Nigerian Catholic Diocesan Priests Association (NCDPA), Kaduna State chapter, has tackled former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai for bragging about how he deceived Christians to vote the Muslim-Muslim ticket.
It urged President Bola Tinubu and Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani to call the former governor to order or he would plunge the country into religious crisis.
El-Rufai made the comment in Hausa in a video that has gone viral saying the bid to promote Islam made him go for a Muslim/Muslim ticket in Kaduna State and boasted that the development would silence the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).
The priests in a letter entitled “On the public declaration of Islamic political supremacism by ex-Governor Nasiru El-Rufai, implications on dialogue and peace, call for your public stance” drew the attention of Kaduna State Governor, Uba Sani to El-Rufai’s reference to Christians as “them” and Muslims as “us” to emphasise that the Christian does not belong in the state in the said video. The priests, who flayed El-Rufai for having run a government that discriminated against Christians in Kaduna State, described his comment as “divisive, bigoted, hateful and completely unstatesmanlike declaration of Islamic political supremacism in Kaduna State and Nigeria” saying “our disappointment and shock did not stem only from the utterances of the former governor, but more from the endorsement he received from the audience, made-up of Muslim clerics who excitedly cheered him on. It was more shocking because these are the same clerics with whom we have been in constant dialogue and discussion on how to help entrench harmony, peace and mutual respect for our different faith-persuasions.
The priests challenged the Kaduna governor to declare his stance openly on the inciting comment as he was present, alongside other Muslim faithful, at the venue of El-Rufai’s outburst.
The open letter was copied the Presidency, Aso Rock Villa, three Catholic Bishops of Kaduna, Kafanchan and Zaria; Archbishop Matthew Man’oso Ndagoso, Bishop Julius Yakubu Kundi and Very Rev. Fr Michael Kagarko, respectively.
Part of it read: “With consternation and utter disillusionment, we watched the now viral videoclip in which the former governor, Nasiru El-Rufai, while addressing a group of Islamic clerics with you sitting by his side, made comments that objectively amount to a divisive, bigoted, hateful and completely unstatesmanlike declaration of Islamic political supremacism in Kaduna State and Nigeria.
“El-Rufai had among other things, while speaking in Hausa language few days to his handing over, said most Christians in Kaduna did not vote his party (the APC), hence the reason why he orchestrated their exclusion from being even Deputy Governor, he said APC can win elections without the Christians, for the same reason, he deliberately excluded Christians in all the top cadre of the governance of the state, including governor, deputy governor, Secretary to the State Government, Chief of Staff to the Governor, Commissioner of Finance, among others whom he bragged, are all Muslims;Muslim dominated LGAs like Kubau benefit more from government than Christian dominated LGAs like Jaba. According to him, that is what Islamic clerics taught Muslims, and that is justice for him as a Muslim. In his campaign, he made the Christians believe that his party does not discriminate anyone on the basis of religious affiliation, but it was meant to deceive them as they would certainly discriminate.
“That campaigns were not ran by their politicians but by the Islamic clerics, and this was done up to the polling booths with the assistance of the Islamic paramilitary group – Yan Agaji. The policy of exclusion of Christians in governance has just begun, and will continue until the Christians cannot resist anymore….
“We cannot fold our hands and watch unpatriotic persons who neither live in the state nor care about it, come and set it ablaze at will. More so, we and our congregations have prominently been at the receiving end of the terrors of ineffective governance, especially in the last eight years…It is also an explanation for the many unjust policies of his administration, uneven distribution of state resources, the wanton killings and kidnappings that afflicted the Christian dominated areas, and the nonchalance and sometimes scornful response of government to the distress calls of victims;It is important to call your attention to the fact (which we believe you already have details of), that during the pendency of the last administration, our association almost lost count of our members who were steadily being targeted, kidnapped and killed! In most cases, priests were executed after paying huge sums as ransom.
“This is apart from the several other pastors of other Christian denominations and countless whole Christian communities that are being steadily raided, ransacked, burnt down and their inhabitants either taken for ransom or slaughtered without any of the perpetrators brought to book, nor any support for the survivors from the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA), or the National Emergency management Agency (NEMA), nor from any other government agency.”
