President Muhammadu Buhari has recounted how he was denied advertising slots to sell his candidacy on the NTA and AIT in the build up to the 2015 presidential election, regretting that this showed the partisan nature of the media organizations.
The President, who stated this yesterday at the Red Media Summit in Lagos, where his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, represented him, noted that he emerged winner of the March 28 election against all odds.
While noting that he won the election despite the deployment of state forces against him, he restated his gratitude to Nigerians for granting him victory at the poll.
According to Shehu, “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.
“Americans say that elections are won on the dollar. It’s very improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We didn’t have advertising money on our campaign. Even when we had little money to spend on advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority was not making available to us slots, neither was AIT.
“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.
“Some other instances that exposed the partisan nature of the NTA. Money was returned to us, from AIT money was returned to us. They simply won’t advertise for us,” he stated.
Shehu also revealed how his home suffered security siege in the heat of the 2015 presidential election campaign, blaming it on the activities of fifth columnists who infiltrated the then opposition party campaign organization.
He recounted that on that day, he and members of his household were jolted out of sleep by the sound from tens of policemen who were cocking their guns and came with vehicles which darkened the windows of his Abuja home.
He said: “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.”
Speaking for the first time on what brought about the invasion of security operatives to his neighbourhood, She said: “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,” he recounted.
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