The All Progressives Congress, APC, has 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 any time 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 issued in Abuja on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, 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 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.
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