Former Nigerian President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, Wednesday, asked the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Pastor Enoch Adeboye, to call the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, to order for peddling falsehood against his person.
Jonathan added that even after Osinbajo had been called upon repeatedly“ to respect his supposed pastoral calling and stop his nasty habit of lying, he refuses to heed these calls and continues to spew falsehood.”
These were contained in a statement the GEJ Media Office issued yesterday, pointing out unfounded allegations the vice president had made at different times against the person of the former president.
Last Tuesday, Osinbajo had at The Platform, a programme organised by the Covenant Christian Centre in Lagos alleged that three unnamed persons stole $3 billion (N1 trillion) in the Jonathan administration.
On March 19, also, Osinbajo alleged that the Jonathan administration shared N150 billion two weeks to the 2015 elections while it spent a paltry N14 billion on agriculture in 2014; N15 billion on transportation and only N153 billion on infrastructure in three years.
But in a statement issued by his media office wednesday, Jonathan called Pastor Adeboye to caution Osinbajo to stop peddling falsehood against his person.
If Osinbajo fails to heed this advice, the former president urged the cleric “to remember that the RCCG ordains its pastors not to lie but to spread the word of God, “asking if “this is what Vice President Osinbajo is doing?”
Jonathan recalled that Osinbajo falsely alleged that he took N100 billion from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) in cash to his personal house in Abuja.
When challenged to provide proof of his fallacious claims, the former president disclosed that the vice president hid behind ‘sources’ and began to feed stories from anonymous officials to the media.
This time around, according to him, Osinbajo alleged that three persons working in his government looted $3 billion from the country’s resources without providing proofs to back his allegation against his administration.
He, thus, noted that the vice president “is a liar, forgetting or perhaps not caring that the devil is the father of all liars. I challenge him once again to prove me wrong by mentioning those three people and providing proof that they stole the amounts allegedly stolen.
“It is sad that at a time when the Buhari administration should be telling Nigerians what they have achieved after three years, they continue to blame and point fingers. The reason for this is because neither Buhari nor Osinbajo can point to any project that they have initiated, started and completed in three years,” he explained.
Jonathan noted that the people of Nigeria voted for Buhari and Osinbajo because they said subsidy was a fraud and would be stopped; that fuel would be sold at 40 per litre, and that fuel scarcity would end.
After three years, Jonathan said the Buhari administration “is paying more subsidy than former President Jonathan ever paid at 1.4 trillion annually. Fuel price was increased from 87 to 145 per litre, Fuel scarcity is worse.
“Faced with these facts, a desperate Buhari administration, wanting to be re-elected and knowing that it cannot run on its record, has devised a plan to distract attention from its woeful record of failure by making constant false allegations on my person.”
He lamented that the Buhari administration “has yet to tell Nigerians what happened to the $25 billion that was awarded in contracts without due process by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).”
He sought to know how “Maina was returned, reinstated, double-promoted and given armed guards or why the indicted Executive Secretary of Nigerian Health Insurance Scheme was reinstated despite a clear case of corruption or when Babachir Lawal would be charged.
“Instead, they continue to throw mud at those who have achieved what they have not achieved. If Osinbajo cannot stop his habit of lying, I hereby call on Pastor Adeboye to withdraw his pastorate before he brings the church of Christ into disrepute.”
Is this another one of biased and infectious media publication?
With logical reasoning, such outcry as subscribed to former president Jonathan should be kept out of religious domain as it’s not the remit of a church, or any other religious administration/leadership to interfere in the affairs of the nation, especially where the contention is embedded in constitutional freedom of speech and opinion. There’s an element of naivety in the involvement of the RCCG in a declaration against the number 2 person in Nigeria’s rule of law. In the purview of the contention is the right of former president Goodluck to present his cause before a court of law, that is, if his refuted counterclaim is correct, credible and honest. The scenario reflects as an in-house dispute between, say, 2 brothers, asking his father to intervene in the dispute between him and his brother.
Concerns have been persistently raised over the confluence of the muddied waters of politics and religion and this is another case study for law makers to verify. In a system with a transparent process, what will happen here is for the former president to table his grievance before a court of law, with evidential facts and figures to disprove Vice President Osinbajo’s ‘libellous’ claims; as there seems to be a catalog of them.
What intrigues me is the disproportionality and incongruency of the contention; like a domestic issue. No, this is not, and it does not warrant the leader of a church being sought as a peace-maker or intercessor. It is a wholly national, political and financial issue, with adverse consequences on the country in general, which requires a ‘high-end’ juridical pursuit to clear the air. It is a disappointment to know that the former president has qualified political advisors and yet, they are not insightful, sensitive or efficient to direct the outflow of this concern.
One wonders how much drain Nigeria’s governance has been through for decades, amidst our low intellectual, cognitive and emotional capacities.