The vice presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Kashim Shettima, has said he never said his principal and presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, had the kind of hospitality displayed by late Head of State, General Sanni Abacha.
Shettima was quoted by NAN to have made the statement while speaking at the Yoruba Tennis Club in Ikoyi, Lagos on Thursday.
“We need a leader with the patience and sense of responsibility and commitment, and somebody who understands the national psyche and mood of the nation of an Abdulsalami Abubakar, and in applicable circumstances, we need a leader with a dose of ruthlessness and taciturnity of general Sani Abacha,” he had said.
“Nice men do not make leaders. We need a leader with intellectual acumen, with the passion to catapult this nation to a higher pedestal. We need a leader who is not bound by regional or religious sentiment.
“We need a leader that has established such records of excellence and commitment to good governance. There is no one, with all due respect, that fits this better than Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.”
Clarifying, the former governor of Borno denied saying such, adding that what he meant was that the country needed Abacha’s style of dealing with insecurity.
“The obsession with distorting one’s views to settle partisan scores brings to mind a certain WBC Commentary. ‘The trouble with deliberate bias,’ it says, ‘is that it cannot be erased by sound education’. The video of my speech in Lagos is out there for those sincerely curious,” he tweeted.
“I never attributed hospitality to Abacha in my speech. I did a rundown of our past Presidents and played up ‘the taciturnity and a dose of ruthlessness of a Sani Abacha’ to show we need strongmen to deal with the non-state actors who’ve turned Nigeria into a vast killing field.
“I was quick to tease the audience, appreciating the humour hovering around the hall, with the familiar jibe that nice men don’t make good leaders.
“By nice men, I meant those who get easily manipulated and pressured to divert state resources to appeal to private expectations.”
