President Goodluck Jonathan
President Goodluck Jonathan on
Friday said there was no truth in the claim by a national leader of the
All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, that he offered the
former Lagos State governor the opportunity to serve as Vice President
in a proposed Interim National Government.
Jonathan, who spoke with State House
correspondents in Abuja through his Special Adviser on Media and
Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, described Tinubu’s claim as absurd and
ridiculous.
Tinubu had in a statement by his media
office on Thursday claimed that the recent attacks on his person were
because he rejected the offer by Jonathan to serve as the Vice President
in an ING.
He claimed that having refused the offer,
the President was looking for ways to take him out either by killing
him or getting him arrested based on trumped up charges.
But Abati insisted that the position of Jonathan had remained that the idea of an ING is treasonable.
He said the President had made it clear that he had neither proposed the idea at any forum nor discussed it with anybody.
He added that as a democratically elected
President, Jonathan’s ambition could never be to head an ING under
whatever circumstances.
The presidential spokesman said Jonathan
was going into the March 28 presidential election with the conviction
that he had performed well and majority of Nigerians would vote for him
massively.
He explained that the President therefore
had no reason whatsoever to support such an unconstitutional
proposition as ING, which would amount to assault on democratic
principles.
He said, “If you de-construct the
statement that purportedly emanated from the office of Asiwaju Tinubu,
you will see again the absurd nature of it.
“The absolutely ridiculous nature of it
in the sense that given the configuration of Nigeria, it is not likely,
totally impossible to have an ING arrangement in which you will have a
southerner as the President and then another southerner as Vice
President.
“It is absurd. It is not something that is likely to work given the nature of our politics.
“But the Tinubu camp putting out that
statement, were so much in a hurry to engage in their usual game of
deceiving the public about the current electoral process, that the
emptiness, the hollowness, the shallowness of their proposition escaped
them.”
Abati appealed to Nigerians to dismiss
Tinubu’s claim as “another gimmick coming from a desperate political
group seeing that defeat is steering them in the face and are resorting
to greater desperation.”
He said Nigerians might witness greater
desperation from the opposition’s camp as the nation gets closer to the
general elections.
“But our appeal to Nigerians is that this
country is greater than everyone’s ambition and at the end of the day
what is important is Nigeria.
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