Adams Oshiomhole, former National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has claimed that APC presidential candidate Bola Tinubu prevented former President Olusegun Obasanjo from taking over Lagos State while he was Governor.
WITHIN NIGERIA reports that the former Edo State Governor stated this on Thursday while speaking at an APC presidential campaign rally in Benin City, the state capital.
Oshiomhole stated that Tinubu fought to preserve and defend Nigeria’s multiparty democracy when the former President sought to turn the country into a one-party state.
He claimed that despite Obasanjo’s efforts to seize Lagos after seizing other South West states, the former President failed, and Tinubu won the battle and later reclaimed other states.
Oshiomhole said:
Today, across Nigeria, if you are going to understand why Obasanjo failed to transform Nigeria to a one-party state, you cannot forget the dogged fight of our presidential candidate to maintain and defend multiparty democracy in Nigeria.
Unless we get the politics right, we cannot fix the economy.
The world is unanimous that multiparty democracy is the way to go. I want young people to remember where we are coming from. Our youths need to know who laid the foundation for the crisis we face and the crisis our presidential candidate is going to resolve.
We are not lamenting it, but we must make you understand your past in order to appreciate the future.
By 1999, President Obasanjo took over ANPP. He appointed the chairman as his adviser and called the governors to move. By 2003, he rigged out all the south-west governors. He took out Lam Adesina, Segun Osoba — all the south-west governors — and planted PDP in the south-west.
Obasanjo tried to take Lagos and Tinubu stopped him. Tinubu showed him he is field marshal of politics while he (Obasanjo) is the army general. At the end of the day, Lagos survived. The rest of the South-West, Obasanjo rigged them over.
Asiwaju decided he is not going to cry. He retained Lagos. They moved away the commissioner of police; they moved away INEC… because Obasanjo wanted to play a do-or-die politics. But Asiwaju said ‘you (Obasanjo) will do; we will live’. Tinubu came back to reclaim Oyo, Ekiti, Osun, and Ondo states.