Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 General Election has been accused by the Presidency of inflaming “religious and ethnic” issues to push his political ambition.
Bayo Onanuga, special adviser on information and strategy to the president made the accusation when he appeared on ‘Mic On podcast’, a programme hosted by Seun Okinbaloye, recently.
He added that any political campaign based on religious and ethnic passion is dangerous to the country’s democracy.
Onanuga also added that the supporters of Obi, popularly called Obidients are desperate to see the downfall of the President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
“What I know about the campaign of Obi was that for the first time in a very long while in our country, we had a candidate who was inflaming ethnic passions. That was the way the election went at that time. He was inflaming ethnic passions, religious passions, bringing two dangerous things to our politics – ethnicity and religion. That is what he did. And those things were dangerous to our Nigerian politics,” Onanuga said.
“Of course, it is very clear unless people are not receptive. Up till now, some are still writing that Bola Tinubu stole the presidency, and some people are saying that the man who came third actually won the election, and they are very unapologetic about that.
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“How could somebody who came third say he has won that election?
“You can even see when they were talking about the naira, some people were just happy that the naira was going downhill. You can trace them. People who are saying so are members of the Obidient movement.”
When asked if he believed the Obidient movement wanted the Tinubu government to fail, Onanuga said, “Of course, it is clear.”
The presidential aide also said Obi never commends the government when it does something good but very quick to tweet when it was about something bad.
“Even Peter Obi himself, read his tweets, when the government has done something good, he will never comment about it. But when it is bad news, quickly, he will tweet, so you can see a deliberate attempt to denigrate this government, to paint it black all the time that he (Tinubu) is not doing well, he is a failure and I’ve said it is so early to even say so,” he added.
