Ex Speaker of House of Representatives, Ghali Umar Na’Abba has advised President Muhammadu Buhari to beware of former President Olusegun Obasanjo because he has nothing to offer.
During an interview with Vanguard, Na’Abba said Buhari shouldn’t allow Obasanjo to distract him.
He said “The other day, I watched on television Obasanjo’s emissary handing over documents to Buhari on power infrastructure developed by his think tank, an action that made me laugh profusely.
“How could someone who spent $16b on power without achieving anything when he was President bring a proposal on that matter to anybody! While I would not advise Buhari to repay Obasanjo in his own coins, I would advocate that he should not allow him to be distracting him.
“He hasn’t got any ideas to offer him. Of recent, he took some Colombians to Buhari and introduced them as experts on insurgency. Up till now, Colombia is battling insurgents. So I don’t see how the Colombians would help end insurgency in Nigeria.So, he should relate with him with some circumspection.
“It must never escape Buhari’ s memory that all the difficulties Nigeria is going through today are Obasanjo ‘s handiwork, including the fielding of the likes of Umaru Y’ar’adua and Goodluck Jonathan to be President and Vice President and subsequently the President in spite of the known condition and limitations of all of them.
“He did that with the sole purpose of continuing to run the government from Otta, which unfortunately for him failed. Both denied him that privilege and guarded their mandates jealously. This accounted for his hostility to Jonathan.”
On state of Peoples Democratic Party before the elections, he said “There was also schism between the President and the party as the President lost confidence in the National Chairman because, according to them, he was planning to contest for the presidency at the expense of Jonathan. The National Chairman also lost confidence in the President. The general feeling among party officials then, was that Jonathan could not win the presidency for the party and had thus become a liability.
“There was also schism between the Presidency and the presidential campaign organization over finances, protocol, procedure and which organ to spearhead the campaign. There was the factor of the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria’s involvement in the campaign which met with a lot of resentment from party members. No one knew them in the party, but they took over the activities of the party and they seemed to enjoy Jonathan’s backing.
“Overall, the government was behaving like a cartel such that most members and organs of the party were not privy to the goings on in government. Under such circumstance, there was no way the party could have won the election because it was out of touch with the people and reality. Members in majority of the states felt they no longer had any stake in the party. The PDP of 1998 that ushered in the new democracy in 1998 had transformed into a bizarre contraption practicing everything but democracy.”
