President Muhammadu Buhari has described as “bloody nonsense” the penchant of some Nigerians to hide under ethnicity and religion to perpetrate injustice and corrupt acts.
He said this while hosting his former staff, who worked with him during his tenure as military Head of State, on Sunday night at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, according to a statement issued by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina.
Buhari said using religion and ethnicity to deceive Nigerians “is just corruption, pure and simple.”
To justify his stance, the President went down memory lane, drawing lessons from his electoral battles at the courts in 2003, 2007, and 2011, where those who ruled against him were Muslims from the North, but those who defended him were Christians from the South.
According to him, “I was recently forced to talk to somebody I respect a lot about Nigeria. I said in 2003, when I started out, complaints about presidential election used to start from the Court of Appeal. The president of the court then was my classmate in secondary school for six years.
“Himself, myself and Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, were classmates. My lawyer, Mike Ahamba, was Roman Catholic and an Igbo man. My first witness was in the box. Ahamba said he needed the register of voters in certain constituencies and states to prove that votes were just allocated, and not true reflection of what existed in the constituencies. He asked them to record his request and sign. They did so.
