President Muhammadu Buhari has once again lamented that men of his own ethnic stock and religious persuasion, ruled against him for 12 years during disputed results of presidential elections in 2003, 2007, and 2011.
Mr Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, in a statement in Abuja on Wednesday, said Buhari said this when he received members of the Muhammadu Buhari/Osinbajo (MBO) Dynamic Support Group, in the State House, Abuja.
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Members of the Group were in the State House to present a compendium of five years achievements of the administration.
The president went into the trajectory of his struggles to get justice at the courts, after he lost presidential elections in 2003, 2007, and 2011, submitting that people who ruled against him were of his own ethnic stock and religious persuasion.
He, however, observed that those who stood up for him were of other faiths and ethnicity.
“Our problem is not ethnicity or religion, it is ourselves.
“After my third appearance in the Supreme Court, I came out to speak to those who were present then. I told them that from 2003, I’d spent 30 months in court.
“The President of the Court of Appeal, the first port of call for representation by presidential candidates then, was my classmate in secondary school in Katsina.
“We spent six years in the same class, Justice Umaru Abdullahi,” he said.
He said that his legal head was Chief Mike Ahamba, a Roman Catholic and an Ibo man.
“When the President of the court decided that we should present our case, my first witness was in the box.
“Ahamba insisted that a letter should be sent to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to present the register of constituencies in some of the States, to prove that what they announced was falsehood. It was documented.
“When they gave judgment, another Ibo man, the late Justice Nsofor, asked for the reaction from INEC to the letter sent to them,” he said.
According to him, they just dismissed it. He then decided to write a minority judgment. That was after 27 months in court.
“We went to the Supreme Court. Who was Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN)? A Hausa-Fulani like me, from Zaria. The members of the panel went in for about 30 minutes, came back to say they were proceeding on break.
“They went for three months. When they came back, it didn’t take them 15 minutes, they dismissed us.
“In 2007, who was the CJN? Kutigi. Again, a Muslim from the North. After 8 months or so, he dismissed the case,” he said.
He said that again in 2011, because he was so persistent, Musdafa, a Fulani man like him, from Jigawa, neighbor to his state, was CJN and he dismissed his case.
“I’ve taken you round this to prove that our problem is not ethnicity or religion. It is ourselves,” he said.
reflected on the complexities of the Nigerian condition, concluding that neither ethnicity nor religion was to blame, “but we ourselves,” for inherent injustices.
TheLeadng recalled that the then incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo of the People’s Democratic Party, defeated Muhammadu Buhari by over 11 million votes in the 2003 presidential election.
Yar’Adua was declared the winner of the 2007 presidential election by the electoral umpire, Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. He received 70% of the vote (24,638,063 votes), Buhari was in second place with 18% of the vote (6,605,299 votes), while Atiku Abubakar was third with about 7% (2,637,848 votes).
President Jonathan’s nearly 22.5 million votes was almost twice the number of the second-place finisher, Buhari, who won a little more than 12 million votes in the 2011 presidential election. The elections was reported in the international media as having run smoothly with relatively little violence or voter fraud.
All these results were upheld by the courts.
Buhari won the 2015 presidential election by recording 15.4 million votes as against 13.3 million by then President Jonathan.
In 2019, Buhari won re-election by defeating former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar who scored 11,262,978 votes as against 15,191,847 by the president.
Atiku and his party, the PDP challenged the result in court but the Supreme Court, headed by a Northern Muslim, Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad upheld the result. Tanko was made the CJN after Walter Onnoghen, a Southern Christian was removed in controversial manner by Buhari’s government.
