Posted by WALE AKINOLA on
The national president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, PFN, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, says the feud between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar is dangerous to the polity and appeals to Obasanjo to mix love for Nigeria with justice, mercy and wisdom in resolving the crisis.
The national president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, PFN, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, says the feud between President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice President Atiku Abubakar is dangerous to the polity and appeals to Obasanjo to mix love for Nigeria with justice, mercy and wisdom in resolving the crisis.
WHAT we are seeing should not be surprising to anybody. A lot of people are jittery, they say Nigeria can collapse because of the crisis and that this would happen, that would happen. Nothing will happen. Nigeria will stay stable. 2007 will come, elections will come, a new government will come in and life would go on. You see, the reason we are going through all these is that the military did not give the political class the opportunity to learn, to make their mistakes.
So, the mistakes they would have made in the 60s are the mistakes they are making now. That is what we are seeing. A child cannot run without crawling; a child must crawl before he can stand, before he can walk and run. What we are seeing are just the normal stages of democratic development. They are normal. It has to happen. Let us use this medium to say that the military must sit down in their barracks; they must have nothing to do with what is happening, they must allow the politicians to make their mistakes, they will correct themselves; Nigerians will correct themselves. In a few years, you will be shocked about the level of maturity that the politics of this nation will develop to. That is the first thing I want to say. We should not be alarmed, we should not be surprised by the happenings. Secondly, I must be honest with you, I read the papers and I wonder sometimes about what the press says.
I always say to myself, why would a vice president be so disloyal to the president? It is so puzzling to me because in every boat, there has to be one captain, there cannot be two captains. We don't have a co-president, we have a president. The vice president is not an alternative to the president, he is a helper. He is there to take orders from the president. The reality is, if you do not believe in the man who said ‘come and join me to do something', then resign and go and do something else. Don't sit with him and be destroying the thing that you are supposed to join him to building.
Submission of some documents
I think that is very wrong. I don't think a lot of people are looking at this thing the way they ought to. Otherwise, they ought to have called the vice president to order and tell him ‘you cannot do this to your boss'. Tomorrow, he hopes to become something. Even in his own house, if his wife does to him what he is doing to the president, will he accept it? If he is a governor, and his deputy does to him what he is doing to the president, will he accept it? Number three, I believe that a lot of wisdom is needed to move the nation forward in view of what is happening now. I think that with the revelations that are coming out, personally, I am not going to judge a man until things have been done in the way they should. The president has submitted some documents to the National Assembly. Let the National Assembly look at those things, come up with their verdict and tell us what exactly they think happened or what did not happen. I pray that whatever it is, we should accept things as gentlemen, as people who have the fear of God and have the good of Nigeria at heart. If you don't run for presidency this time, you can run some other time. If you do not become the president this time, you c an become the president some other time. By the way, it is only God that actually gives power. I don't think it is only Christians that believe that; Muslims do.
Politics is a game. Someone would win, someone will lose. So, if it appears that you have lost whether in a situation of not the election itself but in some of these things going on, accept it, move on, pray that tomorrow, God will help to reposition you. Again, I want to appeal to the president to mix love for Nigeria with justice, mercy and wisdom because if he doesn't do that, there are wicked people who would want to take advantage of the situation to create problems that are not really there.
Our prayers are with him, our prayers are with government, our prayers are with Nigeria. I believe without a shadow of doubt that the nation will come out of this stronger than what it used to be. Nigerians should think objectively in solving the impasse. We should not tribalise it, sectionalise it or bring religious sentiment into it. When things are good, we are all Nigerians, but the moment things are not going well for somebody, we become sectional, ‘they are doing this because I am from a particular place', ‘this is against me because I am from here'. This doesn't help us. We should look at things objectively, look at the facts, look at what is on ground before we make up our minds about anything. But above all, Nigeria will stand and we will come out of this crisis by the grace of God.