to build a veritable coalition to ensure a viable alternative to the #APCPDP in the forthcoming elections,” ACPN Chairman, Ganiyu Galadima, addressed a press conference where he accused her of not doing enough as a presidential candidate, using the party’s platform to lobby for a finance minister position in Buhari’s government and not accounting for millions of Naira donated to her campaign.

And then the ACPN disowned her and endorsed APC candidate Muhammadu Buhari ahead of the election.

The allegations against Ezekwesili border on sabotage, scamming Nigerians emotionally and financially, corruption and borderline hypocrisy. Some of the allegations threaten to erode a chunk of the Oby Ezekwesili brand—one that has been erected on integrity, probity, credibility, transparency and a high sense of morality through the years. 

Ezekwesili has of course denied the allegations from Cabo in Mexico, where she is attending a meeting of the Albert Einstein’s Genius100 Visionaries.

“As for the defamatory statements made against my person by the ACPN leadership in their malicious statement, I want Nigerians to know that there is NO IOTA (emphasis hers) of truth in any of them. Everything ACPN wrote or said of the campaign donations is fabrication and outright lies”, Ezekwesili says. 

She adds that: “Only those who desperately wish to believe falsehoods would lend any credence to such puerile accusations by the leadership of ACPN. Only those who pretend ignorance of my legendary and uncompromising passion for accountability would give heed to such baseless statement”. 

Citing ACPN’s endorsement of APC’s President Buhari for the 2019 presidential election, Ezekwesili says ACPN’s values and vision do not align with hers, hence the separation.

“How could I upon realizing the divergence of values and vision with the leadership of the party continue to stand on such a political platform? The values and vision divergence with the party was a key factor that triggered my withdrawal from the presidential race on their ticket prompting me to dissociate immediately in order to help build a coalition for Good Governance. It is why I was instant in sacrificing my candidacy to uphold my values by withdrawing”, she explains further.

At issue here is also the coalition Ezekwesili intends to lead in this election and the chances of that coalition—now referred to as the 3rd force—getting off the ground or succeeding. Suffice to say that she won’t be able to forge this coalition or solicit for votes for the eventual consensus candidate of the coalition if she doesn’t take ACPN and its Chairman Ganiyu Galadima apart, piece by piece. Her credibility is the currency with which the coalition can trade.

There is also the small matter of how Ezekwesili, not famed for her error of judgment, settled on Galadima--who spectacularly flunked the vice presidential debate of December 2018--as her running mate, and how she settled for ACPN from a long list of 91 political parties, to pitch tent with.

Ezekwesili has promised to address a world press conference when she returns to Nigeria from Mexico and we all can’t wait for the evidence she brings with her to counter Galadima’s and the ACPN’s claims. And then she should go one better as well and sue since she considers the allegations defamatory. The game is the game, as they say.