Posted by BELEMA KOKO on
AHEAD of the 2007 presidential election, a plan has allegedly been hatched to use the media to discredit President Olusegun Obasanjo and top political office holders from the North believed to be his allies.
AHEAD of the 2007 presidential election, a plan has allegedly been hatched to use the media to discredit President Olusegun Obasanjo and top political office holders from the North believed to be his allies.
Primarily, the targets of the smear campaign, it was learnt at the weekend, are those the sponsors believe may get Obasanjo's support for the race to succeed him.
Sources named Governor Adamu Muazu of Bauchi State as one of the targets, saying investigations had shown that the group behind the proposed smear campaign had been found to be made up of supporters of a top politician hoping to succeed the president. The group is also said to be uncomfortable with the alleged plan by Obasanjo to elongate his tenure beyond 2007, and is convinced that the plan has to be scuttled now alongside any other plan by the president to use any of his northern allies to actualise the alleged ambition.
Sunday Vanguard sources said both the Federal Government and Bauchi State government were already responding decisively to the group's offensive.
However, Muazu would not entertain enquiries on the matter as, according to him, he did not want any distraction in the performance of his official duties.
A four-hour meeting of the group, said to have been held in Abuja, allegedly produced a document entitled: '2007 Progamme of Action." The document reportedly detailed how the group intended to tackle Obasanjo, some erstwhile Nigerian leaders and top politicians from the North presumed to be working for Muazu on his 2007 presidential project.
Prior to last week when the game plan of the group was said to have been uncovered by security agencies, it had allegedly raised a committee to carry out the media campaign against the president and governor as outlined in the document.
The game plan included smearing the image of Muazu such that by early next year he would have quit the presidential race. The group's document which, according to the sources, describes Obasanjo as 'general number one", two other former heads of state as 'generals two and three" and the Bauchi governor as the 'main man", canvassed huge sums of money to be spent on the smear campaign.
The Lagos-Ibadan media were proposed to be used to carry out the campaign.
The thrust of the campaign, it was learnt, would be to allege fraudulent practices against the president and Muazu's backers.
The document reportedly did not rule out the production of fake documents especially contract papers involving huge sums of money to be passed on to the media as genuine in the course of the group making its allegations against the Bauchi governor's supporters.
'This ought to be given wide coverage by the media as this would bring about the necessary setback in supporting the ‘main man' who would have brought them bad publicity", the document was quoted as saying.
The document was also said to have recommended the sending of a team to Britain and America to take pictures of houses to be falsely claimed to have been the property of Muazu and his associates, and bought at month watering prices.