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Why NRC didn�t congratulate MKO � Mantu
Sam Akpe, Abuja
Eleven years after the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, a major player in the political events of that period and the Deputy President of the Senate, Alhaji Ibrahim Mantu, has shed light on why the National Republican Convention failed to congratulate the late Chief M.K.O.Abiola, the presumed winner of that election.
Mantu also spoke on the 2007 elections declaring that only the various political parties could determine which geo-political zones should produce the next president of Nigeria.
The NRC, to which Mantu belonged at the time, fielded Alhaji Bashir Tofa for the 1993 presidential election as against the Social Democratic Party, that presented the late Abiola.
Mantu�s revelation emerged on the 11th anniversary of the annulment of that election by former military president Ibrahim Babangida.
Speaking with journalists on Tuesday night, the Deputy President of the Senate whose biography, �Ibrahim Mantu � Lesson in tolerance�, would be presented in Abuja on Thursday, said he had been publicly criticised by northern politicians in the late 80s when he propagated the power shift campaign.
On why the NRC could not congratulate Abiola in 1993, Mantu said if the party had released the message before the presidential candidate, Tofa was called to Aso Rock; the story would have been different.
�I was the boss of the NRC campaign organization, so when Doyin Okupe spoke with me that this is what has happened (Abiola has won) I said fine, we should congratulate Abiola.
�I went to Tofa and he said to me �go and draft the letter of congratulations to Abiola.� I told him I wanted to go on air, he said, �you should not just go on air, draft it so that I can sign.�
�So I drafted the letter. It was typed. When I took it back I asked, �where is Tofa?� they said he had been called to the Villa; The Presidency had invited him to the Villa.
�We waited and time was running out. We wanted to congratulate him before anybody would announce anything.
�You see we came up with some idealistic approach. We wanted to show that we too could accept defeat.�
He said that by the time Tofa returned from the Villa, he instructed the party not to release the congratulatory message explaining that the military leaders had something up their sleeves.
�In short, they gave him the impression that either the election would be cancelled or they would find a way of�I don�t want to go into the details here,� he said.
On the 2007 election, he told journalists that, �If the PDP decides that the next president should still come from the South, what should concern every Nigerian should be the quality of the candidate and not just where he comes from.�
The joy of every politician, he said, should be that at last, �we have succeeded in creating a level-playing ground in which the south and the north or any part has equal opportunity of producing a president.
�Today that jinx has been broken,� he said, referring to the emergence of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 as the President of Nigeria.
He was optimistic that not too long from now, �a time will come when all these geo-political consideration, ethnic and religion will no longer be an issue in the Nigerian political arrangement.�
The PUNCH, Thursday June 24, 2004
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