Top sources in the Aso Villa revealed that the arrowhead of the committee are former Lagos State Governor and current Minister of Works, Housing and Power, Babatunde Fashola,
This is according to a report on Nigerian Times,
The committee according to findings by the Newspaper has been given a blank cheque by President Buhari to, as one of its sources put it, “to do whatever is necessary to return the president to the Villa in 2019”.
The choice of the three men was not by accident. Apart from being stupendously rich having amassed immense wealth as governors, the three are also estranged disciples of Bola Tinubu, former Governor of Lagos State and a leading member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
Fashola in particular has been locked in a battle of wits with Tinubu since the latter whom he served as Chief of Staff before doing two terms as governor, outmuscled him in the contest to produce his ( Fashola’s) successor.
Fashola is said to be still smarting from what he regards as attempts to smear his reputation with regard to widely circulated reports that he spent N78 million of Lagos State funds on a personal website and another N39 million for a unit of borehole.
Sources close to him say he believes the whole thing was a ploy by Tinubu to sully his reputation and thus prevent Buhari from appointing him minister.
As for Amosun, his separation from Tinubu is a well known public fact. Such is the bad blood between both men that Tinubu had to resort to stirring up opposition against him within Ogun State using former Governor Olusegun Osoba as point man.
Buhari is quite mindful of the disagreement between Tinubu and intends to profit lavishly from it. He also knows that he can benefit immensely from the wealth of the three men to actualize his ambition of snagging a second term in 2019.
One of the briefs of the committee is to ensure that anyone with presidential ambitions in other political parties particularly the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), are hounded out of the race using means fair or foul.
A salient part of this strategy is to use the anti-graft agency, the economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to intimidate the aspirants by hauling them in for questioning on real and imagined anti-corruption charges.
Already, the Newspaper claims to have ascertained that potential aspirants in the party like Governors Aliyu Tambuwal of Sokoto State and Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State have already been asked to shelve their plans for the Villa.
“The idea did not go down well with them but they have given their word that they will not upset the apple cart,” Nigerian Times quoted a source as saying.
It was also learnt that the committee has since swung into action and that the impact of its activities is already being felt within the polity.
One of the fallouts of the work of the committee is the crisis within the PDP.
Presidency sources say the plan is to keep the party perpetually in crisis to the extent that it would be mortally weakened to the point where it would not pose a threat to President Buhari’s re-election plans.
“The rumblings within the PDP are substantially being instigated by this committee. They are working round the clock in cahoots with moles within that party to deal it a mortal blow. All the court suits and counter suits you are seeing are all part of this effort,” a source said.
Even though the committee is an informal one without the formal approval of the party’s national leadership, the paper learnt that it has the tacit approval of the national chairman of the party, Chief John Oyegun, who is more and more said to be prising himself from the grip of Senator Bola Tinubu, one of the party’s leading lights and financial heavyweight.
A chieftain of the APC was quoted as saying recently that the romance between Oyegun and President Buhari seems to be getting hotter by the day and that the president is counting on him to align party chieftains likely to object to his second term bid, to the project well ahead of time.
The APC primary in Ondo State was a test case for the committee and confirmation of the newfound romance between Oyegun and Buhari. A candidate backed by Bola Tinubu who was seen as a sure bet for a ticket was out-manoeuvred and out-spent just two weeks to the primary election . And to rub it in, once Tinubu got his minions to ambush the result at the National Working Committee of party in Abuja, Oyegun ignored the vote for cancellation to send the committee’s candidate’s name to INEC as the party’s candidate.
Although Nigerian Times was not immediately able to ascertain how much the president has voted for his second term project or who is directly funding the project, it was able to gather that the committee is actually bulldozing its way within and outside the seat of power.
The Edo State governorship election postponed from September 10 to September 28 is another case in point.
It was learnt that the 2019 committee working behind the scenes engineered the postponement of the election. Our source said the committee from investigations it carried out discovered that given the groundswell of discontent in the land following the economic recession in the country, holding the election on the original date would be disastrous for the party.
It believes loss of Edo State would hurt President Buhari’s plan to remain in the Villa beyond 2019 since one strong source of funding for campaign would have been eliminated.
“What happened in Edo is a clear case of the ‘Hand of Esau but the voice of Jacob’. The Police and DSS (Department of State Security Services (DSS) were merely mouthing the plans of the committee. As far as that election was concerned, all the security agencies including the Police and DSS, were ready for that election. In fact, 24 hours before the sudden advice to INEC the two agencies had assured INEC they were prepared and were even part of the stakeholders meeting INEC was having in Benin City that fateful Tuesday they gave that advice,” a source said.
He said the committee is hoping to use the two-week window to perfect its plans to ensure the APC retains the governorship seat.
On the whole, INEC as a body is a major target of the committee. Its aim is to progressively weaken the electoral body to the point where it would not be able to conduct free and fair elections. The committee believes that with President Buhari’s popularity among Nigerians dipping, the likelihood of his returning to power would be very slim and that having an INEC that sticks to the rules would foreclose such possibility for the president.
For now, the paper said its source reveals that the secret committee is bent on enforcing the Mugabe option, which is that President Buhari must rule whether he is fit or popular or not and anyone who gets in the way of that plan will get his fingers burnt.
One individual who is likely to get in the way of that plan is Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, former Governor of Kano State who finished in second place behind Buhari during the APC’s presidential primary in 2014. Kwankwaso is known to be still nursing the ambition to be president of Nigeria and is said to be still miffed the way party chieftains from the southwest influenced delegates to abandon him for Buhari.
Stubborn as a mule, they know that the possibility of getting him to denounce his ambition is almost nil and thus has resorted to getting rid of him the hard way.
“Kwankwaso’s travails at the hands of Governor Ganduje, his successor is not the normal tiff we have between an oga and his boy. The pair enjoyed good relationship until recently and the bad blood is being stoked by those who want him out of the 2019 picture, the Newspaper added.
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