"I knew that if i stood my ground not to accept defeat a lot of my supporters would have been dead by now because the northaners who most of them supported APC were ready to kill.

“The fate of thousands of Christians and southerners in the North and my other northern supporters who were at the risk of being slaughtered if I took a selfish decision lay heavily on my mind.

“What rang persistently in my mind was the futility of vanity. What would it profit me if I clung on to power and let my country slide into an avoidable crisis? Who would stop the impending crisis? Too many things were bound to go wrong.

“The multiple massacres which characterised the aftermath of the 2011 elections were still fresh in my memory. I was neither willing nor ready to look grieving children and parents in the eye and explain to them that they lost their loved ones because of their leadership struggle.”

“An eerie comment was made two years before by the then main opposition candidate threatening that ‘if what happened in 2011 should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood’

“Of course what happened in 2011 was that the opposition had lost the Presidential election that was unanimously adjudged free and fair by both international and local observer missions.”

“When I met with President Obama after the 2011 elections, he told me that from the information they had, the elections were free and fair. Yet, here was the opposition threatening to soak the country in blood if the same thing occurred in 2015.” -Goodluck Ebele Jonathan