The All Progressives Congress (APC) has
described as a compound embarrassment the
fact that it took 17-year-old girl-child
education campaigner, Pakistani Malala
Yousafzai, to visit and convince President
Goodluck Jonathan to agree to a meeting with
representatives of the parents of the
kidnapped school girls.
”President Jonathan, who has already
embarrassed himself and the entire people of
Nigeria by his inexplicable failure to visit
Chibok since the girls were abducted over 90
days ago, has compounded the
embarrassment and insulted Nigerians by
waiting for Malala to goad him to meet with
the girls’ parents, not in Chibok but in Abuja,”
the party said in a statement in Lagos,
Thursday, by its National Publicity Secretary,
Alhaji Lai Mohammed.
It said after the meeting failed, because the
parents were not properly informed and
invited, a shameless presidency turned around
to blame the opposition and the patriotic and
selfless Nigerians who have been campaigning
daily, under the #Bringbackourgirls group.
”Fortunately, and to the eternal discomfiture of
the presidency, the Chibok community has
said the decision not to meet with President
Jonathan in Abuja was theirs and theirs alone,
and that they took that decision because their
sole reason for coming to Abuja was to meet
with Malala, and not the President who did
not invite them anyway.
Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai
(L) watches on July 14, 2014 Nigerian
President Goodluck Jonathan look at a book
at the State House in Abuja. Malala on July
14 urged Jonathan to meet with parents of the
schoolgirls kidnapped three months ago by
Boko Haram. Malala, who survived a Taliban
assassination attempt in 2012 and has
become a champion for access to schooling,
was in Abuja on her 17th birthday to mark the
somber anniversary of Boko Haram’s April 14
abduction of 276 girls from a secondary
school in the northeast Nigerian city of
Chibok.
AFP PHOTO
”With this explanation, one would have
expected a presidency that has regard for the
truth to immediately retract its earlier panic
statement, which it issued to save face after
what was nothing but a PR gimmick blew up
in their face, and apologize to the opposition
and the #Bringbackourgirls group that were
unjustly pilloried by them.
”Instead, the presidency has persisted in its
distortion of the truth, for which they have
now become infamous, even as a new date
has been agreed for the meeting. This is
unfortunate, condemnable and irresponsible,”
APC said. ”If indeed, as the presidency
claimed earlier, that the opposition was
behind the earlier refusal by the parents and
escaped girls not to see the President, what
has then happened to make them change their
minds? Has the opposition now asked them to
meet with the President?”
The party alerted Nigerians that the reason
President Jonathan, whose wife bullied and
harangued the girls’ parents on the grounds
that they were lying and that no girl was
missing, agreed to meet with the parents is so
that he could use the meeting as a photo-op,
after Malala pushed for it and the President’s
US-based image laundering firm acceded to it.
”Mr. President, your frantic effort to meet with
the Chibok parents now is too little too late,
and no amount of photo-op will change that.
If your handlers had been sincere, Mr.
President, they would have told you that the
best venue of the meeting is Chibok, not Abuja
where your people tried, but failed, to waylay
the parents who came for a meeting with
Malala.
”Mr. President, you have ceaselessly compared
yourself to the great leaders of our time,
including US President Barack Obama. But do
you think Obama would have refused to visit
the parents of these abducted school girls if
the abduction had occurred in the US? Do you
think Obama, as Commander-in-Chief, would
have refused to visit his troops in the front
line of the anti-terror fight as you have done?
Malala and Five Escaped Chibok Girls
”Do you think, Mr. President, that a band of
rogue elements like Boko Haram would have
restricted Obama’s movement within his own
country as they have done to you? No true
and caring President will ever fail to visit the
sites of disasters and offer solace to his
compatriots,” it said.
APC reminded President Jonathan that neither
in Nigeria’s culture nor in any other culture
are those hit by tragedy invited to be offered
solace, adding that the practice is to visit
those to be offered solace ‘in situ’.
The party reiterated its earlier call on the
President to shake off his lethargy and bring
the abducted school girls home safely, instead
of playing politics with the lives of over 200
human beings.
Alhaji
No comments:
Post a Comment