A former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, has reacted after federal government asked ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo to withdraw his recent comments which imputed ethno-religious motive to Boko Haram, ISWAP, terrorism in the country, as well as apologise to Nigerians.
The media had reported that Obasanjo on Saturday decried the high level of insecurity in Nigeria, stating that the Federal Government alone cannot tackle the menace.
He regretted that both Boko Haram and herdsmen acts of violence were not treated as they should at the beginning.
According to him, “They have both incubated and developed beyond what Nigeria can handle alone. They are now combined and internationalized with ISIS in control.
“It is no longer an issue of lack of education and lack of employment for our youths in Nigeria which it began as, it is now West African fulanization, African Islamization and global organized crimes of human trafficking, money laundering, drug trafficking, gun trafficking, illegal mining and regime change.”
But reacting in a statement issued in Abuja on Tuesday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, averred that such “indiscreet, deeply offensive and patently divisive comments are far below the status of an elder statesman”.
He added that, “It is 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”.
The minister stated that Boko Haram and ISWAP are terrorist organisations pure and simple, adding 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 organisation has killed more Muslims than adherents of any other religion.
“The terrorist group 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.
But in reaction, Fani-Kayode, in a tweet on Tuesday wrote: “LaiMohammed and @MBuhari should be the last to talk about Boko Haram or attack OBJ for exposing their Fulanisation and Islamisation agenda.
“The same Mohammed once said it was wrong to ban BH and the same Buhari once said an attack on BH was an attack on the north! Who is fooling who?”
