He made this known In his book, “The Accidental Public Servant,” adding that Obasanjo had considered the Yar’Adua/Jonathan presidency in 2007 weak.
According to El-rufai,“There are those who say Obasanjo’s revenge for his third term defeat was intentionally picking two incompetent people to be president and vice-president, but I do not full agree with that. I think Obasanjo picked them for a different reason. He thought they were weak people he could control and through whom he would continue to exercise power. I think that he thought Yar’Adua would be an acceptable president, but would be weak and subservient to him in many policy areas and would be consulting him regularly so that Obasanjo might be a Lee Kuan Yew sort of figure exercising power from behind the scenes.”
“If I am just naïve and the ticket that ended up succeeding Obasanjo was meant to be a third term revenge, it did not exactly work out. Yar’Adua revolted against him, reversed virtually everything he did and even began investigating him. Obasanjo recently admitted to a close friend of ours that throughout the years Yar’Adua was in power, he was constantly in fear of being arrested because it was clear to him that at some point, Yar’Adua was after him.
Speaking about the issue of the ejection of former Chairman, Code of Conduct Tribunal, the late Justice Bashir Sambo from his official residence in 2006, the former head of the Bureau of Public Enterprise insisted that the jurist was an illegal tenant in the house.
He said “Perhaps the most publicised controversy arising from the sale of houses programme was the ejection of Justice Bashir Sambo in August 2006 from his official residence located at 1, Aso Drive, Maitama District. At the time, the carefully choreographed media war led by the Daily Trust newspaper was going on, I chose to maintain silence, and just directed the Secretariat to put out full-page adverts explaining what it had done and why. I thought that was the end of it.
“Sadly, less than a year later, Justice Sambo who was former chairman of Code of Conduct Tribunal, died on April 29, 2007 in a Cairo Hospital. He was 76 years old and had been ill for some time.
“For that reason, I decided never to join issues with those who thought that the ejection of the deceased jurist was inappropriate and went as far as suggesting that it was the cause of his “premature” death.
“I will simply tell my side of the story on the sale of the house in question, subsequent cancellation, and the actions that followed naturally with reference only to letters written by Justice Sambo, himself and the other officials in the government.
“These exchanges of correspondence culminated in my directive to the sales secretariat on July 17, 2006 to eject him immediately from the house in question because he had by then become an illegal tenant.
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