Ex-generals can’t stop Buhari’s re-election – Presidency

The Presidency said none of President Muhammadu Buhari’s contemporaries in the army and former leaders advising him against seeking re-election can stop him in 2019.

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said in an interview in Abuja that even if they contested against Buhari, he would defeat them.

A former president, Olusegun Obasanjo and a former military president, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, had earlier this year separately written scathing letters advising Buhari not to run for the 2019 presidential election.

The presidential spokesman said he would advise Buhari to run for second term “because he richly deserves a second term in office.”

He said: “My response to them (Buhari’s contemporaries in the military and former leaders) is that if they like, they can come and contest against President Buhari. He will defeat them, all of them.”

Shehu also explained that Buhari was yet to declare his intention for 2019, because he was focused on the problems facing the nation.

“The president himself, his passion is for the country. This is a president whose passion is not even for the office. Even when everyone is asking him to go for a second term, he is keeping quiet because his focus remains the nation and the problems of the country,” he said.

For those asking Buhari not to talk about second term when people are hungry, Shehu said: “With all the noise the PDP is making, even during their tenure as president did they give breakfast lunch and dinner to every citizen? Is there any country in which someone does not go hungry? I am not saying it is perfectly in order but they are just politicizing these issues.

“This is a government that has removed this country from the shame of food importation, every state of the country now is into rice production, and we are feeding not only Nigeria but West Africa. And the government is working on having respectable prices for food items; food inflation is coming down grossly. Everyone complaining of hunger should go and work.”

The presidential spokesman hinted that Buhari would continue working with all his ministers, since he had not sacked them as being demanded in some quarters.

Shehu defended the proposed amnesty for the Boko Haram insurgents, saying “Whoever is peddling these rumours that Boko Haram is being granted amnesty and so on, I would ask them who doesn’t want to make peace with the enemy? In any case, as it is proverbially said, all wars end up in the boardroom. You can defeat people technically in the field but at the end you must come to the conference room to resolve all issues.”