Olalekan Adetayo, Abuja
The Minister of Communications, Alhaji Adebayo Shittu, on Monday said despite the criticisms that trailed his distribution of President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election campaign caps at the last meeting of the Federal Executive Council, he had no regrets about his action.
Speaking with State House correspondents at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, the minister said he was not guilty of breaking any law.
He said all he did was to pronounce an intention.
“It is true that the constitution and the electoral law talk of campaigns starting 90 days before elections, but there is no law stopping announcement of intentions. There is a difference between campaigns and intentions,” he said.
Shittu said the event he organised in Ibadan, Oyo State, was not a campaign event but the opening of the South-West Zonal Office of the Muhammadu Buhari/Osinbajo Dynamic Support Group.
He said, “This organisation has been in existence for more than six years. So, if it did not have presence in the South-West, and now, because they appointed me as chairman of the Board of Trustees and I feel that as a serious-minded person, we need to have presence in the South-West in preparation for the campaigns, I don’t see what is wrong with that.
“So, I plead not guilty to the issue of starting a campaign before time. The best thing we could say is that it has been a pronouncement of an intention.
“The man himself has not declared but we are saying we will persuade him to declare his intention at the appropriate time and we are going to support him.”
Shittu also faulted a statement credited to former President Olusegun Obasanjo calling on Buhari not to seek re-election.
He accused Obasanjo of engaging in sensationalism, which, he said, had been the ex-President’s stock-in-trade for the past 30 years.
Shittu said, “Obasanjo, as a Nigerian, has the right to hold an opinion. If Obasanjo holds an opinion that Mr. President has performed less than it should be, those of us who are in the position to know better has a right to also state the other side, which perhaps Obasanjo is ignorant of.
“There are some people who enjoy engaging in sensationalism. With due respect to Gen. Obasanjo, if you take his history over the last 30 years, there is hardly any regime other than his own that he did not criticise except Sani Abacha, who didn’t wait for Obasanjo to criticise him before he sent him to the Gulag.
“So many Nigerians know that Obasanjo enjoys this type of sensationalism. In any case, no matter what impression you have of me, do you have a right to tell me not to contest an election? I mean we should talk like people who are educated, who know our left from the right.
“There are procedures for elections. President Buhari is a member of the APC and the APC has its rules and regulations as to how candidates will emerge.
“If members of the party feel that the President has not performed well enough, it is for them to show that during the primary election. It is not for anybody to short-change Nigerians and prevent people from offering themselves for an election.
“In any case, since Obasanjo is no more a member of our party, with due respect to him, it doesn’t lie in his mouth to tell us who among our party members or leaders should contest or should not contest.
“I think Nigerians should concede this privilege to us, the members of the APC, to decide the fate of Mr. President when the next rounds of primaries come.”
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Source: Punch
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