would not be right for him to get to Nigeria and be reading different versions and interpretations of what happened, which may be right or wrong.
“Myself, Ambassador Kazaure, (SCOP), Chief Security Officer to the President, Idris Ahmed Kasim, Mohammed Sarki Abba, Dr. Suhayb Rafindadi, Col. Yusuf Dodo, the Aide-De-Camp, and Tunde Sabiu, Special Assistant, put heads together, and decided that I should brief the President when we were airborne to Abuja. The motive was so that he would not get varied and possibly distorted versions.
“Few minutes into the flight, I approached the President and said I needed to bring him up to speed on something major that had happened back home.”
Adesina said after he finished narrating what had transpired in Ogun to his principal, Buhari went silent for a few minutes.
He said, “Ever a willing listener, the President told me to go ahead. I did a summary of the Emilokan speech, and when I ended, the President ruminated for some moments, and responded: ‘Asiwaju said all that? Thank you for coming to brief me’.
“The Emilokan speech was raging like wildfire, and as we feared, being interpreted in different ways, and from different perspectives. The Bola Tinubu campaign team felt a clarification was needed, that the aspirant was not actually deriding the President in any way.”
The former presidential spokesperson further said when they returned to Nigeria on June 3, 2022, Buhari held a meeting with all presidential aspirants in the state house the following day and urged them to “consult among themselves, build a consensus, and produce a formidable candidate”.
“Next day, June 4, President Buhari held a scheduled meeting with all APC presidential aspirants at the Villa. Emilokan hung thick in the air, but trust the President, not a word of it was mentioned. He only appealed to the aspirants to consult among themselves, build a consensus, and produce a formidable candidate who could win an election for the party.”