2015 elections: How AIT, NTA frustrated us -Buhari

In from Smart Ali . . .
Echoes of the 2015 presidential election reverberated on Thursday as President Muhammadu Buhari recounted unpleasant tales of activities of some selected partisan media organisations during the run-up to the March 28 and April 11 general elections.
The President said he emerged victorious despite the deployment of state media forces against him and his party.
He, however, expressed gratitude to Nigerians for their support which he noted, ensured victory for him and his party at the polls against all odds.
Buhari spoke through his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu.
According to the media aide: “Muhammadu Buhari’s goodwill greetings to you is on account of the fact that he won an election that many people thought he was not going to win.
“Americans say that elections are won on the dollar. It’s very improbable that anybody can win an election without money. We didn’t have advertising money on our campaign. Even with the little money we spent on advertising, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) was not making slots available to us, neither was African Independent Television (AIT).
“I remember on a particular night I called the NTA, they had 16 slots of one minute ads and I said I wanted to buy one minute for the Buhari campaign, they said all 16 had been sold.
“Some other instances that exposed the partisan nature of the NTA: money was returned to us, and from AIT money was returned to us. They simply won’t advertise for us.”
He went on: “The day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to see that my house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the campaign. In fact, it was the cocking of their guns that roused me and my family members from sleep. Only to discover that tens of policemen, police vehicles and some other unidentified vehicles darkened the windows around my home.

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“Of course it was much later that we came to know why they had come. Even the APC Presidential Campaign was penetrated by fifth columnists, and I will make this confession, because a day before that siege we had had a meeting with the security committee at which we agreed that we were going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser at that time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against Muhammadu Buhari.
“The former National Security Adviser was involved in a coup that threw out Muhammadu Buhari as military president in 1984.
“This time around, all the things that followed, the postponement of the election on account of this and that and a lot of the thinking of the campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by the National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege on our homes was to pre-empt the story.‎”

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