Activist and presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has accused Datti Baba-Ahmed and Peter Obi of being military apologists, alleging that their ties to former military leaders raise questions about their political positions.
He said this while speaking in an interview on ARISE NEWS on Tuesday.
“These guys are military apologists. It is not only Datti Baba-Ahmed that is a military apologist; Peter Obi himself is a military apologist. They are all Abacha’s boys; Datti was a Babangida person, Peter Obi is an Abacha boy, and they all worked with the military. Whenever they want to seek approval or validation, they always go back to the homes of the military generals,” he alleged.
Sowore also alleged that Datti Baba-Ahmed, Peter Obi and President Bola Tinubu share longstanding connections to Nigeria’s political and military establishment, pointing to their interactions with Tinubu as evidence of relationships that extend beyond public political differences.
“I met Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed for the first time during a peace agreement signing event in 2023. I was sitting next to him while he was occupying the seat meant for Peter Obi. Next to me was Tinubu, who is now president.
“When Tinubu walked in, and Datti was calling Tinubu ‘Uncle.’ He was almost kneeling down for Tinubu. I was looking at his conduct right there, comparing it to what was going on on the internet regarding how they were discussing Tinubu as a terrible candidate. I said to myself, these guys are presenting a double-faced, Janus-faced persona to the public. I am not saying that Tinubu is not his uncle or that he shouldn’t respect him, but that level of fawning around him showed me that these guys don’t have any real disagreement with Tinubu.
“Eventually, Peter Obi also arrived. When the event was over, I stood up and left. I didn’t greet Tinubu; I just left. I looked back five seconds later, and all of the guys we held meetings with who were busy in public were lined up—Peter Obi, Dan Nwanyanwu, all of them were lining up to greet him.
“I thought, am I seeing a different set of candidates who, when we go to meetings as presidential candidates, speak about how to defeat Tinubu, how they have no respect for him, and discuss all kinds of things about him? Yet here we are, right in front of the world, and this same Tinubu has all of them queuing up just to have a handshake with him. I was the only one who didn’t wait behind.”
“That was why I confronted them. I’m saying to you: if you knew that your candidate, Peter Obi, was not competent to be president in 2023, why did you have to drag Nigeria through that whole process of presenting such a candidate when you knew it and are now saying it?”
Dismissing the significance of Obi’s strong youth following in 2023, Sowore argued that popularity alone did not establish competence, insisting that voters should instead examine how the former Labour Party candidate was presented to the public.
He maintained that the controversy surrounding Datti Baba-Ahmed’s recent remarks warranted further scrutiny, particularly because of what Sowore described as an apparent contradiction between Baba-Ahmed’s role as Obi’s running mate in 2023 and his current assessment of Obi’s suitability for the presidency.
“This whole idea that he was popular and youth followed him, It’s all part of the campaigning that brought us here today. It’s exactly that: you can package a candidate and then discover that everything you did in packaging made people fall for what was false and fraudulent.
“Then, that person who was the heartbeat from that effort has now come out and said, ‘The person that was presented to you in 2023 wasn’t who you thought he was. If he were to be president today, your problems would be compounded.’ That’s what brought this conversation we’re having today, and I’m saying we should interrogate that and discuss it. I don’t think we’re discussing why he was popular; we’re discussing how he became popular and on which grounds he became popular.
“That was my position then: that all these things were packaged to fool the public and fool some youths.”
Favour Odima