TINUBU HELPED TO GIVE NIGERIA A BAD LEADER BECAUSE HE SELFISHLY WANTS TO HAVE HIS TURN AS PRESIDENT – DATTI-AHMED

Abuja: Senator Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, running mate to Mr Peter Obi, the Labour Party Presidential flag bearer, has alleged that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC deliberately pushed Nigeria into a mess by helping ‘a bad leader’ become president because of his own selfish ambition to lead the country.

Baba-Ahmed asserted that Tinubu’s decision to join forces with President Muhammadu Buhari ahead of the 2015 presidential election was not borne out of his conviction that Buhari was the right person to lead the country.

Baba-Ahmed alleged that Tinubu, who is the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) 2023 presidential candidate, only supported Buhari for his self-seeking ambition to take the reins of power in 2023.He stated this in an interview with Arise TV hours after the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, unveiled him as his running mate on Friday.

Recall that prior to his emergence, Tinubu had attacked Buhari, at a function in Abeokuta, Ogun State, claiming that Buhari could not have become President without him. He had gone further to make the now infamously famous statement in Yoruba, “Emi Lokan” meaning “It’s my turn (to be President)

While noting that Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, are ‘master politicians’, Baba-Ahmed said “right now, in the 2023 presidential election, all I can see is His Excellency Peter Obi, with due respect to the others.”He said, “I have worked with Atiku. Atiku is knowledgeable in his own right, a master politician and all that. Tinubu is the master politician but he didn’t have to give a Buhari to Nigeria for eight years because he wants to be president. He didn’t have to do all that. If he was that good, he should have simply taken Nigeria in 2015, why bring Buhari and all that has happened?“He (Buhari) yielded to the master politician of Nigeria (Tinubu) because they funded him. FIRS belongs to you (Tinubu), SGF belongs to you and he (Tinubu) is putting certain kinds of northerners so that by either 2019 or 2023, he could then draft them as his deputies. This is wrong.”

Baba-Ahmed described President Buhari as ‘a bad leader’ whose alleged misgovernance plunged the country into its current economic and security afflictions.He said the separate agitations for secession by Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igbo in the South East and South West, respectively, were a result of poor management of the country’s diversity by the president.

“They (agitations by Kanu and Igboho) have been handled very poorly. Because if for any reason I happened to be President Muhammadu Buhari, I would have in 2015 given Ogbonnaya Onu the SGF of Nigeria and told him I don’t want to hear anything as such. But Buhari was such a bad leader, why hold a part of the country with such disdain? Because they gave you 5% votes? He said it so if I repeat it I’m not wrong.

“I’m too Nigerian to succumb to answering questions about Sunday Igboho and (Nnamdi) Kanu. My overwhelming interest now, by engagement is education and by government role, is security and economy.“His Excellency Peter Obi is of a certain technical opinion that they (Igboho and Kanu) hardly exist and if you listen to his argument, he is right. If they had not been mismanaged, they would not be there today.”