• Kachikwu extols ex-leader on N’Delta deal with militants
Former Secretary to Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, yesterday, dismissed the contributions of the incumbent, President Bola Tinubu, to the emergence of Muhammadu Buhari in 2015. He stated this while explaining why the amalgam of political parties that coalesced to form the All Progressives Congress (APC) settled for the Daura, Katsina State native as its presidential candidate for the poll.
Speaking at the unveiling of the book, “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” written by Garba Shehu, the ex-scribed argued that Buhari already had 12 million existing votes, adding that the merger merely contributed three million votes.
Mustapha, who was a member of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), explained that most of the founding members of the APC in the mould of President Tinubu were left with no choice at the time than to settle for Buhari, who administered the country between 2015 and 2023. He said: “I do not intend to stir up any controversy. The merger in 2013 was midwifed to create a Buhari presidency. Let us look at the statistics.
In the 2003 election, it was the Obasanjo, Buhari presidential contest where Buhari recorded 2.7 million. In the next election, he got 12.7 million votes. In 2007, it came to 6.6 million, and it went back to 12.2 million in 2011.
“When we were conceptualising the merger; what would give us a headstart and obviously, it was at the back of our consciousness that the merger with the Congress for Progressives Change (CPC), though it has only one state, the ACN has six states, ANPP three states, and when you sum up the total votes that gave us the presidency in 2015, the aggregate of the total votes was 15.4 million.
“So, basically, what we brought to the table after the merger outside the Buhari’s 12.5 million votes was three million.”
ALSO, former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Dr Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, recalled how ex-President Buhari was afraid that he would be kidnapped by militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta region when he offered to negotiate a peace deal with the stakeholders.
At the programme, he remarked that Buhari told him he could not afford to pay ransom to kidnappers in the event he fell into their trap. He explained that it is to the credit of the former leader that he was able to ramp up oil production from 800,000 to two million barrels per day after he brokered the deal with the militants, with the support of the late Chief Edwin Clark-led Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF)
