One of Buhari’s spokesmen has revealed a hidden plot by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to accuse Colonel Sambo Dasuki (Rtd) of staging a coup against the government of President Muhammadu Buhari.
“We agreed 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,” Mr. Garba Shehu revealed at The Red Media Summit in Lagos, Thursday, October 15, 2015.
Speaking on behalf of the President at the summit, Shehu, who is Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and publicity said that there was a “deployment of state forces” against him during the March elections, but that he won “against all odds”.
“Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people think he was not going to win,” he remarked as he bemoaned the cost of media lamented not being funded enough to pay for advert placements on the state owned TV station, NTA and privately owned AIT. “Americans say that elections are won on the dollar. It’s very improbable that anybody can win an election without money.”
“I remember on a particular night I called NTA, they had 16 slots of one minute adverts and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari campaign, they said all 16 had been sold,” he revealed.
Shehu went on to tell an interesting story about how the All Progressives Congress (APC) had hatched a plan to declare that then, National Security Advisor, Dasuki was plotting a coup against Buhari’s government.
Premium Times captures his confession below:
Mr. Shehu expressed the presidency’s gratitude to Statecraft, an arm on The Red Media, for ”selling an unlikely candidate to a very skeptical nation.”
“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,” Mr. Shehu said.
“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 threw 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.”
Soon after Buhari was sworn into office, National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki’s house was raided by operatives of the DSS in July with subsequent threats of charges for treasonable felony being brought against him over $40,000, seven luxury cars, and seven rifles found in his residence. His passport was unlawfully seized by the DSS.
Dasuki, who served under President Goodluck Jonathan, is a retired Army colonel and crown prince of the Sokoto Sultanate. He maintains that the raid on his house is a ‘witch-hunt’ by the Buhari government.
In September, Dasuki appeared before a Federal judge on charges of possessing a firearm without license. He was granted bail on self recognition.
President Buhari appointed Lawal Daura, his kinsman from his hometown in Katsina on July 2, as head of the DSS after firing Ita Ekpeyong. Daura was recalled from retirement as he had retired from the service of the DSS when he reached the mandatory age of 60 according to the Civil Service rules of Nigeria. Daura has been exposed as a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and served on the security committee for Buhari’s presidential campaign.
It would be recalled that there has been considerable persecution of members and perceived sympathisers of the former President Goodluck Jonathan administration by the DSS, since Daura’s appointment. Some notable victims of the said clampdown include the former Chief Security Office (CSO) of Jonathan, Gordon Obua, who was detained in solitary confinement for days.
