Kano State Governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, has said that President Goodluck Jonathan was the architect of his defeat General Muhammed Buhari in the March 28, 2015.
Kwankwanso blamed the loss suffered by Jonathan to his appointment of “wrong people” to key offices and his inability to play national politics well.
Jonathan who ran on the ticket of Peoples Democratic Party was defeated by the opposition All Progressives Congress Candidate, Buhari, which is the first time in Nigeria’s history an incumbent was beaten in an open election.
According to the Kano governor, “He (Jonathan)didn’t know who is who in this country; he was just looking at faces and those who were dressed very well. He meets them at the airport and he smiles and says ‘these are good people,’ he sits down and listens to gossips, ‘oh this man is bad, this man is good in so so places’ and sometimes he doesn’t even know the names and at the end of the day he made a big mistake by picking the wrong people.
“Our leaders who were in this game before us, those who were in the 1st Republic especially, told us so much about our friends in this country and if you happen to come from South South, where they were very close to our leaders, they had done everything possible to work with that part of the country.
“But of course (Jonathan) misused the opportunity to the extent that many of us felt that with him there, we have no future as a people and as individuals and that is why we had to come and organise ourselves to defeat him.
“Look at what the wife was saying that northerners were bearing children and throwing them away. How could you say that to northerners? With due humility, we are masters of the game. You cannot stay and insult us and get away with it.
“Democracy is a game of numbers, whether you are almajiri or professor, everybody has one vote; that was why we went back and put almijiris together to get about two million votes.”
Kwankwaso said that though Jonathan himself did not make such remarks he never denounced the disparaging remarks of his associates about the North.
Another factor, he said, was that the PDP was carried away by its successes, saying all those who supported it were hit in one way or the other.
“Nobody was important, even those of us who have high population and number of people in the country, those of us who by the grace of God have the confidence of our people, were not being carried along by the PDP,” he said.
