Former Nigerian president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, is plotting to install one of his godsons, a former governor of Kano State, Alhaji Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso as president in 2019, a very reliable source told Global Excellence magazine.
Kwankwaso, who emerged second best in the 2015 presidential primary elections where the incumbent president, Muhammadu Buhari clinched the APC ticket that eventually fetched him the four year mandate, the source said, has since positioned himself for the exalted office.
The source said that the Obasanjo/Kwankwaso alliance was further boosted with the sickness of President Buhari last year when he was twice admitted at a London hospital for treatment. The calculation was that the president when he returns would be unfit to continue in office, let alone think of a second term. If this had happened, the source claimed, the group reasoned that it would be an opportunity for the former governor, backed by the influential Obasanjo, to be drafted into the race and eventually win.
Unluckily for the alliance, Buhari survived the sickness and has incredibly improved on his health.
The source said that, it was the failure of their first plot that encouraged former President Obasanjo to call a world press conference late January where he highlighted what he called the failures of the Buhari administration, and ‘his few successes’. According to the source, the latest plot was meant to rally public sentiments against the APC government which they assumed would work like magic given the frontline role Obasanjo played in bringing Buhari to power in 2015.
However, a presidency source has said that the federal government was not unaware of the plot by the former president and his allies. “We are aware that he had been promoting Kwankwaso. But be assured that they will lose again”, stated the presidency source.
Another aide of the president, Alhaji Suleiman Abdurahaman Kawu Sumaila later said that the combined forces of former president Olusegun Obasanjo and Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso cannot stop Buhari from securing his second term in 2019. “If Nigerians decide that President Buhari should run again, Obasanjo certainly has no choice but to concede. Whenever there is a piece of advice for a leader, I think the correct thing to do is to pick out what makes sense in the advice and throw away the rubbish thereafter,” We, APC, are ready for any eventualities. We are ready for Obasanjo, we are ready for Kwankwaso too” Kawu stated.
-Abiodun Ishola
