An
Aide to President Goodluck Jonathan is actually the brain behind the
letter written by Senator Iyabo Obasanjo to her father - former
President Olusegun Obasanjo, Elombah.com can reveal. In the letter which
was made exclusively available to Vanguard Newspaper, Iyabo Obasanjo
described her father as a liar, manipulator, megalomaniac, narcissistic,
two-faced
hypocrite determined to foist on President Goodluck Jonathan what no one
would contemplate with him as president. She also ruled out further
communication with her father till death.
However, an impeccable source has told
elombah.com that while it is true that the thoughts reflected in the
letter are Iyabo’s, Jonathan's aide actually penned the letter.
"Go through the letter again and compare
with some of the journalist's past work and you will see that the way
he writes is reflected in the Iyabo letter", he claimed.
Asked for clarification in view of the
fact that the first daughter of the former President, Iyabo, is said to
have refused entreaties by family members, friends and political leaders
to withdraw her statement disparaging her father, the source which
craved anonymity explained that Iyabo and the aide had been close
friends over the years, and Iyabo had also complained to him about her
father and had severally threatened to expose him.
“Iyabo Obasanjo and President Jonathan’s
aide, (xxxxx) had long been best of friends and the latter had always
confided in the Journalist her bitterness with her father”, our source
said, and added that “Iyabo had been planning to expose her father, but
had been stopped from doing so all these while by the aide whom we were
told, told her not to do it so as not to deepen the family crisis and
wash their dirty linens in the public, an advise which Iyabo had since
kept.”
However following the acidic letter to
his boss, the aide we gathered had to put pen to paper all that Iyabo
had told him in the course of their previous conversations and sent it
across via mail to her for her perusal.
Having gone through the letter, our
source stated that she sent it to Vanguard editor, who was initially
shocked at the content but still went to press with the publication. A
call we gathered was also put across to her, where she agreed that the
content of the letter be made public.
Multiple sources further told
elombah.com that President Goodluck Jonathan’s aides had earlier met in
the Presidential Villa on how to attack the former President who wrote
the controversial letter titled ‘Before It’s not too late’. Some of the
agreement reached we gathered was to hit Obasanjo below the bet using
his close family members.
In the 11-page open letter, Iyabo
Obasanjo, a former senator of the Federal Republic, painted a very
unwholesome intimate portrait of Nigeria’s leader, accusing him “of
having an egoistic craving for power and living a life where only men of
low esteem and intellect thrive.”
And to dismiss insinuations and other
reports in the social media that she was not the author of the
statement, Iyabo is currently insisted yesterday that she did not tell
anybody to deny the statement on her behalf.
“Nobody can say that I told him that I
didn’t write it. I am not a liar. I will not back away from what I wrote
and there is nothing that is there that is a lie,” Iyabo told Vanguard.
She disclosed that she decided to break
away from her father after realising that he cannot change from his
manipulative person she had known all along, adding that throughout last
year she did not speak with her father. She started speaking with him
recently.
“The last time I spoke to him was three
days ago and I decided that I was not going to speak to him again after
that. That was the communication through which I realised that this man
would never change from manipulations for himself,” Iyabo told the
paper.
Senator Iyabo Obasanjo, who is in the
United States, has so far rejected various entreaties by friends and
family members to deny the statement by refusing to carry her telephone
calls.
In the damning statement, Iyabo accused
her father of orchestrating a third term for himself as president,
cruelty to family members, abandonment of children and grandchildren,
and also, a legendary reputation of maltreatment of women, including the
mother.
Iyabo also foreclosed further political
engagements in Nigeria. She denied any political motive for her missive,
and described Nigeria as a country where her father and his ilk have
helped to create a situation where smart, capable people bend down to
imbeciles to survive.
“For you to accuse someone else of what
you so obviously practiced yourself tells of your narcissistic
megalomaniac personality. Everyone around for even a few minutes knows
that the only thing you respond to is praise and worship of you,” she
wrote in reference to Obasanjo’s letter dated 2 December to President
Goodluck Jonathan.
Iyabo was not the only child of Obasanjo
that denounced him, Gbenga, the first son of Obasanjo, had sometime ago
expressed his frustration in a 50-paragraph affidavit before a court in
Lagos detailing how his father slept with his estranged wife, Mojisola.
Gbenga was seeking to divorce his wife who he got married to on 29
April, 2000.
In the 10th paragraph of the affidavit
signed by Emankhu Addeh, of Addeh and Associates, legal practitioner for
the petitioner, the petitioner averred “that he knows for a fact that
the respondent, his wife, committed adultery with and had an intimate,
sexual relationship with his own father, General Olusegun Obasanjo, due
to her greed to curry favours and contracts from him in his capacity as
President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
He said Mojisola also got rewarded for
her adulterous acts with several oil contracts with the Nigerian
National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, from his father, among which was
the NNPC consultancy training in supply chain management and project
management awarded to her company, Bowen and Brown.
Again in 'Bitter-Sweet, My Life With
Obasanjo', Oluremi, the wife of Chief Obasanjo, emphasised the former
President’s hatred for his family when she said: “he told me to wait for
him. When he emerged, he was in shorts and a short sleeve shirt. He
slapped me twice and ran after me as I fled down the stairs…Throughout
his tenure as Head of State, Obasanjo also ensured that I was not given
any allowance as his wife. What he gave with one hand, he retrieved with
the other.
“It rained cats and dogs the day
Obasanjo handed over to Shagari at the Race Course, Onikan, Lagos,
October 1, 1979. He asked me to move to Abeokuta with him but I declined
because of his extra-marital indiscipline.
“When he was being drawn out of the
Army, I was in the same car with him. When we went for thanksgiving at
Owu Baptist Church, Abeokuta, I was also in the same car. At the church,
I sat with him on the front pew. During the reception I was in control
of events and sat his mistresses with other guests as their importance
demanded.
“I made Stella take one of the middle
seats with her friend, Julie Coker. After the ceremony, I told my
husband that I had risen to the top with him by the grace of God. Now, I
was giving him a free rein to misbehave with his mistresses as I would
not stay with him at Abeokuta. He begged me earnestly not to leave him
alone. He said he had not finished his house at Victoria Island, Lagos,
wondering where I would stay. I still kept my flat on Lawrence Road,
Ikoyi.
“Obasanjo did not forgive me that I did
not live with him in Abeokuta. He stopped taking care of the children,
probably thinking I had a lot of money. He only sent N400 a month. Iyabo
and Busola were at Queen’s College, Lagos; Segun was at King’s College.
I was now torn between raising my children and running the farm.
Sometime in 1981, Gbenga and Enitan were due to return to school at
Corona after the long break.
“When the school fees were not
forthcoming from their father, I went to the late Simbiat Abiola for
assistance. She prayed that God would help. I later sold off my gold
bangles to Alhaja Abdulraq, a jeweller, to raise the fees.
“My topsy-turvy relationship with
Obasanjo continued. He would drive past Oduduwa Crescent without
checking on his children, who were progressing in education. Iyabo,
Busola and Segun were making excellent grades at school. I was
struggling to make ends meet.”
Meanwhile, a chieftain of the All
Progressives Congress, Mr. Rotimi Fashakin, has described Senator Iyabo
Obasanjo’s purported letter to her father as a distraction.
Fashakin, who was the National Publicity
Secretary of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change, told Saturday
PUNCH, on Thursday that Iyabo’s letter did not detract from the issues
raised by ex-President Obasanjo in his letter to President Jonathan.
Fashakin said whatever Senator Obasanjo
had against her father was a family affair which had no bearing on the
growth and development of Nigeria.
He equally wondered whether Nigerians
were being railroaded into taking the younger Obasanjo’s letter as
President Jonathan’s response to the former president’s letter.
Fashakin said, “Should we now take the letter from Iyabo Obasanjo to her father as the response from the President?
“Because, the coincidence is too much,
telling us that Obasanjo is not a good father, what has that got to do
with our progress as a nation?
“That is at best the business of the
Obasanjo family. What Iyabo has written and what Obasanjo has written
are two different things.
“(Olusegun) Obasanjo opened a can of
worms, is it true that the President has trained or is training 1,000
snipers in North Korea? Because he said it was the same place Abacha
trained his own.
“There is no need trying to dance around
these issues, let us know the truth. Let us know whether when we go for
campaigns now those snipers will begin their work.
“Those are the things we are interested
in, not the Presidency using Iyabo Obasanjo to distract us. Does her
letter detract from what Obasanjo said in his letter?”
He said at best Iyabo’s letter only told Nigerians that Obasanjo was a bad father and a bad family man.
He accused the Jonathan administration
of trying to use “this distraction” to shift public attention from the
issues raised in Obasanjo’s letter.
Fashakin also demanded that government
should explain to Nigerians the real reasons behind its decision to free
Major Hamza Al-Mustapha from jail.
He expressed fears that political
campaigns might become dangerous gatherings to attend if indeed there
were trained snipers on the prowl.
The party chieftain maintained that what
Nigerians expect from the President is for him to address all the
issues raised by ex-president Obasanjo in his open letter.
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