A combined photo of late Mohammadu Buhari and Buba Galadima
By Abdullahi Abubakar
A prominent chieftain of the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP), Buba Galadima, has revealed that the late President Muhammadu Buhari’s foray into politics was never his idea but a strategic move to halt an attempt by the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) to dislodge Fulani structures in Ilorin.
Speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show on Tuesday, Galadima explained that some northern leaders felt the need to take drastic action when the OPC mobilised heavily in the early years of the Fourth Republic.
He said, “Some of us who recruited him into politics had a mission, and I will reveal that mission today.
“General Buhari came into politics, it wasn’t his province, he never liked politicians because he believed we are fake and that we don’t mean what we say but there was an incident that made some of us to recruit him, convince him and use other people to convince him to join politics, even though we had our own agenda.
“In 2000, the OPC was on rampage in some parts of the country, especially in the southwest. They had inconvenienced a lot of people from this part of the country to the extent that they mobilised over 500 vehicles to come and invade Ilorin with the sole aim of uprooting what they called Fulani structures in Ilorin and we felt that was too much and President (Olusegun) Obasanjo was doing nothing, President Bola Tinubu, then Governor of Lagos was doing nothing.
“And some of us felt that those group of people were (sic) being encouraged by their leaders in positions of authority. So, how do we stop that? And I called a meeting in Kaduna at Alhaji Bashir Dalhatu’s house in a place called Dongo Kanji, directly opposite the house of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
“And some of those we invited included Alhaji Wada Nas, Prof. Yadudu, Bashir Dalhatu himself, Alhaji Yahaya Suleiman and a host of others, about 34 of us. And we sat down to reason, ‘How do we save our people from this OPC menace?
“So I suggested that we have to because you can remove a government through only two ways, through the barrel of a gun and through the ballot box.
“And they said it was impossible to challenge General Obasanjo. That was how Buhari came to our mind and when he was approached, he had very unkind words for politicians but since he didn’t say he was not doing, we still persuaded him.
“To cut long story short, we achieved our first purpose of putting a brake to what OPC was doing because immediately Buhari joined partisan politics, we had a very big outing in Daura to initiate him into politics. The Obasanjo government became restive and was shaking to its bone marrow and because those were some of our thinking, Obasanjo had to really checkmate the OPC. So we achieved our first purpose of bringing General Buhari into partisan politics so the remaining now is history.”
