Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, on Thursday declared that he was ready to sacrifice everything including his life for the interest of the country as against the interest of his party.
According to Obasanjo, “My first pre-occupation is what is best for Nigeria, Nigeria first, party second and any other thing third. Nigeria first, meaning that I’ll not sacrifice anything for the interest of Nigeria and I can sacrifice my own life for the interest of Nigeria; I can’t sacrifice my life for the interest of a party; I’ll sacrifice my life for the interest of Nigeria.”
Thisday Newspaper reports that Obasanjo made his intentions known in Abeokuta while receiving the presidential candidate of the National Conscience Party (NCP), Mr. Martin Onovo, in his residence where the former president claimed that he was still a card carrying member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
He said: “If what you are trying to do is in the best interest of Nigeria and Nigerians accepte and vote for you, who am I not to accept you as president of Nigeria, I will.
“Whatever may be the outcome of the election, once the election is free and fair and undisturbed, uninterrupted, then you have to accept the verdict of the people.”
Speaking further, he said: “You can do a lot of things to a lot of people but you don’t have to necessarily be in government to serve your people, you can still do it, the founder of your party was never in any government and yet, he served the people of this country.”
He said: “Let me hasten to wish you every success in you endeavour and also pay tribute, as I have done in my recent book, to the founder of your party, Gani Fawehinmi.”
He continued: “I believe he was a genuine social critic and I thought so, you may not agree with all he said or how he went about it, but he was definitely a genuine social critic. So if you, as the standard bearer of the party he founded believe that you should follow his footstep of integrity and genuine critical analysis and committed analysis and criticism of the situation in the country, I think nobody will fault you.
“No matter what others may say because people may come up and say Nigerian doesn’t belong to anybody, I believe that is a stupid saying, Nigeria belong to all of us because anything that doesn’t belong to anybody, anything can happen to it. For me, Nigeria belongs to all of us and we are stakeholders in this country.”
However, Onovo who spoke earlier, said Nigeria needs a fundamental change and not superficial change, saying that is the view of his party.
He said they decided to visit Obasanjo to express his mission in politics, saying
“What we are here to seek is your blessings for the efforts we are making.”
According to him, Our programme is designed to lead to the abolition of poverty through full employment, improved health care and electricity supply and energy which is very critical to industrial development.
He added: “We are very aware that you did very few critical things in government when you were there and some of those we wish to continue when we get to office particularly the anti-corruption efforts, EFCC, ICPC, we intend to continue.”
He said: “When we get elected with your guidance, we will check the loss in national revenue so that we have funds to carry out the developmental programmes we have promised our people.”
“We are also aware that you left about $67 billion in the excess crude account and the foreign reserves and unfortunately, what we know now from the time of the Debt Management Office is that we are indebted to $70 billion.
“It’s unfortunate, and we also think that many Nigerians are looking for fundamental change and we are hoping after getting in to the office, with your blessing, to build on some of the developmental initiatives you left behind,” he added.
