The Presidency on Sunday in an image-making move, maintained that there was no rift between President Goodluck Jonathan and his predecessor Olusegun Obasanjo.
Presidential Adviser on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati, in an interview with State House correspondents in Abuja, claimed that the both leaders have an “excellent relationship” and that his boss still calls Obasanjo “Baba”, a yoruba parlance for Father.
Abati who was reacting to the allegation by the Leader of the Niger Delta Volunteer Force, Mujaheed Asari- Dokubo, that Jonathan and Obasanjo are at loggerheads.
The aide said, “I read that interview granted by Asari-Dokubo and I was quite surprised that he would talk like that because as he himself admitted in that interview, he is close to government. And his interview was full of proverbs.
“So, I don’t know whether it is a wise thing for you to be a member of the house and then for you to stand outside and urinate into that same house”.
“The president has the utmost respect for the former president whom he regards as his father. He even calls him Baba. And I don’t think anybody can say he has any evidence anywhere where the president has been disrespectful to the elderly man.”
“So, those things that you see in the newspapers about people saying President Jonathan and former President Obasanjo are quarreling are exaggerated. They do not reflect the truth. He (Asari-Dokubo) claims that there is a rift between President Jonathan and former President Obasanjo; so, you can see that the whole of that commentary is based on a wrong premise”.
On Asari-Dokubo’s statement that Jonathan is surrounded by greedy people, Abati replied by crafting a crab theory.
“What is that crab theory all about? If you put a number of crabs in a bucket and one of them tries to go to the top, the other crabs will be struggling to pull that one that is trying to go to the top down.
They will keep reminding that top crab that you are one of us; this is where you belong and you cannot leave us; we are together.
“When you translate that crab theory into the governance arena, you find that it puts people who are in a leadership position under enormous pressure because there are too many other persons saying they don’t want progress because they all want to be at the same level.”
“I believe that he, having been a very strong supporter of the administration and who has been on record as having saying a lot of positive things about the administration, having made whatever point he has now made, will also see the need to be consistent, honest and truthful, and to see the big picture and to worry less about greedy people who are preventing other Ijaws, as he seems to be making out, from reaching the president because at the end of the day, President Jonathan is not running an Ijaw project.”
“That is the man Nigerians voted for and all of us, whether we are his kinsmen or we are his staff or we are his friends, I think we should focus more on the Nigerian project, the Nigerian assignment that President Jonathan has been given and worry less about insinuations like all these people are blocking me from having access, he has forgotten his brothers, he is arguing with a particular person.”
The former president has been critical of his successor administration on some national issues including the economy, unemployment, security and corruption.
Dr. Jonathan, who on some occasions responded to Obasanjo’s assessment of his leadership, had about two weeks ago issued a warning to his media aides to desist from attacking or portraying his political benefactor in a bad light.
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