Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the late president Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu, has described as “terrible” a statement credited to former president Goodluck Jonathan that Boko Haram terrorists once nominated Mr Buhari to lead negotiations with his (Mr Jonathan’s) administration.

In a statement on X late Friday, Mr Shehu described the statement as false, accusing Mr Jonathan of fabricating a misleading statement towards his bid for the presidency in 2027.

“We are compelled to make a response to a terrible statement made on the late president Muhammadu Buhari by his predecessor in office, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, to the effect that Boko Haram had nominated him to represent them in a dialogue with government. If this is a campaign statement towards his bid for the presidency in 2027, we want to say to him that “Mr. Jonathan, you are making a false start,” Mr Shehu said.

Earlier, Mr Jonathan said he thought the dreaded “Boko Haram” terrorists would end after his successor, the late Buhari, took over the reins of power from him, adding that the terrorist group nominated the late president to lead negotiations with his administration.

“One of the committees we set up then, the Boko Haram nominated Buhari to lead their team to negotiate with the government,” he said at the public presentation of a book, Scars, authored by a former Chief of Defence Staff, Lucky Irabor, in Abuja.

However, Mr Shehu said neither Muhammed Yusuf nor Abubakar Shekau, the slain leaders of the Boko Haram terrorist group, nominated the late Buhari for such arole, noting that Mr Shekau routinely denounced and threatened Mr Buhari because their ideologies were in direct opposition.

He said, “In 2014, Muhammadu Buhari escaped a bomb attack on his life by Boko Haram in Kaduna, in which his personal staff suffered varying degrees of injury. Buhari’s campaigns focused on fighting Boko Haram and restoring security to Nigeria whenever he became president, putting him in direct opposition to the terrorist group’s leader.”

Mr Shehu further said that contrary to the news making the rounds in those years that the radical Islamist extremist –Boko Haram had nominated Mr Buhari as the mediator between them and the federal government of Nigeria in the proposed peace talk, the late president denied knowledge of his nomination, citing a statement issued by the then national secretary of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), Buba Galadima.

The source of the information, which the politician described as misleading, was a press conference in Maiduguri, Borno State, which he said was staged by a faction of the terrorist group, through a certain Abu Mohammed Ibn Abdulaziz, who claimed to be the group leader in the state, “saying the sect would prefer the former military leader, General Muhammadu Buhari, ex-Yobe State governor and the then Senator, now late Bukar Abba Ibrahim, first Nigerian Minister of Petroleum, Shettima Ali Monguno, also late, Chairman of the Presidential Committee on Insecurity in the North-East, Ambassador Gaji Gatimari, and other prominent members of the Borno Emirate to mediate between them and the federal government.”

Mr Shehu quoted the then CPC national publicity secretary, the late Rotimi Fashakin, who he said lambasted Mr Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for latching on Mr Buhari’s alleged nomination for political reasons, accusing them of trying to divert the attention of Nigerians from the party’s looting of the country’s patrimony.

“Without any scintilla of equivocation, General Muhammadu Buhari has never been directly or remotely connected with any insurrection or insurgency against the Nigerian nation and her people. He remains the quintessential patriot that continues to magnetise the very best across the ethno-religious boundaries within the Nigerian nation-space,” the politician quoted Mr Fashakin as saying.