Buhari’s SSA Explains The ‘Hell’ They Went Through In the Hands Of NTA, AIT & Security Men During Campaign

Indeed, the race is not for the swift. Here’s what the
Senior Special Assistant to the president on Media and Publicity, Shehu Garba
said today while representing the president at The Red Media Summit which took
place in Lagos.

“Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you is on account
of the fact that he won an election that many people think he was not going to
win.”

“Americans say that elections are won on the dollar. It’s
very improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We didn’t have
advertising money on our campaign. Even when we had little money to spend on
advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority was not making available to us
slots, neither was AIT.

“I remember on a particular night I called NTA, they had 16
slots of one minute adverts and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the
Buhari campaign, they said all 16 had been sold.

“Some other instances that exposed the partisan nature of
the NTA. Money was returned to us, from AIT money was returned to us. They
simply won’t advertise for us.”

Mr. Shehu expressed the presidency’s gratitude to
Statecraft, an arm on The Red Media, for ‎”selling an unlikely candidate to a
very skeptical nation.”

“The day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to
see that my house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the
campaign.”

“In fact it was the cocking of their guns that rose me and
my family members from our sleep. Only to discover that tens of policemen,
police vehicles, and some other unidentified vehicles darkened our windows
around my home.

“The first thing I did was to say ‘Who will help me out of
this situation?’ I needed to expose what was going on, and the‎ first man I
reached was Adebola Williams of Statecraft. Adebola began to announce on
Facebook and Twitter from that moment until the security elements realized that
the whole world was looking at what they were doing, because I remained indoors
throughout the siege.

“Of course it was much later that we came to know why they
had come. Even the APC Presidential Campaign was penetrated by fifth
columnists, and I will make this confession, because a day before that siege we
had had a meeting with the security committee at which we agreed that we were
going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser at that
time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against Muhammadu
Buhari.

“The former National Security Adviser was involved in a coup
that threw out Muhammadu Buhari as military president in 1984.

“This time around, all the things that followed, the
postponement of the election on account of this and that and a lot of the
thinking of the campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by
the National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege on
our homes was to pre-empt the story.‎”