President Muhammadu Buhari has restated his gratitude to Nigerians for
his victory at the general elections saying he emerged winner against
all odds.
Speaking at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, Thursday,
Mr. Buhari that he won the election despite the deployment of state
forces against him.
“Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you
is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people
think he was not going to win,” said Garba Shehu, Senior Special
Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, who represented Mr.
Buhari.
“Americans say that elections are won on the dollar.
It’s very improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We
didn’t have advertising money on our campaign. Even when we had little
money to spend on advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority was not
making available to us slots, neither was AIT.
“I remember on a
particular night I called NTA, they had 16 slots of one minute adverts
and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari campaign, they said
all 16 had been sold.
“Some other instances that exposed the
partisan nature of the NTA. Money was returned to us, from AIT money was
returned to us. They simply won’t advertise for us.”
Mr. Shehu
expressed the presidency’s gratitude to Statecraft, an arm on The Red
Media, for ”selling an unlikely candidate to a very skeptical nation.”
“The
day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to see that my
house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the
campaign,” Mr. Shehu said.
“In fact it was the cocking of their
guns that rose me and my family members from our sleep. Only to discover
that tens of policemen, police vehicles, and some other unidentified
vehicles darkened our windows around my home.
“The first thing I
did was to say ‘Who will help me out of this situation?’ I needed to
expose what was going on, and the first man I reached was Adebola
Williams of Statecraft. Adebola began to announce on Facebook and
Twitter from that moment until the security elements realized that the
whole world was looking at what they were doing, because I remained
indoors throughout the siege.
“Of course it was much later that
we came to know why they had come. Even the APC Presidential Campaign
was penetrated by fifth columnists, and I will make this confession,
because a day before that siege we had had a meeting with the security
committee at which we agreed that we were going to run a story
announcing that the National Security Adviser at that time, Mr. Sambo
Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against Muhammadu Buhari.
“The former National Security Adviser was involved in a coup that threw out Muhammadu Buhari as military president in 1984.
“This
time around, all the things that followed, the postponement of the
election on account of this and that and a lot of the thinking of the
campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by the
National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege
on our homes was to pre-empt the story.”