Bayo Onanuga, an aide to president Bola Ahmed Tinubu has revealed that his principal was targeted by the opposition during the 2023 presidential campaign because he was the favourite to win the election.
He said that Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) knew that Tinubu was the man to beat in the election because the All Progressives Congress (APC) was united and controlled 21 states.
The presidential aide said that the ruling APC was not divided like the PDP, and Tinubu had the backing of all the governors elected on the party’s platform.
In an interview with Nigerian Tribune, Onanuga said the opposition spread rumours and made false claims about Tinubu, that he was sick and could not string two sentences together.
He said: “It is because both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi knew that the man to beat in the election was Bola Tinubu, a candidate of the ruling party, whose party controls 21 states, a man whose party was not divided unlike the PDP, which had broken into four factions.
“What mud did they not throw at him? They said he was ill and that he could not string two sentences together and so on. But eventually, God and the people of Nigeria gave Tinubu victory.”
Onauga added that Obi’s supporters, popularly known as the Obidient Movement, pushed false narratives about Tinubu, such as the academic records of the president from the Chicago State University and the drug trafficking allegation.
He added: “It was God’s handiwork that made Bola Tinubu win the election, despite the mudslinging, most especially from the Labour Party mob – those uncouth members of the so-called Obidient Movement.
“We always call them a mob as they always respond unthinkingly to a kind of stimulus. Once somebody throws something out, no matter whether it is fallacious, they gobble it and start sharing. And they keep repeating, circulating the false narratives, the false stories, misinformation, and rumours, such that if you don’t respond to them at times, people believe they are telling the truth.
Look at the Chicago University controversy, for instance. There was a deposition in the US by Caleb Westberg, registrar of the university. Nowhere in the deposition did the man say that Tinubu forged the certificate.
“What the man said was that ‘because we don’t have the original, we cannot authenticate the certificate they said he submitted in Abuja.’ They tried to make the man say he forged the certificate, but the man said no.
“In fact, the school even produced two other certificates similar to the one Tinubu submitted to INEC. Westberg made it clear that Tinubu was an honours graduate and that once a student graduates and wants a replacement certificate, the certificate is not issued by the school. It is issued by a third-party vendor.
“The Tinubu attackers ignored this salient fact and kept bombarding their zombie audience that the university declared Tinubu’s certificate a forgery. This is not true.”