Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has said he has been vindicated following President Muhammadu Buhari’s suspension of Walter Onnoghen as Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN).
This is even as he described his former Vice President and PDP Presidential Candidate, Atiku Abubakar as a team leader who will not allow his government to be hijacked by a cabal, if elected as President in next month’s General Election.
The elder statesman spoke in Lagos on Wednesday at the Lagos Island Club Quarterly Business Lecture.
According to him, unlike Buhari, Atiku never claimed to be a saint.
In reference to his state of the nation address recently when he lamented that the Buhari administration has taken Nigeria back to the Abacha era, Obasanjo said the Presiden’s sack of Onnoghen and his swearing in of Tanko Mohammad in acting capacity, smacks of totalitarian regime.
“Only two Sundays ago, I said what I believe I understood as to the way the Buhari administration is going about the coming election. And within less than a week, things started to show itself. But let us leave that because Nigerians are rising up to defend our fledging democracy and to defend our future progress. Nobody else will do it for us. We have to do it for ourselves.
“I believe that we have no better man to lead us out of the morass that we are, morass in the economic term, security, even in international affairs. Atiku has done things which are absolutely imperative for a leader to be followed and to be believed,” he said.
Obasanjo who was Nigeria’s President from 1999 to 2003 also debunked rumours that he never allowed Atiku to preside over the Federal Executive Council whenever he travelled out of the country.
He taunted Buhari for staying out of the country on medical vacation for 104 days.
He said: “One of the most ridiculous claims I have heard on this issues is that I did not give Atiku chance to preside over the Federal Executive Council meeting because I did not trust him. That is not true. That was not correct because he had occasion to preside on a few times that I was out of the country on duty.
“On those occasions, he was in charge of FEC meetings and no Nigerian Chief Executive had devolved to his deputy as much as I did to Atiku. I did not need to designate him acting president because the Constitution is clear. Once the president is not available, the Vice President automatically acts with full powers and he consults when he considers it necessary.
“But since I was not absent from home for 104 days at a time, people may know that Atiku actually stood in for me whenever I was out. Atiku has what it takes in experience, exposure, in that he has learnt and he has learnt his lessons. I tried to teach him a few of them”.
Earlier in his lecture, Atiku, the Guest Lecturer at the event, promised to create an Economic Stimulus Fund with initial investment capacity of approximately US$25 billion to support private sector investments in infrastructure.
The PDP Presidential candidate also said he would improve liquidity by undertaking fiscal restructuring and improving the management of fiscal resources by improving spending efficiency by reducing the share of recurrent expenditure and increasing the share of capital expenditure in budget, raising additional revenue by blocking leakages from exchange rate adjustment as well as review of fuel subsidy payments.
