A former Director-General of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), Osita Okechukwu, has faulted the claim by a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha, that President Bola Tinubu was not instrumental to the 2015 electoral victory of former President Muhammadu Buhari.
PREMIUM TIMES reported Mr Mustapha as saying that President Bola Tinubu, who was the leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC) at the time, did not make Mr Buhari president.
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He explained that Mr Buhari was already famous and had over 12 million votes in his kitty before the 2015 election.
“The merger of the legacy parties merely contributed three million votes to his victory at the 2015 presidential election,” Mr Mustapha said at the public presentation of a book authored by Garba Shehu, a media aide to the former president, on Wednesday in Abuja.
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The Presidency swiftly rejected the assertion, describing it as “a disservice to our recent history.”
In a statement shared with PREMIUM TIMES, Mr Okechukwu, an APC chieftain who served as VON DG in the administration of Mr Buhari, submitted that President Tinubu laid the premium golden victory votes which made him (Buhari) president in 2015.
“May I, hereby, plead that there is no need for controversy because my friend, Boss Mustaph, should be excused as he was not with us in 2003 when Buhari began the presidential race.
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“He was in ACN and did not know the water which passed the realpolitik bridge; this is why he relied only on mathematical calculations of votes in 2015 and not on realpolitik,” Mr Okechukwu said.
The former DG is one of Mr Buhari’s long-standing political associates. He left the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) with the former president to float the equally defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), which later merged with other opposition parties to form the APC.
He was the CPC governorship candidate in Enugu State in the 2011 election.
Speaking further, Mr Okechukwu recalled that in “Mr Buhari’s first election in 2003, their submission at the Presidential Election Tribunal was that Buhari won majority votes, not only the 12.7 million, which INEC allocated to him, the ground upon which a former justice of the Supreme Court, Slyverster Nsofor’s minority judgment rested on that slip numbering, was jettisoned.”
He added, “Then in the 2007 general elections, one of the worst, Buhari was rigged out, which made the famous beneficiary, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua to graciously admit that the election which brought him to power was flawed.
“In 2011, when our merger with Tinubu’s ACN failed, Buhari lost, and we rekindled the ACN merger once again. Luckily, this time, it produced the premium golden victory votes that propelled our principal to Aso Rock.”
Mr Okechukwu said that President Tinubu’s premium golden votes were laid the day he (Tinubu) unequivocally guaranteed Mr Buhari that he would support him to be president with all his political structure.
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The former VON DG recounted that when Mr Tinubu was asked about his friendship with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and former Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, “he (Tinubu) agreed and said that he had told them that Mr Buhari is the man with a formidable 12 million vote bank to support.”
“I am a witness to how this scenario played out when we, the delegates of the defunct CPC, were instructed to negotiate only with the ACN.
“And when we arrived at Chief Tom Ikimi’s Maitama (Abuja) house, we refused to negotiate with ANPP and co. It took pleadings and adjournments before we all sat together to hatch the APC merger in July 2013. The rest they say is history. Truly, without Asiwaju’s premium supplementary votes, no two-thirds spread and no victory,” Mr Okechukwu said.
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