The Buhari Media Organisation (BMO) has urged security agencies to investigate former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s unholy romance with foreign bodies especially United States of America, in pursuit of a mandate he never had.
A statement issued by the group’s Chairman, Mr Niyi Akinsiju, and Secretary, Mr Cassidy Madueke, on Wednesday in Abuja, accused Atiku of seeking to destabilise Nigeria in a bid to realise his failed ambition to be president.
This, it said, was the reason he had been lobbying the U.S. authorities to recognise him as authentic president, even though he overwhelmingly lost the Feb. 23 presidential election to President Muhammadu Buhari.
The group said that the step the former vice president was taking was a treasonable act that has its dire consequences.
“We had in the past drawn attention to the desperation of the failed PDP Presidential candidate to rule Nigeria at all cost and it is becoming more obvious with his latest gambit.
“Not satisfied with pushing out cooked-up figures which he and his party claimed they got from the server of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Alhaji Abubakar is now using lobbyists in order to con the U.S. to his side,’’ it said.
The group said it was not surprise because it had raised an alarm even before the election that PDP elements had been preparing ground for what they called a ‘Venezuelan option’.
According to BMO, before the last presidential election PDP had been instigating the international community against the Buhari-led administration by raising all sorts of false alarms.
“And now that news has filtered out that Atiku has hired some prominent American lawyers to lobby the U.S. Congress and the Executive to recognise him as President.
“It beggars belief that a man who rose to the position of Vice President could be engaged in acts that amount to treasonable felony, especially as the legally authorised body in election matters, INEC, declared that he lost the Presidential election,” the group said.
BMO also noted that some of the measures being taken by the failed presidential candidate to win American support was the ploy that he was the man to prevent ‘genocide, poverty, corruption and strife’ in Nigeria.
BMO said: “We have seen how banditry has suddenly threatened to spiral out of control in Zamfara State and some other parts of North-Western Nigeria almost immediately after the election.
“These are places that were relatively peaceful before and during the election and which also had a reasonable turn out of voters.
“It should not be a surprise that this spectre of violence is deliberately orchestrated and coordinated as part of a game plan to make incumbent President look helpless and win U.S. support for the failed PDP presidential candidate.’’
The pro-Buhari group therefore urged the U.S. authorities to guard against being used by unpatriotic Nigerians to work against an election that their representative in the country had hailed as largely free and fair.
It said: “Even though Amb. Stuart Symington had in the run up to the election appeared to show some sympathy for the opposition, apparently based on media reports that had been deliberately skewed to present the incumbent in bad light’’.
It added that Symington was fair enough to rate the election as reasonably credible.
The group reminded Americans that the main local election observer group they funded, the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement (YIAGA), validated Buhari’s victory as declared by INEC.
“Aside from that, the European Union, UK, France and Russia have since congratulated President Buhari on his re-election with all of them hailing the process as credible and transparent.
“We now wonder why Atiku Abubakar would take his desperation to the extent of seeking a Venezuelan-style U.S. intervention in an election that he lost overwhelmingly; at a time he has filed a legal challenge to the outcome of the election”.
BMO also urged Nigerians to be prepared to defend the mandate they freely and overwhelmingly gave to Buhari on February 23.
However, reacting to the allegation, Mr Paul Ibe, the Media Adviser to Atiku, described the allegations as shameless lies, saying the propaganda did not come to us as a surprise.
Ibe said that “since Abubakar resisted pressure not to go to the court, the APC has been behaving like a cat on hot bricks because the outcome of the 2019 elations has exposed and shattered the façade of their dubious integrity’’.
Ibe said that Abubakar’s court case had become APC’s biggest burden because it exposed the integrity of the ruling party as sham.
“Now instead of defending their stolen mandate in court, they are now using fake news to divert public attention from the historic electoral heist they have committed against Nigerians.’’
Ibe said that no amount of diversionary propaganda and fake news would stop Abubakar from continuing the court action he had started to reclaim the stolen mandate. (NAN)