Your Comment Is Far Below Elder Stateman’s Status – FG Replies Obasanjo

….. President Buhari has done that and more since assuming office.

………..Boko Haram and ISWAP are terrorist organizations pure and simple.

The federal government has reacted to comment made by former president Olusegun Obasanjo on Boko Haram and ISWAP, describing it imputing ethnoreligious motive to Boko Haram and ISWAP as deeply offensive and divisive.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, in a statement on Tuesday, noted that such comment is indiscreet and far below the status of an elder statesman.

According to the minister, it was particularly tragic that a man who fought to keep Nigeria one is the same one seeking to exploit the country’s fault lines to divide it in the twilight of his life.

Mohammed who noted that Boko Haram and ISWAP are terrorist organizations added that they care little about ethnicity or religion when perpetrating their senseless killings and destruction.

‘‘Since the Boko Haram crisis, which has been simmering under the watch of Obasanjo, boiled over in 2009, the terrorist organization has killed more Muslims than adherents of any other religion, blown up more mosques than any other houses of worship and is not known to have spared any victim on the basis of their ethnicity.

“It is, therefore, absurd to say that Boko Haram and its ISWAP variant have as their goal the ‘Fulanisation and Islamisation’ of Nigeria, West Africa or Africa,’’ he said.

While pointing that president Muhammadu Buhari has put to rest the mischaracterization of Boko Haram as an Islamic organization when he said, in his inaugural speech in 2015, that “Boko Haram is a mindless, godless group who are as far away from Islam as one can think of”, the Minister said Obasanjo’s comments are therefore as insensitive and mischievous as they are as offensive and divisive in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country like Nigeria, wondering whether there is no limit to how far the former President will go in throwing poisonous darts at his perceived political enemies.

He said Obasanjo’s prescriptions for ending the Boko Haram/ISWAP crisis, which include seeking assistance outside the shores of Nigeria, are coming several years late, as President Buhari has done that and more since assuming office, hence the phenomenal success he has recorded in tackling the terrorists.

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