The former VP said the “imposition” of the late Umaru Yar’Adua was Obasanjo’s way of punishing the citizens for rejecting his third term agenda, saying the ex-President hated him for his refusal to support the agenda.

Yar’Adua became president in 2007 and died in 2010 from a kidney related disease. The late President’s administration was dominated by the issues of his illness. At a point, he was out of the country for about six months, receiving treatment in Saudi Arabia.

Abubakar, who was reacting to comments credited to Obasanjo by a newspaper, said there was no truth in Obasanjo’s claim that he (Abubakar) was not capable of leading the nation.

Rather, he said Obasanjo’s grouse against him started with his (Atiku) refusal to support the former president’s desire to amend the Constitution to contest a third term in office.

Abubakar advised Obasanjo to defend himself against the allegation of lobbying the Bush administration to support his third term ambition in 2006. Abubakar said Obasanjo’s moves were exposed in the recently published memoirs of former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Obasanjo had said in the interview that his former deputy destroyed his own chance of succeeding him in 2007, submitting that Abubakar was “unreliable, lacked vision, orientation and experience to step into his shoes.”

But the former Vice-President said he was “unbelievably shocked by the distortion of truth” by a statesman like Obasanjo.

According to him, Rice was quoted on page 638 of her memoir titled, “No Higher Honour” as saying that “In 2006 when President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria sidled up to President Bush and suggested that he (Obasanjo) might change the constitution so that he could serve a third term, President Bush told him not to do it.” In Bush’s words “You have served your country well. Now turn over power and become a statesman.”

The former vice-president insisted that Obasanjo had no succession plan while in office and that he wanted to be Nigeria’s Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe has been the President of Zimbabwe from independence in 1980 till date.

Abubakar accused Obasanjo of handing over power to Yar’Adua reluctantly as a face-saving measure following the collapse of his third term ambition on the floor of the Senate on May 16, 2006.

He added that his opposition to the third term ambition of Obasanjo derived from his belief that the constitution should not be amended for the sake of granting one man’s lifetime ambition at the expense of public interest.

On the claim by Obasanjo that he didn’t discuss third term ambition with anybody, Abubakar recalled that the former President sent two senior cabinet ministers to him to deliberate on a draft constitution. Curiously, Abubakar said the draft was silent on term limit, which made him to smell a rat and that his courage to confront Obasanjo over this controversial plan was the beginning of his troubles with his former boss and the subsequent plot to frustrate his ambition to become President.

Abubakar praised Nigeria’s past leaders and the media for coming together to pull Nigeria from the brink and ensuring an orderly succession to the Presidency by the then Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan.

“Without this, Nigeria would have been plunged into yet another major crisis arising from the actions of one man,” Abubakar said.

On the allegations of unreliability made against him by Obasanjo, he said the ex-President was the last person qualified to lecture any Nigerian on reliability.

Abubakar also dismissed the allegation against him by Obasanjo that he was inexperienced, and challenged Obasanjo to disclose any responsibility or task that he assigned to him while in office and which he didn’t discharge competently.

He accused Obasanjo of being obsessed with the myth of indispensability and the false notion of being the cleanest person and said that “even President Jonathan and the late Umaru Yar’Adua are not safe from Obasanjo’s self-righteous attacks on other leaders.”

Obasanjo was also recently engaged in public exchange of words with former military dictator, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, with the two ex-rulers calling themselves fools.