APC Warns PDP and Presidency: Stop This Nonsense Now! -

The immediate past chairman of the PDP, Bamanga Tukur publicly said Boko Haram is fighting for justice and the party pretend as if they didn't hear what he said. But at every opportunity, PDP tries to paint APC as one big Muslim party in order to gain cheap sympathy from Nigerians.

The APC has thus come out to warn the PDP to stop such nonsense talk and drop the idea of joining issues of politics with religion as such could be detrimental to the country.

 "On a more dangerous level, it shows that the PDP will not relent from engaging in Islamophobia by using the Boko Haram crisis in a part of the country to stereotype Muslims and paint them as terrorists, even when it is obvious that majority of Muslims do not support the heinous crimes being perpetrated by the sect. 

 "The only reason that the PDP used the word ‘Janjaweed’ is because the militia that goes by that name comprises mostly, if not exclusively, of people of Arab/Muslim stock in Sudan. 

 "This has further confirmed our fears that there is a clear attempt by the PDP, led by President Goodluck Jonathan, to divide Nigerians along religious lines as never before in the history of our country and to use religious as a political tool – a very dangerous move that can only result in religious warfare, from which no country that engages in it has ever survived intact."

The All Progressives Congress said the Peoples Democratic Party’s reference to its Road Map as a product of ‘Janjaweed Ideology’ is a thinly-veiled religious blackmail, which is in furtherance of PDP’s campaign to pigeon-hole the APC as an Islamic party.

APC’s Interim National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said in a statement that:
"How else can one explain the continuous attempt by the PDP, despite warnings from right thinking people and groups, to cast people of a certain faith, who constitute half of our country’s population, as either terrorists or terror sympathisers/sponsors, or to label the APC as an Islamic party just to hang it? Couldn’t the PDP have criticised our Road Map without resorting to its well-worn, dangerous game of religious blackmail?"

The party said it was reacting because of the saying that a lie, when repeated several times, appears as truth.

"We are a party for all Nigerians, and we believe in issues-based politics, not one based on religious or ethnic sentiments. We believe God is neither Christian nor Muslim, and that he is the God of all, irrespective of their religion. We believe God will judge politicians not according to their religion but according to how much they have fulfilled the mandate to ensure the welfare and security of their people, and by how much they have lessened the people’s burdens rather add to them."

APC challenged the PDP to unveil its own Road Map for Nigerians to see and compare, rather than attempt to drown the fast-growing party’s message with nonsense religious blackmail.

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