2019: Buhari not desperate for power – Presidency

The Presidency said an important motivation for President Muhammadu Buhari’s bid for second term is that the gains made from 2015 should not be frittered.

According to the Presidency, Buhari “is not involved in corruption and is not desperate for the office.”

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Malam Garba Shehu, said this yesterday in a statement entitled “Buhari’s 2019 Bid and Matters Arising.”

He said since Buhari announced his intention to seek re-election on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress, “All hell has been let loose by the chaotic, illprepared opposition camp.”

He said Buhari “Is among the few leaders we have, who are not obsessed with money, cars and homes, but working passionately for the country’s economy, peace and safety.”

Shehu said if a corrupt politician wins in 2019, the country would go back to where it was in 2015.

He said in all democracies, second terms by incumbents are usually harder to get simply because somehow, there is always some kind of anti-incumbency leading to a loss of faith among those supporters.

“For President Buhari, who won with massive votes in 2015, his major challenge is to do as well as he did, or even better. He came to power with a lot of expectations and Nigerians had, justifiably placed very high hopes on him. As we said sometimes back, he as a consequence, has became a victim of the tyranny of expectations. The weight of unrealistic expectations has evidently blinded many of the people from seeing the revolutionary changes happening across the nation. Nigerians expected him to undo the damage in several decades of mis-governance and naturally, many are already feeling frustrated that he hadn’t done that in three years,” he said.

Shehu alleged that beyond faultfinding, the opposition were unable to give or innovate a vision of their own on how they could make the nation better.

The presidential spokesman mocked the former President Olusegun Obasanjo-led third force and said it would take the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) a minimum of 12 years to reinvent itself.