Festus Keyamo, the Spokesman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council, has been described as a troublesome interloper looking for attention over alleged corruption against the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.
This is according to Dele Momodu, a spokesman of the PDP’s Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign, in an exclusive interview with Nigerian Tribune.
Meanwhile, following a claim by Atiku’s former aide, Micheal Achimugu, alleging that the former Vice-president used Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to siphon public funds between 1999 and 2007, Festus Keyamo called for Atiku’s arrest and investigation by the EFCC and other anti-graft agencies and later sued the PDP presidential candidate.
But responding, Momodu said Keyamo’s attitude as a spokesman of the APC PCC has done more damage to the party’s presidential candidate than to Atiku.
“I’m not in a position to speak about legal issues. As far as I’m concerned, Festus Keyamo is just a troublesome interloper who is looking for attention at all times. And what he has done with that is that he has done more damage to Tinubu than to Atiku.
“Senator Dino Melaye spoke on a television Programme and brought new insights to the issues because a lot of people who were not looking at it that way started seeing Tinubu in another light. What Dino said was that Nigeria cannot have a president who is a Pablo Escobar and a Vice President who is Osama bin Laden,” he said.
Speaking further, the Spokesman of Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign stated that while nobody is perfect, “nothing in Atiku compares as negatively as in Tinubu.”
Continuing, he maintained that Keyamo’s “gutter language and behaviour” have always called for his attacks against Tinubu, whom he described as his friend, adding that his duty is to defend Atiku.
“So, I don’t like it if I have to wrestle with a pig but he’s decided that that’s what he wants. Atiku has told us frontally and clearly that he wants to run issue-based campaign and you can see him. If you like slap him, he can turn the other cheek. That’s him, otherwise he would have replied Baba Obasanjo long ago. That is why that misperception was able to stick on him. But it is in the character of Fulani. They don’t make noise. A lot of us make noise about a lot of things whether we know the truth or we don’t know it; whether we have the facts or we don’t have it. We just like to whip up all kinds of things,” he said.
Momodu, while speaking further, described dragging his principal to court by Festus Keyamo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) as a waste of Tinubu’s money.
“…they’re wasting it already on funding a serial blackmailer from escaping from Nigeria to wherever he’s hiding. Nobody is pursuing him. But we know the details, we know what happened and we know why he’s doing what he’s doing. That wasn’t the first time he would release the thing, he was looking for a potential buyer and they’ve bought it. So, when they go to court, we will see what will come out of it,” he said.
The Atiku/Okowa presidential campaign Spokesman, while likening the allegations to the APC’s awareness of its possible loss to Atiku at the poll in February, added that despite a series of allegations against the APC presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, his principal and the PDP chose to remain silent about it and “nobody touched him.”
