The election season may have come to a close, but the political name-calling continues.
POLITICS NIGERIA reports that the camp of Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the 2023 presidential election, has refuted claims made by President Muhammadu Buhari that they relied on foreign backers to secure their bid for power.
President Buhari recently asserted that while the All Progressives Congress (APC) worked hard to maintain their position of authority, opposition parties lost the election due to their dependence on foreign support. He also attributed the opposition’s defeat to a combination of overconfidence, complacency, and poor strategic decision-making.
However, Daniel Bwala, spokesperson for the Atiku-Okowa Presidential Campaign Organization, dismissed Buhari’s claims as inaccurate.
Speaking to The Punch, Bwala accused the President of pandering to President-elect Bola Tinubu, who was rumored to have received insufficient support from the incumbent.
He said: “Who are the foreign backers? This is not surprising to me personally. The reason is because, from a vantage point of view, I know that nothing that comes out of the President’s mouth at the moment in a bid to please Tinubu would be enough. In the build-up to the election and even the primaries of the APC, it was believed that Buhari did not work for Tinubu or he did not want Tinubu to win. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen.
“So in the general election, you remember when they were fighting each other. The campaign council said the presidency was not supporting them, the presidency was against them, naira redesign was produced to make them lose. There were lots of fingers-pointing among them. Tinubu had to do what he did. So Buhari is trying as much as possible to please him.”
