“I called Buhari for days before he granted the extension in the Naira note exchange”– Tinubu

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the APC’s nominee for president, has explained how his tenacity ultimately persuaded President Muhammadu Buhari to extend the deadline for exchanging old Naira notes.

However, he claimed that although the President did not accept the request for the full Naira exchange, it was still acceptable.

This was announced on Sunday, only hours after President Buhari met with Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, in Daura, Katsina State, the hometown of the former two-term governor of Lagos State.

Emefiele made the announcement to extend the deadline by 10 days from the original January 31 target date after the meeting.

During a visit to the Oba of Benin, Oba Ewuare II, Tinubu said the issue of the redesigned Naira notes and its impact on regular Nigerians has been a big source of concern for him. He was speaking in Benin City, the capital of Edo State.

He claimed it was the cause of his tardiness for the visit to the Oba before his campaign in the old town.

He said: “My coming late is not intentional.

“It is because of national politics.

“Some of our cousins, our wives selling garden eggs, carrots, roasted corn, they need money and they need Naira.

“In the process, if Naira is cancelled the way it is and we fail to intervene, we have failed in our duties.

“We have been on this for three to four days and suddenly today, when the President said okay out of great respect he will consider our request for an extension, we were happy.

“I was running back and forth on this and calling him.

“So that is what we have been doing.

“Hopefully, even though we didn’t get all that we wanted, we got an extension by a number of days.”