Matthew Kukah, Catholic bishop of Sokoto, says the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket fielded by the All Progressives Congress (APC) is a precursor for disunity and negates the spirit of one Nigeria.
Speaking on Thursday in an interview on Channels Television, Kukah said such decision does not bode well for the country’s progress on national integration.
Bola Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate, picked Kashim Shettima, the former governor of Borno, who is also a Muslim, as his running mate for the 2023 presidential election.
Speaking on the development, the Catholic bishop said the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket of 1993 election has been “over-exagerrated” to assume that Nigerians don’t care about religion.
“As a Christian, I feel proud of the role we played in managing diversity and politics in Nigeria,” he said.
“I think we over-exaggerated our interpretation of what happened in 1993 because we always have this dubious assumption that it is evident that Nigerians don’t care about religion.
“But moving forward, the question I have asked my friends who are Muslims, especially those who are from northern Nigeria, is a simple question: ‘Would Muslims in Nigeria or northern Nigeria be ready to make the same concession that Christians made in 1984 and 1993?’
“And they have now been asked to make the same concession.
“You have to then understand this against the backdrop of what has happened in the last seven years.
“When you look at the squandered opportunity; when you look at the way power has been distributed; when you look at the way this government has allocated opportunities to broad spectrum of Nigeria against the wide backdrop of the crisis that we are in now, ordinarily the least we should be talking about is whether our next president should be a Christian or Muslim.
But as a Christian, I can tell you very frankly that the decision of the APC, naturally, I felt astonished.
“I think that as a Christian, this is totally reprehensible. It is not acceptable to me, but that is the decision of the APC as a party. Perhaps, when the campaign starts, we will hear what people have to say.
“But it has just laid the foundation that has taken us back after the kind of progress we thought we have made in terms of national integration.”