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The Atiku-Agbaje Media Engagement Network (AAMEN) has described the drafting of Mrs. Aisha Buhari into the President’s campaign team as a bribe that the APC administration meant to silence the outspoken First Lady.
AAMEN also called for the immediate sacking of the Comptroller-General of Customs, Retired-Colonel Hameed Ali, who was on Wednesday announced as a member of a novel Aisha Buhari-chaired All Progressives Congress Women and Youths Presidential Campaign team, having the wife of the Vice-President, Mrs Dolapo Osinbajo, as Co-Chairman.
According to a statement Thursday by AAMEN Executive Secretary, Felix Oboagwina, the only rationale for bringing Alli on board would be to make him funnel Customs revenue into the President’s reelection project.
“In addition, a national paramilitary institution whose personnel bear arms cannot be headed by a man neck-deep in partisanship. It is dangerous for everybody,” AAMEN warned.
The group dismissed Mrs. Buhari’s appointment as APC’s usual style of blackmailing, arm-twisting or corrupting opposition voices.
However, AAMEN said that the issues the President’s wife raised were too pertinent to be swept under the carpet and should be given urgent attention.
“If the APC goons feel they can make Mrs, Buhari’s objective voice to disappear, let them know that it will be a lot more difficult making her allegations go away,” AAMEN said.
In the past, Mrs. Buhari had accused the administration of insensitivity to the plight of Nigerians.
Apart from revealing at a public forum the absence of basic drugs in the Aso Rock Presidential Clinic, despite huge budgets yearly allocated to the facility, the President’s wife also accused two unnamed powerful men of being behind the President’s lack-lustre performance, tagging them “retrogressive elements.”
In October 2016, Aisha Buhari openly criticised the President for appointing people unconnected with his 2015 election, and threatened: “…If things continue like this up to 2019, I will not go out and campaign again and ask any woman to vote like I did before. I will never do it again.”
She also criticised the last APC primaries, charging the party leadership with impunity and imposition of candidates after collecting bribes.
However, AAMEN said the onus lay on Mrs. Buhari to prove to the world that the appointment had not bought over her conscience and that she remained as credible as her outbursts had made her in the eyes of Nigerians and the entire world.
In its own words: “They have discovered that she would not bend to barks and bites, so they used the appointment to bribe her. But Aisha must prove that she did not make those damning allegations just to draw attention and get settled like so many other people that the administration has succeeded in capturing and silencing with its usual if-you-cannot-beat-them-you-must-join-them and carrot-and-stick method.”
AAMEN said that the First Lady’s outbursts glaringly revealed that there was trouble in the seeming Paradise of APC.
Oboagwina said: “With the bribing of Mrs. Buhari, APC has lost its last redeeming feature. She represented the last shred of decency in this regime, a regime that has spent its entire life flying propaganda and falsehood. Successfully silencing her dims all hope that this government is redeemable.”
However, AAMEN predicted that despite the inducements APC was throwing throughout the polity to the likes of the First Lady, the party would still be rejected by Nigerians.
“APC is Babylon falling,” AAMEN stated. “Wise people should abandon this collapsing empire before Nigerians democratically send it to hell at the 2019 elections.”
