FORMER Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has challenged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s repeated assertion that he was chiefly responsible for the election of late former President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015.
News Point Nigeria reports that Amaechi, who served as Director-General of Buhari’s 2015 presidential campaign, insisted that the former president’s victory was the outcome of collective efforts within the All Progressives Congress and not the achievement of any single individual.
The former minister stated that he played a leading role in the political mobilisation that culminated in the APC’s historic defeat of the then-ruling Peoples Democratic Party in the 2015 general election.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television, Amaechi reacted to Tinubu’s claims that Buhari would not have become president without his intervention and political support.
President Tinubu has on several occasions maintained that Buhari had failed in three previous presidential contests before he persuaded him to return to the race ahead of the 2015 elections.
According to the president, he personally visited Buhari in Katsina and encouraged him to contest again, while also helping to build the political coalition that eventually secured victory.
However, Amaechi argued that it would be inaccurate to credit one individual for Buhari’s emergence, stressing that several major political actors contributed to the formation of the APC and the success of its presidential campaign.
“When we decided to form the APC, while I was a minister, President Tinubu was claiming he made Buhari president, and I couldn’t respond because I was the minister under President Buhari,” Amaechi said.
“That will be suicidal because Buhari could fire you. So I couldn’t have said no then. He wasn’t the president. I couldn’t tell him, ‘You are wrong. You didn’t make President Buhari president’.”
The former Rivers State governor maintained that his own role in the 2015 election was substantial, noting that he coordinated the campaign and led political engagements across the country.
“Not only was I the DG of the campaign, but everybody will bear witness that I did all the battle,” he said.
Amaechi also recalled that he was serving as Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum at the time and travelled extensively across the country to mobilise support for Buhari and the APC.
“I led the governors’ forum. I crisscrossed the country fighting here and there,” he stated.
Reflecting on the APC administration that came into power on the strength of its “change” agenda, Amaechi acknowledged that the government achieved some of its goals while falling short in other areas.
“Did we achieve the change? Here and there. In some areas, well, we did. In some areas, we did not,” he said.
Amaechi’s comments have further intensified the ongoing debate over the political alliances, personalities and forces that shaped Buhari’s historic rise to power in 2015, an election widely regarded as a watershed moment in Nigeria’s democratic history and the first time an incumbent president was defeated at the polls.