2019: Oshiomhole Meets Buhari Behind Closed Doors, Blasts Sowore

Adams Oshiomhole, the nationals chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), held a closed door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday’s evening at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

His meeting came at the time he is grossly enmeshed in allegation of been induced with up to $80 million dollars from some state gubernatorial aspirants to influence the APC primaries in their favor.

SaharaReporters exclusively reported the angle of the Department of States Securities from the time he was grilled on November 4 over the allegation coming from aggrieved governors from the ruling party governors, till the recent report sent to the Presidency and Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

Speaking with the State House correspondents after the meeting with Buhari, Oshiomhole outrightly denied collecting such bribes.

“No tree that will bear fruits that will grow in Sahara desert and the fact the publisher of Saharareporters himself is a presidential aspirant; we would soon find out the difference between Sahara and its reporters, and a green forest and its reporters.

“The unfortunate thing here, however, is that people, who specialise in libels they take advantage of our peculiar judicial system.

“When I was a governor in Edo state, they published all kinds of things against me. At a point I decided to go to court and my lawyer told me that I have to be ready to enter the witness box to make my case – whether I was ready to go through that humiliation.

“What is in the governorship? Before I became the governor I entered the witness box and I know after being governor I can still go back there one day. So I went there and I won the
case. They awarded damages in my favour.

“But by the time you want to check the process of the guy who libeled you and so on, he sells himself everything put together he could not compensate for by legal fee not to talk of really mitigating my paying as a result of the judgment,’’ he said.

The party chairman also bore his mind on the readiness of the party against 2019 elections especially as the incumbent president would be slugging it out with the likes of former Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar from the main opposition, People Democratic Party.

He said: “We are fully ready, we have done with our primaries and filled our nominations.

“As you know, INEC still has a window between now and first of January to deal with issues of substitution. As of campaigns, we are ready.

“We are going to announce the date and
programme for our campaigns. My idea of kick-off will be the day we will do our first presidential rally where Mr President as our candidate and other candidates, party leaders will assemble in a venue that will be agreeable to all of us.

“There will be two sets of messages. One, on what we have done in the past, without failing to remind people of where we were before, what we are going to do in the next four years, and a couple of things we believe we will be
doing differently.

“President Buhari if compared to the rest of the candidates, there is no basis to compare day and night. The real issue in this election is not going to be religion. It is not going to be about ethnicity.

“Central to the issue and given our past
experience as a country, we know that what makes a difference is the character, the issue of integrity of the candidates.’’

According to Mr Oshiomhole, the campaign is going to be focusing on character and integrity of those who want to govern the country.