Posted by From GODWIN TSA ABUJA on
The political infighting in the Presidency reached a new height on Thursday when Vice President Atiku Abubakar accused the Federal Government of plotting to scuttle his 2007 presidential ambition.
The political infighting in the Presidency reached a new height on Thursday when Vice President Atiku Abubakar accused the Federal Government of plotting to scuttle his 2007 presidential ambition.
Atiku, who spoke in Abuja through his media consultant, Mallam Garba Shehu, said the plans are in three folds all aimed at pinning a charge of corruption against him.
Speaking against the backdrop of the on-going persecution of Atiku's friends and associates, including the recent seizure of his bank records at the Plantinum Habib Bank in Lagos by security operatives, Shehu revealed that that the first stage of the plot is to castrate the vice president financially and render him incapacitated from funding his political campaigns.
The second stage, he said, is to intimidate and scare away his friends by clamping down on them and forcing them to incriminate him in some financial scandals and dealings, while the last lap of the plot is to make Atiku a political leper with whom nobody would want to do business with.
While condemning the zeal with which government is pursuing the vice president, Mallam Shehu said "the clampdown on Mike Adenuga and Otunba Fasawe by security operatives is to crack them into implicating the vice president in a financial scandal to see whether anything can be used to nail him." He further linked the persecution of Atiku to the disappointment the Federal Government suffered by the failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to implicate him over the raid on his US house.
The media consultant, who said the Federal Government is desperate to incriminate Atiku, added, "giving this disappointment I'm not surprised by this flurry of investigations against the vice president."
He feared that the arrest of Adenuga was a veiled attempt to get at the vice president over the 20 Million US Dollars belonging to the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF), which was deposited in Equitorial Trust Bank Limited (ETB).