Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, Olorogun Festus Keyamo, SAN, has declared that former President Goodluck Jonathan remains constitutionally barred from seeking the presidency.
Keyamo, who spoke in an interview on Sunday, May 10, insisted that the former president’s reported presidential ambition was headed for a dead end in court.
The minister referenced the factional crisis rocking the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, pointing out that Jonathan’s reported association with the Turaki Umar faction, a faction he argued has no legal standing to field candidates, compounded what he described as an already hopeless constitutional situation for the former president.
“Jonathan is not constitutionally eligible to run it is as simple as that. The Supreme Court will most likely disqualify him. And I think he knows because they are dangling the ticket of the PDP that does not exist in law before him, the Turaki-led PDP that cannot field candidates. That is double tragedy for him. But I think they just want to participate in an academic exercise,” he said.
Jonathan served two oaths of office, completing the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s term from 2010 to 2011, then winning a full term from 2011 to 2015, a tenure profile that legal analysts have long argued renders him ineligible for another presidential run under the two-term limit enshrined in the 1999 Constitution.