Former Minister of Women Affairs and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain, Josephine Anenih, has claimed that former Vice President Atiku Abubakar effectively left the party shortly after the 2023 presidential election—not in June 2025, as widely reported.
Speaking during a television interview on Thursday, Anenih, who once served as PDP’s national woman leader, said Atiku had become inactive within the party since his defeat at the polls.
“If you ask me, I would say he didn’t exit yesterday; he had exited after the last election,” she said. “Maybe he held a conference once after the polls, and that was it. He hasn’t been involved.”
Anenih added that party members had reached out to Atiku multiple times, urging him to assume leadership during a time of crisis within the PDP.
“Even the women of the Board of Trustees visited him and told him the party was drifting due to lack of leadership. We reminded him that we saw him as our ‘baba’, our leader, and expected him to give direction.”
Despite Atiku’s resignation, Anenih insisted that the PDP would survive under the watch of its founding members.
“In 1998, we didn’t have all those people. It was grassroots members like us who built the PDP and won elections,” she noted. “As Chief Bode George said, anybody can go, anybody can come. But for those of us who believe in PDP, we’ll keep it alive. The PDP won’t die on our watch—maybe after we’re gone, but not now.”
Atiku formally resigned from the PDP in a letter dated July 14, 2025, addressed to the chairman of the party in his home ward in Adamawa State. In the letter, he cited irreconcilable differences and a departure from the party’s founding principles as reasons for his exit.
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