Between PDP’s accusation and Buhari’s court threat

Recent allegation by the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh linking General Muhammadu Buhari to Boko Haram insurgency may lead to a protracted legal tussle that may alter political calculations ahead of 2015 elections.

Unless the National Publicity Secretary of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Olisa Metuh, abide by the demand of former Head of State and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Gen. Muhammadu Buhari to retract the comment linking him with the insurgents, a legal battle akin to that of 2011 may be in the offing.
 Like the 2011 tussle, the impending face-off was as a result of comments linking

the former Head of State with violence.
Buhari had last Thursday in Kaduna issued a seven-day ultimatum which expires next Wednesday to Metuh and the PDP to avoid a legal action. This follows Metuh’s statement linking Buhari to the activities of Boko Haram insurgency.
Buhari had in 2011 sued the Special Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan on Media and Publicity, Dr. Reuben Abati following his opinion article in The Guardian Newspaper titled, “For the attention of General Buhari”.
Abati in the piece accused Buhari, who was to contest for the Presidency on the platform of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), of making inciting statements which led to the post-election violence that rocked some parts of the north.
The article infuriated Buhari who saw it as defamatory, intended to lower his integrity and to bring him into public ridicule and subsequently dragged Abati and The Guardian to court via suit no. ID/837/2011 and demanded N1billion damages from them.
The Presidency, however, reportedly intervened and convinced Buhari to settle out of court. 
Metuh had on Tuesday in a statement accused Gen. Buhari, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former FCT Minister Nasir el-Rufai and Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi of making utterances that helped the insurgency in the country.
He said inflammatory utterances by these politicians against the emergence of President Jonathan sparked off hatred and attracted insurgents who started demanding the ouster of the President with threats to cripple the system through acts of terrorism.
He insisted that it was not a coincidence that after Buhari “beckoned on his supporters to go on lynching spree should he lose the 2011 presidential election, an unprecedented violence  broke out claiming the lives of hundreds of innocent Nigerians.”
However, in a swift reaction, Buhari in a statement he personally signed gave seven days   to the PDP to retract its accusation linking him with the Boko Haram terrorist acts, tender an unreserved public apology to him, or face a legal action.
“I cannot sit back and allow my image, and that of my political party be smeared by falsehood in the name of politics,” Buhari said.
He said the widely publicized and very serious allegations made against him by the PDP and its spokesperson, Olisa Metuh, to the effect that his utterances were responsible for the current state of insecurity and terrorism bedeviling Nigeria, were absolutely without basis.
He said: “To support his claim, Mr. Metuh engaged in twisted logic and outright distortion – which he called facts – in which he said that I, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, beckoned on my ‘supporters to go on lynching spree’ should I lose the 2011 presidential election, as a result of which ‘an unprecedented violence broke out claiming the lives of hundreds of innocent people.
“I take very serious exception to this grave accusation against me by the PDP Publicity Secretary. It is a false allegation aimed at tarnishing my image and reputation in the hope of destroying my political and electoral standings, and that of my party, the APC, in the country. Firstly, it is public knowledge that Boko Haram as a terror organization long preceded the 2011 presidential elections. My utterances or lack of them on the 2011 presidential election could not therefore have created nor sustained the Boko Haram insurgency.
“Secondly, the PDP Government of President Goodluck Jonathan constituted the Sheikh Ahmed Lemu Panel of Inquiry to investigate and report on the post-election violence in some parts of the country. The panel discharged its duties within its terms of reference and submitted its Report to the President. This Report was accepted by government and a Whitepaper issued. Nowhere in that Report, a product of thorough investigation of that unfortunate incident, was I mentioned in the remotest way to have uttered a word or acted in any form or manner that sparked off the violence. If I had, certainly that investigation would have uncovered it. The truth is that I had not.
“Thirdly, 2011 was not the first time I contested a presidential election and was declared defeated, it was the third! If I had had no cause to ‘beckon on my supporters to go on lynching spree’ in the two previous occasions, I would have had no cause to change in 2011 – and I did not,” he said.
The APC chieftain also said  Metuh deliberately misquoted the interview he gave in Hausa on May 14, 2012 in which he said the opposition was determined to fight in the 2015 elections, saying: “I used the Hausa idiom ‘Kare jini, Biri jini’, which is a metaphor for a very tough fight. But, like the Islamic fundamentalist toga they falsely put on me because they cannot impinge on my personal and professional integrity, PDP apologists deliberately twisted this idiom to mean I called for violence.
“I am not a violent person and, other than my professional calling as a soldier, I have never associated with violence, I abhor violence and have never advocated it. I have always been a law abiding person who insists on due process and the rule of law in all my private and public affairs. It is therefore a grave infraction to my person, personality and integrity that such a false and malicious accusation is being leveled against me by the PDP. This is dangerous politics by the ruling party and it must stop forthwith,” Buhari said.
Before the latest altercation, the APC had challenged the PDP and Metuh to substantiate the March 22, 2014 allegation that it was the APC and its chieftains that were sponsoring terrorism in the country especially that it was more in the three states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa being controlled by the APC and where a state of emergency is currently in place. Metuh’s statement was therefore seen as a response to the APC spokesman Alhaji Lai Mohammed’s charge.
It would be recalled that the PDP in 2012 made similar accusation against Buhari and taunted him to lead government mediation with some leaders of the Jamatul Ahlil Sunnah lit daawati wal Jihad, also known as Boko Haram as part of measures to resolve the crisis.
Many Buhari loyalists and other members of the opposition parties warned Buhari against agreeing to such request as it was seen as attempt to indict him and directly link him to the sect’s activities.
Buhari, therefore, rejected the offer to lead the peace deal, saying he did not know any Boko Haram member or have anything to do with the group at a CPC’s Board of Trustee (BOT) meeting in Abuja.
 “Firstly, I do not know any member of the Boko Haram sect. I do not believe and I do not know of any religion that will go and kill people, burn schools. There was a stage where I mentioned that I agreed with one intellectual where he said there are three Boko Haram, one was Muhammed Yusuf whom we know of. A leader of the military in Maiduguri then did what we know in the military about internal security. They looked for Yusuf they handed him over to the police.
“Healthy young man and he died under a very dubious account in the police custody. Again his in-law was murdered; their houses were raised to the ground I understood that Borno State government had to pay for compensation. The second Boko Haram were criminals attacking banks and market places stealing money and they issued  statements that they are Boko Haram and I said, and I have no regret saying it that the biggest Boko Haram is the Federal Government itself, because it has all the powers to stop anarchy in the country. Now the social part of the country has been paralyzed, economic activities have stopped. People are no longer thinking of employment, they are thinking of what to eat and how to go about the following day,” Buhari had said.
National Publicity Secretary of the former CPC, Rotimi Fashakin, had also said in a statement that Buhari would rather not accept to lead the negotiation for peace deal of the sect, saying it was not his (Buhari’s) creation contrary to the propaganda of the PDP and those opposing Buhari, adding that the trajectory of the insecurity travails of Nigeria is largely to do with the ruling PDP, adding that the PDP is the harbinger of the nation’s insecurity travails.
Majority of Buhari’s supporters view the current altercations as another campaign strategy against him ahead of the 2015 elections, seeing that many are still calling for the APC to give the presidential ticket to Buhari.
As the Wednesday’s deadline draws near, Nigerians and even the outside world are waiting with berthed breath what would happen next.