Why Atiku will not be hijacked by cabal – Obasanjo

Yesterday, Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo shared that majority of Nigerians would vote massively for his former vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.

He said though Atiku is neither a saint nor a messiah, he would perform much better than the incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, adding, “He will be a team leader but will not allow the seizure of his mandate by a cabal”.

He spoke at the Quarterly Business lecture organized by the Lagos Island Club which was delivered by Atiku in Lagos.

Obasanjo said he had received a lot of bashings on his position endorsing Atiku, saying he stands by all the statements on the former VP and his comment on Buhari.

On Atiku never becoming an acting president in the eight years her served under him, Obasanjo said Atiku “had occasions to preside on a few times that I was out of the country on duty. On those occasions he was in charge of the Federal Executive Council meetings.

“And no Nigerian Chief Executive has devolved to his deputy as much as I did to Atiku.  I did not need to designate him Acting President because the Constitution is clear, once the President is not available, the Vice-President automatically acts with full powers and he consults where and if he considers it necessary.  But since I was not absent from home for 104 days at a time, people may not know that Atiku actually stood in for me whenever I was out”.

The former president declared that he had wholeheartedly forgiven Atiku for what he might have done to him and against him.

“If anybody blames me for forgiving Atiku, I leave such a person with God Almighty, especially as both Christian and Islamic clerics joined Atiku to visit me to seek forgiveness. Anybody who does not forgive when forgiveness is sought with contrite heart cannot be a true believer and should not expect the forgiveness of God,” he said.

In his lecture titled ‘My vision to get Nigeria working again,’ Atiku said the present administration took Nigeria to recession while drawing back the economic gains of the previous administrations under the PDP.

He said his former President Olusegun Obasanjo inherited a crude oil price of $11 per barrel yet took Nigeria out of recession, cleared the country’s foreign debts and grew the economy by six per cent.

According to him, “unemployment has unfortunately been our only boom industry with over 13million people joining the ranks of people without a job, which now totals 21 million.”

He said the actions and inactions of government had weakened investors’ confidence in Nigerian economy, noting that Ghana with a population of 13m people attracted more Foreign Direct Investments (FDI).

According to him, unlike during Obasanjo’s presidency when there used to be regular meetings with chief executive officers of major companies, nothing of such is presently happening.