The President Muhammadu Buhari campaign organisation has described the recent visit of the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar to the United States as a political and public relation disaster.
According to the spokesman of the campaign organisation, Festus Keyamo in a statement,he noted that by running for President of Nigeria, Atiku intends to get some immunity from prosecution.
He recalled that he had earlier said Atiku was hoping to obtain a visa to visit the US, as a guest of the State department, a concession that the US will grant to a Presidential candidate of Africa’s biggest Nation.
He said, “ therefore, we were not surprised by his visit to the U.S. For us, this visit is really a non-event considering the issues involved in the forthcoming election. However, we have bad news for those who think this is a momentous event for Atiku Abubakar: the visit was nothing but a downright catastrophe because rather than dispel the fact of indictments hanging over his head, it further confirms and reinforces those facts for the following reasons:
“The visit had all the trappings of a fugitive sneaking into America under a “special diplomatic waiver”. For the candidate of the major opposition party in Nigeria, it is an absolute disaster that the visit was not announced ahead of time in Nigeria, with his programmes and itinerary clearly spelt out, the decent and customary minimum standard of such visits.
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“This culminated in his close aides issuing conflicting statements about the visit when he was already on his way there. In fact, one of them called Paul Ibe actually spoke to the Press that his principal was nowhere near America! Such was the secrecy of the planning and execution of that visit.
According to him, “It is shameful that a presidential candidate of a major opposition party in Africa’s most populous country would visit America, and the international press was kept in the dark, noting that there was no press conference with the array of international media and correspondents required for such ‘high-profile’ visit”.
Keyamo said Atiku knows he has no moral stamina to withstand the avalanche of hard questions bordering on his sordid past in America. In fact, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar claims he visited the Voice of America (VOA) but only did two carefully-packaged interviews with the Hausa service and the English to Africa program – platforms that have always been available to him back home.
He said, “How strange! In fact, both the Twitter handle (@VOANews) and official website of VOA did not mention any such visit of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar to their station. For news hounds, you would agree with us that such an ‘important personality’ cannot walk into a news premises without reporters swooping on him. Whatever he went to do in the premises of the VOA must have been a carefully-arranged private visit for the photo-ops, which was intended to scam Nigerians.
What more evidence do we need of a “sneak-in-sneak-out” arrangement than this?
