Bola Tinubu will run on the template of President Muhammadu Buhari if elected president in 2023, his campaign spokesman Festus Keyamo clarified on Friday.

Presidential Candidate Tinubu is seeking to succeed his partyman in the next dispensation but there have been concerns about the direction his government would run given the woeful performance of the incumbent.

Mr Tinubu’s associate and former party chairman Adams Oshiomhole had on Thursday sought to extricate Mr Tinubu from the failure of the Buhari regime, claiming his man has not been part of the government.

But Mr Keyamo, a serving junior minister for Labour and Employment said Mr Oshiomhole was misinterpreted by the media.

“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 on Friday night.

“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. Like I said, we are proud of the record of the APC.” The APC chieftain said.

Mr Keyamo emphasised that Mr Tinubu is proud of the achievements of the Buhari regime. He said Mr Tinubu may however choose to improve on certain aspects of governance “on the same template of progressivism.”

Nigeria has regressed on almost all indexes of national development in over seven years of the Buhari regime with worsening insecurity and the economy in comatose. Public universities have been shut for about six months as lecturers continue agitation over poor condition of service.

In 2018, Nigeria displaced India to become the world’s poverty capital, according to a report by Brookings Institution, while Nigeria’s total public debt hit N41.60 trillion under the watch of the Buhari-led regime, according to the Debt Management Office.