Former minister of transportation Rotimi Amaechi has directly challenged President Bola Tinubu’s longstanding claim that Buhari’s 2015 election victory would not have happened without him, arguing that the triumph belonged to the All Progressives Congress as a whole rather than to any single individual.

Amaechi, who served as director-general of Buhari’s 2015 presidential campaign, told an ARISE News interviewer that he had been unable to push back against Tinubu’s version of events while he was a serving minister under Buhari, because doing so would have put his position at risk. With that constraint now gone, he said the record needed to be set straight.

He described the formation of the APC and the defeat of the Peoples Democratic Party as the product of contributions from many quarters, including his own work leading the campaign, his role as chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, and the political groundwork he covered across the country during the period. He said he had crisscrossed Nigeria fighting battles on multiple fronts to build the coalition that eventually displaced the PDP after 16 years in power.

Amaechi did not deny that Tinubu made a contribution to the 2015 effort, but insisted that attributing the outcome to one person was a distortion of what actually happened. He acknowledged that the APC government which came to power on the back of that victory recorded genuine progress in some areas while falling short in others.