1/ This 10 year old Buhari-branded Tee must be my oldest piece of cloth (bar a couple of agbada inherited from our patriarch).

The story?

In 2011, when Buhari was a hard sell in the South, before he joined forces with Tinubu et al, some of us volunteered to sell him

2/ So a group of us on Nairaland then came together, raised some funds among ourselves. I was the coordinator. I remember one Nairaland guy - from Kogi? - I didn’t know came to my then office and dropped N500k cash and 100 pieces of this Tee from the booth of his car.

3/ We raised about N800k in all and did jingles in radio stations in Lagos, Osun, Oyo and Rivers states. I think we called ourselves Buhari Online Support Group or something like that. We also did some publicity material and distributed those shirts.

4/ I churned out over 20 articles in newspapers making a case for Buhari candidacy. That was also where I got to be friends with people like Femi Adesina and Tope Fasua, through pages of newspapers.

5/ Well, with GEJ’s 2011 goodwill (recall the “I had no shoe” & “Breath of fresh air” campaign mantras?), +with absence of political xture (forget volunteering by small boys like us, you cannot make inroads into a region without xture), GMB only managed to get 200k votes in Lagos

6/ Bakare came into the picture later when it was time to choose running mate and possibly half of those votes were due to his factor, the Church factor.

7/ So that shirt always reminds of that self-given impossible task of selling Buhari in the South at a time he was a hard sell, and before he joined forces with Tinubu, Amaechi etc to eventually make inroads into the South.

8/ So it’s been a long way coming. I had very high hopes when he eventually got the job in 2015. Google my article “Buhari: To Whom Much is Given”.

9/ Unfortunately, I have not been very impressed. Doing a good job in infrastructure, but the performance in security (in particular) and economy is depressing.

By the way, I used that Tee as underwear for a couple of years after 2011.