A chieftain of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), Engineer Buba Galadima, has alleged that opposition candidates are being paid large sums to withdraw from the 2027 elections, and that the money is being distributed from a hotel in the Asokoro district of Abuja.
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“I will start by telling you a story,” he said. “As we speak now, if you go to Carlton Hotel in Asokoro, there is a lady from Zamfara who is sharing money.”
He said he regarded the alleged operation as confirmation of a position he had taken before. “This is proving me right, because I have said on several occasions that President Tinubu and all his governors are afraid of contest and they want to win unopposed. That’s why they accumulated such an enormous amount of money to be used in buying people.”
Galadima spoke on Arise Television’s Prime Time on Tuesday, in an interview conducted 100 days before the general election.
Asked who was paying, Galadima said: “By the lady. There are a lot of security people, DSS people, and everybody in the hotel as you go now.”
He set out a scale of payments said to be on offer to candidates who abandon their candidacies.
“Every member of the House of Assembly who agrees to forfeit his ticket and withdraw for the APC candidate is being given 50 million naira,” he said.
“Every House of Reps member who agrees to let go his candidature will be given 200 million naira with their car, and several have collected and they are still collecting from state to state.”
He continued: “If you are contesting for Senate, you have 500 million plus a Jeep. If you are contesting for governor and you want to withdraw, it’s 2 billion naira plus a Jeep.”
He also alleged a meeting. “In fact, she just held a meeting about three, four days ago with Professor Nentawe, the chairman of APC, showing some candidates who have forfeited their right to contest the election. They wrote resignation and they collected money.”
Asked whether he was saying candidates of other parties were being made to step aside so that the APC candidate becomes uncontested, he answered: “Yes — especially NDC and ADC.”
He said he had not attended himself. “I know people who attended the meeting. And they have clips of that meeting,” he said, adding that they were NDC members and that “they report back to us.”
He asked: “When did politics become Ariaria market or Sabon Gari market or Oshodi market in Lagos?”
The exchange that followed is as material as the allegation, and the anchor pressed the point repeatedly.
Told that this was an allegation, Galadima agreed at once. “Yes — because I don’t have any evidence to prove it,” he said, before adding: “I say you can go now.”
When the anchor replied that he could not leave the studio mid-programme, Galadima said: “Then accept what I tell you.”
The anchor said he was listening but taking it “with a shovel of salt.” Galadima answered: “I don’t want to put this Arise TV in trouble.”
The anchor then stated a disclaimer on air: “It’s a very alarming picture that you paint. But let me also put in a disclaimer, which is that we have absolutely no evidence to corroborate the allegations you’re making.”
Galadima accepted it and turned it into a request. “Thank you very much. I’m saying this because I want you as an investigative journalist to try to investigate the veracity of my claims. I may be wrong. I may be wrong. But this is the information we have.”
Later in the same exchange he said: “Until this allegation is proved otherwise, I want to tell you I’m right.”
Galadima said the campaign season had not begun in any meaningful sense.
“We are passing through very, very difficult times, and this election, unlike many others, has a lot of constraints, a lot of roadblocks put on the path of democracy,” he said.
“If you can observe, we are only 100 days away from the general election, yet the election fever has not caught the country at all.”
He added: “Like every politician, except those in power, are watching their backs, because as I speak to you, I don’t think there is any candidate outside APC that is sure of contesting this election.”
“The APC itself are not letting it go, and they are using all machineries available to them, good and bad.”
Galadima turned to campaign finance, arguing that the statutory spending limit is being disregarded.
“The Electoral Act says that nobody should spend, no party should spend more than 10 billion naira on campaign. That looks a huge amount of money for you. But one item alone — do you know how much they’re asking for one billboard in Abuja?”
He put the figure at a billion naira. “In Imo, it is one billion naira. One billboard, not the whole state. Just to fix one billboard, you pay one billion.”
He then did the arithmetic on air. “So if you have to pay every state one billion, and you pay 37 states, which is 37 billion naira, including Abuja — did you run foul of the act or not?”
He invited the anchor to test his claim by observation. “Have you seen the billboard or poster of any candidate of any political party except the APC in this Abuja?”
The anchor replied: “I have to be honest, I have not.”
Galadima asked: “So is that democracy? Does Abuja belong to APC alone?”
The anchor declined to accept the inference, suggesting the absence of opposition material might have other explanations.
“The fact that I haven’t seen it does not mean that the reason it’s not there is because the APC is preventing it from being there,” he said. “It could be that you’re holding onto your resources.”
Galadima responded: “You can make a good attorney for them.” When the anchor said he was trying to be balanced, Galadima added: “You’re doing a good PR for them.”
The anchor maintained the position. “It is my job to be balanced, and to be sure that anybody can make any sort of allegation,” he said, noting that the other side has an automatic right of reply.
Galadima alleged that opposition figures are prevented from campaigning.
“This APC and its government does not want any opposition person to campaign in any part of the country, as they are stoned wherever they go. They also want to make life impossible for those opposite them.”
When the anchor noted that some states had said publicly that visitors required permission, Galadima said: “Is that the democracy you learnt in Europe? Everybody has the right to go anywhere in this country. So why should we call it democracy? We can just as well call it fascism or dictatorship or monarchy.”
“They can’t claim to be democrats and not imbibe the tenets of democracy, which is free choice, free speech, free movement — and that is in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
He added: “But all this they are doing because we citizens have allowed them to do so.”
Asked about his earlier account of the consequences his politics have had for his family, Galadima said the effects reached into employment.
“Even your chairman offered to give one of my daughters employment here. She didn’t take it,” he said. “I told him he was taking a risk, because if they see the face of my daughter interviewing somebody as you are doing to me, they may concoct certain allegations against Arise TV and maybe get you closed for some three, four days and lose billions of naira.”
He said associates had withdrawn. “Even some of our close friends — not close, even people we assisted to be where they are — don’t want to communicate with us or have contact with us, because they’re afraid to lose their job.”
Galadima said he could not see the governing party’s path to victory.
“What keeps on puzzling me is how does APC win this election? How? With all this deprivation, with all this hunger, with all this lack of medical facilities, with all this lack of equipment for agric.”
He said the President should not expect northern votes. “What the President has done to a large section of this country — two or three things he did — I don’t think President Bola Tinubu is expecting any vote from Northern Nigeria.”
He gave his first instance: “All the oil explorations in the north have been put on hold.”
He declared his own position: “Of course, me, I will not vote for him. I will vote for Peter Obi.”
On the governors, he issued a challenge. “He’s got the majority of governors in the north. I dare them to conduct a free and fair election and see which governor will come back. I’m throwing a challenge.”
His second instance concerned agricultural equipment.
“General Buhari bought 20,000 tractors that arrived this country three years back, and equipment, harvesters, planters, and everything for agriculture, and somebody just kept them away in warehouses,” he said.
“There is a place called the Sheda Seed Council. The tractors are there three years. They are rotting away. And you can see them tomorrow if you want.”
Asked why that would be done, he said: “They want to impoverish a section of the country.”
His third instance was the concentration of infrastructure.
“How can somebody in his right senses sit down in France and sign a contract of seven billion US dollars for a deep sea port in Ogun, next to Lagos, when we are already spending twice that amount of money for Lagos ports?” he asked.
“How about the people from Warri, Burutu, Calabar and a host of others? Or even Onitsha river port, or even Lokoja river port? We are not Nigerians?”
He drew an inference. “Can’t you, as a sane human being, extrapolate that there is something we don’t know that they want to do by concentrating all projects in one geographical area, and we are supposed to be a country?”
Galadima alleged that appointments had abandoned the constitutional principle of federal character.
“Do you know that the Federal Character Principles Act has been thrown to the dustbin? That every juicy appointment, according to Nigerians, is being given to only one tribe? And these are the people who expect us to vote for them.”
He took issue with a remark attributed to a former governor. “I hear one of my friends, a former governor, saying that it’s only an ingrate in the North who will not vote for Tinubu. So I am not voting for Tinubu. Does that qualify me to be an ingrate?”
He said the man was from Katsina, “where every blessed day people are displaced, hundreds are killed, and you cannot travel.”
Asked why he believed the administration had been ungrateful to the former Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, Galadima began by distancing himself personally.
“To start with, El-Rufai is not the best of my friends, but I claim to be fighting for justice. Even if you are my enemy, I would never agree for you to be cheated unjustly.”
He argued that the detention was selective. “A lot of people committed the kind of offence they allege El-Rufai has committed, and they are walking all over the place. In fact, there are bigwigs in the APC Campaign Council. Why detain El-Rufai?”
He put the legal question directly: “Which of the offences they claim he committed is not bailable?”
He extended the criticism to the courts. “And the judiciary sits down to watch this, and citizens do conclude that they are being directed by powers that be.”
He added: “Is that a capital punishment? He didn’t kill, at least to the knowledge of the generality of Nigerians, and he was the one that fought the entire leadership in Northern Nigeria to support Tinubu. There are certain things that even if you don’t like, you have to let go.”
Asked why he thought the administration had turned on him, Galadima offered his own explanation: “Because he went to Lagos and told Ambode that he will teach him how to deal with godfathers. For me, that is his major offence.”
He added: “But they are accepting somebody who dealt with his godfather in Kano. We will see how they will win the election in Kano.”
Asked what had prompted him to advise El-Rufai to stay out of the country, Galadima paused over his own exposure, after the anchor cautioned him to be circumspect and said he did not want guests leaving the studio in handcuffs.
“I don’t want to be El-Rufai,” he said. “But if you are in the opposition, you get unsolicited raw information from citizens. Those who dare not say anything will approach you and even give you documents and tell you. It’s normal.”
“So I was told that they are planning to arrest El-Rufai when he comes back to Nigeria.”
He described what he did with the information. “When I went to Kwankwaso — because I always go to him, we eat at 2 a.m. dinner — I was telling him that this is what I heard. I’m not the best friend of El-Rufai, but I don’t want him to be unjustly treated. So you who talk to him, tell him not to come, because that’s what they are planning against him.”
“I suspect he spoke to him, so he postponed the date of coming. But just suddenly, one day through the social media, we heard that he was coming the following day,” he said.
“I said, since he has decided to come, maybe he has cleared his way, or he has got contrary information to what we know. So that is it. But El-Rufai does not deserve to be treated this way by his tormentors. He has done a good day for them. He has assisted them. Maybe without El-Rufai, that difference between Tinubu and Atiku during the election wouldn’t have been there.”
Asked what Nigeria he would like to see going into the elections, Galadima disclosed what he described as a private study.
“We commissioned a study, a secret study, using a British polling company, not to publish. We want them to tell us the truth, really, what is the situation on the ground,” he said.
“In that finding, they told us clearly: if there is a free and fair and transparent election, Peter Obi would win this election. But despite the president’s unpopularity, he may still manipulate the system.”
He linked it to an international publication. “So they’ve given us a hint of what is likely to happen, and that informed the release by The Economist of London. That was part of the findings of that secret poll we commissioned.”
Galadima said his candidates were the only ones campaigning.
“We are the only people that defied the excesses of the APC. Peter Obi and Kwankwaso have been variously in Jigawa, in Kano, in Katsina, in Sokoto, in Delta, in Benue, in Plateau, in Kaduna — doing consultation and town hall meetings,” he said.
“All the other candidates, either they are fragile or they are aged. They cannot even afford to campaign.”
He said the polling company had advised that sustained pressure could deliver victory, and that the ticket’s message had not yet been made.
“We have not even started discussing what our party and ticket stands for, which we christened a healing ticket. When we start to explain in English, in Pidgin, in Igbo, in Yoruba and in Hausa, I want to assure you that Nigerians will buy into it, because everybody wants to live in peace, in harmony and in prosperity.”
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