Rotimi Amaechi has rejected Bola Tinubu’s claim that late Muhammadu Buhari would not have become president in 2015 without Tinubu’s intervention and political backing. Speaking on Arise Television on Friday, Amaechi said Buhari’s victory came from the work of several political actors, not one man.
Amaechi said he could not answer at the time because he was serving as a minister under Buhari when the claim was being made during the formation of the All Progressives Congress. He said he played a central role in the campaign, beyond leading the effort as director-general of Buhari’s presidential bid, and added that he was also chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum and crisscrossed the country to build support. “Not only was I the DG of the campaign, but everybody will bear witness that I did all the battle,” he said.
The dispute goes to a familiar fault line in Nigerian politics: who deserves credit for the coalition that carried Buhari to victory in 2015. Amaechi said the answer was collective effort, and he said his own role was limited not just to campaign management but to political mobilisation across the country.
His account also undercut the cleaner version of the victory story. Amaechi said the administration that followed did deliver the change agenda in some areas, but not everywhere. “Did we achieve the change? Here and there. In some areas, well, we did. In some areas, we did not,” he said.
The argument matters now because it reopens a contest over legacy at a moment when the politics of 2015 is still being used to settle present-day scores. Amaechi’s answer was direct: Tinubu was not the sole architect of Buhari’s rise, and the record, as he described it, belongs to a wider circle of actors who spent the year building the victory.
