..Reveals Why Tinubu Was Targeted During Campaign By Atiku, Peter Obi
The Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Information and Strategy, Mr Bayo Onanuga, has disclosed that the president is still nursing the knee surgery he went to treat in London.
He said this while answering a question about Tinubu’s health in an interview with Nigerian Tribune.
He said, “No, he was not sick. We made this clear to Nigerians. Tinubu was as fit as the fiddle in the run-up to that election. Before that campaign began, I think a year before, he went for knee surgery, which was not a secret as President Buhari even went to see him in London when he was recuperating.
“So, that was what he went to do – knee surgery. That was why he could not walk properly.
“When you do knee surgery, you cannot be walking like a 25-year-old man. He is still nursing it up till now because it was a major surgery. It is not that he has any other ailment.” he said.
Recall that Tinubu in 2021 went for a knee surgery in London. This is before the commencement of the campaign for the general election.
Meanwhile, Onanuga also revealed why Tinubu was targeted by the opposition during the 2023 presidential campaign.
Onanuga said Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) knew that Tinubu was the man to beat in the election because the All Progressives Congress (APC) was united and controlled 21 states.
The presidential aide said that the ruling APC was not divided like the PDP, and Tinubu had the backing of all the governors elected on the party’s platform.
He said: “It is because both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi knew that the man to beat in the election was Bola Tinubu, a candidate of the ruling party, whose party controls 21 states, a man whose party was not divided unlike the PDP, which had broken into four factions.
“What mud did they not throw at him? They said he was ill and that he could not string two sentences together and so on. But eventually, God and the people of Nigeria gave Tinubu victory.”
Onauga added that Obi’s supporters, popularly known as the Obidient Movement, pushed false narratives about Tinubu, such as the academic records of the president from the Chicago State University and the drug trafficking allegation.
He added: “It was God’s handiwork that made Bola Tinubu win the election, despite the mudslinging, most especially from the Labour Party mob – those uncouth members of the so-called Obidient Movement.
“We always call them a mob as they always respond unthinkingly to a kind of stimulus. Once somebody throws something out, no matter whether it is fallacious, they gobble it and start sharing. And they keep repeating, circulating the false narratives, the false stories, misinformation, and rumours, such that if you don’t respond to them at times, people believe they are telling the truth.
Look at the Chicago University controversy, for instance. There was a deposition in the US by Caleb Westberg, registrar of the university. Nowhere in the deposition did the man say that Tinubu forged the certificate.
“What the man said was that ‘because we don’t have the original, we cannot authenticate the certificate they said he submitted in Abuja.’ They tried to make the man say he forged the certificate, but the man said no.
“In fact, the school even produced two other certificates similar to the one Tinubu submitted to INEC. Westberg made it clear that Tinubu was an honours graduate and that once a student graduates and wants a replacement certificate, the certificate is not issued by the school. It is issued by a third-party vendor.
“The Tinubu attackers ignored this salient fact and kept bombarding their zombie audience that the university declared Tinubu’s certificate a forgery. This is not true.”
