We had it tough with AIT, NTA on 2015 election –Presidency

President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, yesterday said the president’s party, the APC, had it tough in the hands of the African Independent Television and Nigeria Television Authority (AIT) in the build up to the 2015 presidential election.

Speaking at the Red Media Summit in Lagos yesterday Shehu applauded Nigerians for electing the APC in the March 28, 2015 presidential election.

According to him, in spite of the hostility of media houses such as AIT and NTA coupled with the deployment of state apparatus against Buhari, he still emerged victorious.

“President Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people though he was not going to win. Americans say 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,” Shehu recalled.

He however applauded the effort of Red Media through one of its units, Statecraft, which he said helped in selling the president to the acceptability of Nigerians.