Former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar is planning to return to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a party that expelled him last year in the wake of his political face-off with the former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. P.M. News can authoritatively reveal that Atiku’s return to the PDP, of which he was a co-founder in 1998, is almost complete and will be consummated in the next few weeks.

Sources told P.M. News that Atiku has been in consultations with President Umar Yar’Adua on this planned return and one of the conditions to facilitate the move has been fulfilled by Yar’Adua with the sending of Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes, on study leave to the Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, in Kuru, Jos. It is believed that the course may be a way by Aso Rock to ease Ribadu out of the EFCC job.

P.M. News sources said Atiku has personally applauded the action by the president and declared a truce.

“Atiku cannot forgive Ribadu over his role in his political battle with his former boss, with the EFCC offering itself to be used to humiliate him and scuttle his presidential ambition under the banner of the PDP”. In the run up to the 2007 poll, the EFCC had come out with an indictment of Atiku over mismanagement of the finances of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund, then under Atiku’s supervision. Atiku’s spirited fight that the indictment was a witchhunt did not stop Obasanjo from ensuring that Atiku was expelled from the PDP and excluded from running for the presidency on the PDP platform.
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P.M. News sources said returneeAtiku may vie for the position of chairman Board of Trustees of the PDP, a position now being occupied by former president and Atiku’s estranged boss, Olusegun Obasanjo.

“Atiku wants to give OBJ the Zuma treatment at the convention of the party’, said a source close to the deal, referring to the recent convention of the ruling African National Congress in South Africa, where a disgraced former vice-president, Jacob Zuma, defeated the sitting president Thabo Mbeki in the race for the leadership of the party.

If this is true then I think politics is simply mysterious