Bola Tinubu, the presidential standard-bearer of the All Progressives Congress, appears stupid to everyone in Nigeria, says his campaign organisation.

Specifically, the APC presidential campaign council’s spokesman Festus Keyamo said he and other APC members were proud to look stupid campaigning for Mr Tinubu. 

“People say you can’t campaign for Asiwaju without looking stupid. I have heard such comment and I love that comment a lot. So, we are proud to look stupid. To campaign for a genius who appears stupid to everybody now,” Mr Keyamo stated.

His comments came on the heels of Dino Melaye’s criticism that based on President Muhammadu Buhari’s abysmal performance, anyone campaigning for APC’s presidential candidate, Mr Tinubu, would look stupid.

Mr Melaye is a spokesman for Atiku Abubakar’s presidential campaign organisation.

Reacting to Mr Melaye’s comment in an interview with ThisDay, Mr Keyamo said, “You know why I love that comment that you can’t look stupid? Because only geniuses look stupid. The Newtons of this world looked stupid.”

The junior labour minister, however, declared that Mr Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos, would be the easiest presidential candidate to campaign for ahead of the 2023 general elections.

According to him, facts and figures support Mr Tinubu’s presidential candidature. 

“I have said it on different fora that Asiwaju is the easiest candidate to market. On the surface, people just thought like ‘is this guy joking? Is he insane?’,” added Mr Keyamo. “By the time we begin to roll out the records, the facts and the figures, it will now become clear that nobody is close to Asiwaju.”

Before now, Mr Keyamo had said Mr Tinubu would run Nigeria exactly like Mr Buhari’s regime. 

Former APC chair Adams Oshiomhole had tried to distance Mr Tinubu from the failure of the Buhari regime. But Mr Keyamo insisted the media misinterpreted Mr Oshiomhole’s statement.

“It is the same APC template that both leaders (Buhari and Tinubu) that they will use,” Mr Keyamo said in an interview on Channels TV. “I saw one misleading headline from one of the papers yesterday, and I laughed. It was misleading, misinterpreting what one of our leaders said. That we were distancing ourselves from the records of Buhari, that is utter nonsense.”