Kingsley Kanayo
President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday has restated his gratitude to Nigerian youths for his victory at the general elections saying he emerged winner against all odds.
Speaking at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, Mr. Buhari who was represented by Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Garba Shehu thanked the organisers of the summit who are also owners of StateCraft for the role their company, StateCraft played in helping Buhari win the election.
“StateCraft sold an unlikely candidate to a very skeptical people”, he said.
He commended the youthful energy that StateCraft brought into the President’s campaign noting that they galvanized young Nigerians to take ownership of the campaign.
“Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greeting to you is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people think he was not going to win”, Mr. Shehu said.
He spoke about the role StateCraft played in safeguarding the lives of members of the Buhari campaign from harassment by security agents of the state.
“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 kicked 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”, Mr. Shehu said.
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