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I Advised Obasanjo Not To Join Politics – Abdulsalami Abubakar Trust TV Interview

I Advised Obasanjo Not To Join Politics – Abdulsalami Abubakar Trust TV Interview

Former  Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd), has revealed how he advised former President Olusegun Obasanjo against joining politics shortly after he was freed from detention.

Obasanjo, who was detained by the regime of late General Sani Abacha, regained freedom when Abdulsalami took over power.

Yet, we ended up with Obasanjo, the whole process ended up producing another general as president and people keep saying that you generals actually found a way to organise this transition. He was in prison and somehow he was brought out, dressed up as a civilian candidate, and became president. There is this believe that this is all arranged by the leading generals of the period.

Thank you for asking that question. I always smile and laugh when I am accused or my Government is accused of imposing Obasanjo.

Now of course we released Obasanjo and other prisoners and pardoned them. So when Obasanjo was released he came to see me, saying he was going to take the Government to Court. “Why are you going to do that?” He said his business was crumbled by the military, his human rights have been violated, that he did not commit any coup and so on and so forth. I said “Sir, please let bygone be bygone, thank God you are alive today, forget about these things. Some of the issues you mentioned, within my power I will look into that, so we left it at that”.

The next time he came to see me was to tell me that he had been approached by this group of people, they want to make him the candidate to stand for election.

I said “Sir, if I were you, please disregard this people, Sir, go home and rest and sort your health out and so on and so forth”. He said “Okay, General thank you for your advice, I will get back to you”. He never got back to me. The next I hear was that he was one of the presidential candidates.

I tried to tell people that I had nothing to do in bringing Obasanjo to contest the election. Whatever must have happened was within the political parties and so on.

But you had to rehabilitate him after prison…

Like I had all other prisoners! What do you mean by I had to rehabilitate him?

Well I am thinking of his businesses, whether he was helped with something to revive them which was one of his complaints.

Of course not only him, all people that were imprisoned in one way or the other, we tried to rehabilitate them; to help them in one way or the other. In one way or the other we did what we could to assist them, so you cannot equate that to bringing him to contest for an election.

 Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd), has revealed how he advised former President Olusegun Obasanjo against joining politics shortly after he was freed from detention.  Obasanjo, who was detained by the regime of late General Sani Abacha, regained freedom when Abdulsalami took over power.

Close allies of yours, General Babangida and General Gusau seem to have been involved in this PDP arrangement and that is why it is assumed you would be in the know and probably help here and there with the situation.

Of course I know the situation of the political parties; of course we had to intervene in one way or the other to give peace a chance. We put some conditions for the registration of political parties, in order to make peace reign we had to tinker with some of the conditions because categorically the AD did not qualify, it was only I think PDP or APP that qualified to be registered as political parties.

But if we had not done that we would still not be out of the woods. There was this agitation from the South West that they have been shortchanged and so on and so forth, so we said look, what we are trying to do is bring peace, no laws are sacrosanct, let’s see how we can tinker. So we tinkered and allowed the AD to be registered and thereby we were able to placate another area where there will be unrest and accusations; so we did.

Now if in the process of making political parties, people are jockeying here and there, please take my administration out of this tinkering. We didn’t know anything, we did not say look make A, B, C, D the presidential candidate, it is an issue between the political parties.

If as you have said Babangida, Aliyu Gusau have played a role, that must be a role they were playing with the political parties because they became members of political parties.

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