Babangida Blasts Bamanga Tukur


Former Military President, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, is still very bitter over the way the recent convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) turned out in Abuja. According to Babangida, fondly referred to as “IBB”, and who was a former presidential candidate of the PDP, the process that threw up the election of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur as the National Chair-man of the PDP and those of the other national officers of the party was not only faulty but totally undemocratic.

Babangida spoke exclu-sively at the Government House in Benin City to Sunday Mirror through his spokesman, Prince Kassim Afegbua, who the soft-speaking former presidential aspi-rant of the PDP, this week re-leased to manage the media and publicity affairs of the re-election campaign organ-isation of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate and Edo State Governor, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole.

According to the former military president, the days ahead do not look too bright for the PDP under the leadership of Tukur essentially be-cause of the circumstance of the election of the party boss. Tukur, he said, was elected through a process that co-erced his opponents to step down instead of facing them in an election. He argued fur-ther that the burden of such an undemocratic election is that the newly elected party chairman would have no moral justification to “look straight into the President’s face and challenge him if the President is seen to be devi-ating from the efforts of the political party.”

He said, “The process that threw up Bamanga Tukur is undemocratic. I was read-ing a statement credited to the Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Olisa Metu, talking that Babangida was not involved. How pitiable! I pity him. These are the people who were not even in the fringes when the party was being registered. When IBB, Danjuma, Aliu Gusau and the others were putting PDP together, where was Olisa Metu? Today, he has the guts to talk as if he owns PDP. What process threw up Metu himself as a party publicity secretary? Did he go through election?”

“Democracy is all about elections. Now, it is being discussed further in develop-mental terms as all-inclusive and participatory. You have to allow people to test their popularity at elections. When they are defeated, they will know in their hearts that they have gone through a process seen to be transparent, free and fair and that they lost the election of our country.”

Reminded of his criticism of Oshiomhole’s support of the Federal Government’s fuel subsidy removal and subsequent hiking of the pe-troleum product pump price in January, Afegbua said he still stood on his belief and position but understands why the governor supported the FG then. He thereafter commended Oshiomhole for giving him the opportunity to serve in the governor’s re-election campaign organisa-tion as its Director of Media and Publicity.

Afegbua said it did not take much effort for IBB and Oshiomhole to reach an ac-cord that sent him to Benin City to come and help in en-suring the re-election of Oshiomhole.

Meanwhile, in a related de-velopment to the forthcoming governorship election in Edo State, a group of elders, leaders and members of the PDP in Oredo local concil of thetate on Saturday afternoon at the NUJ Secretariat announced that they were joining the ACN in support of Oshiomhole be-cause they “could no longer pretend like the others they were leaving behind that Edo State under Oshiomhole has been revived and transformed into a centre of massive, people-centred development.”

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