The All Progressives Congress (APC) on Thursday said President Goodluck Jonathan is only shedding crocodile tears with his lamentation over the fact that Nigeria has become more divided along religious and ethnic lines today than at anytime in its history.
”Mr. President, there is no point being sanctimonious about an issue for which you bear the most responsibility. You are the most divisive leader in the history of Nigeria, having ceaselessly exploited the country’s fault lines for political gains,” the party said in a statement in Abuja by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed.
It said President Jonathan is the first leader to have turned the
house of worship to a political arena, using the pulpit to make
political and policy statements and making a show of what should
ordinarily be a very personal religious affair.
APC said the President’s belated lamentation is aimed at pulling the
wool over the eyes of Nigerians with a view to extracting undeserved
political gains, especially a few weeks before next month’s elections.
”Where was President Jonathan when his spokespersons and party
members sought to pit Christians against Muslims by labelling the
country’s main opposition party, the APC, as an Islamic Party? Where
was President Jonathan when his spokespersons and party members sought
to portray all adherents of a particular faith as terrorists? Not once
did this President call his loquacious and sycophantic supporters to
order when they were denigrating people of other tribes, calling them
unprintable names. Not once did he call his supporters to order when
they were threatening to bring the country down if he is not
re-elected.
”President Jonathan himself led the divisive band by tagging the
leaders of a whole people ‘rascals’, just because people dared to
protest against his Administration’s policies. A man who got a
pan-Nigerian mandate turned himself into a tribal leader, running a
government that excludes a critical mass of the nation’s demography
and pigeon-holing himself into an ethnic cocoon.
”A President who has undermined the nation’s unity with his actions
and utterances, and a President who has cashed in on all the nation’s
fault lines to feather his own political nest definitely lacks the
moral authority to preach to anyone about unity. He is the embodiment
of divisiveness, hence he has no business being self-righteous,” the
party said.
It called on Nigerians of all hues to repudiate the divisiveness that is embodied in President Jonathan and his party, the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP), so that the country’s ‘unity in diversity’ can
once again become a reality, rather than a mere saying.
