The former minister of transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has challenged President Bola Tinubu’s claim that he was solely responsible for Muhammadu Buhari’s emergence as president in 2015.
Amaechi said he played a major role in Buhari’s victory and led crucial political efforts that secured the electoral success.
The former minister was reacting to Tinubu’s repeated assertion that Buhari would not have become president without his political intervention and support.
Tinubu had previously stated that Buhari lost three presidential elections before he convinced him to contest again ahead of the 2015 poll.
According to Tinubu, he personally visited Buhari in Katsina and persuaded him to return to the race, eventually leading to the formation of the political coalition that brought him to power.
However, Amaechi disagreed with the narrative, insisting that Buhari’s victory was a collective effort involving several political actors who formed the All Progressives Congress (APC).
“When we decided to form the APC, while I was a minister, President Tinubu was claiming he made Buhari president, and I couldn’t respond because I was the minister under President Buhari,” Amaechi said during an interview on Arise TV on Friday.
“That will be suicidal because Buhari could fire you. So I couldn’t have said no then. He wasn’t the president. I couldn’t tell him, ‘You are wrong. You didn’t make President Buhari president’.
”Not only was I the DG of the campaign, but everybody will bear witness that I did all the battle.”
Amaechi explained that he spearheaded political mobilisation across the country as chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum and director-general of Buhari’s presidential campaign.
“I led the governors’ forum. I crisscrossed the country fighting here and there,” he said.
The former Rivers governor added that although the APC came to power in 2015 on the promise of “change,” the administration achieved mixed results in governance.
“Did we achieve the change? Here and there. In some areas, well, we did. In some areas, we did not,” he said.