*Pastor Emmanuel Nuhu Kure-Do you think that this state of emergency will bring an end to Boko Haram? It will go far. I think negotiations eventually will finish the rest. It’s already done much. Go to some parts of the North and you will see some semblance of sanity. People are moving around, they are confident. I think the crisis we should be addressing more now is the Fulani uprising. The Fulani are gradually taking the place of the Boko Haram right now and I think we should be concerned. The Fulani thing is not just in the North; it’s all over Nigeria. In the Yoruba land now, we’ve had so many of that, whole villages ransacked and wiped out, and the governors of those states are not saying anything. They are suppressing the thing. I don’t know when the government will find a solution to the Fulani restiveness. I think that might be the new frontier. We are moving from Boko Haram to the Fulani now. Actually the Fulani are almost taking over the Boko Haram fight, making it their own. With the picture you are painting about the esperation of the North to remain relvant vis-à-vis the Fulani uprising an the desire of government to always neotiate; do you think there will ever bea time when there’ll be peace in this country? Yes, when the patriotic ones are born. There are northerners who are patriotic except thatreligion has a way of affecting them eventually. They start being patriotic, and just when we are developing great hopes, they dash our hopes by tilting towards religion and spoiling the whole thing. Let me tell you one of those northern patriotic people. The late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was a very sincere man. The other one that was a complex man but was still patriotic is Gen. Sani Abacha. Deep inside him, he was a real patriotic Nigerian. You won’t believe it but that’s the truth. They say that every man has his own extreme; every man has his own weakness. He was a complex man who was in love with power, but let me tell you, Abacha would bite a Muslim as much as he would bite a Christian in trying to do what was right. You were close to him… Don’t say I was close to him. I had access to his government. You can’t be close to any of these people. I’m sorry to say that. As a priest,you cannot, not even as a prophet. Those who knew him will agree with me but, unfortunately, it is not always what you want the world to know that they get to know about you. There are some final aspects of you that the world might never discover. Thank God that there is a book in heaven thatrecords us, maybe when we get there, we’ll get to know more about each other. Somebody like Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) for example; I admire him, despite the criticisms by some Christians. At a time, I really thought that Buhari would be one of the saviours of this nation; one of the finest individuals that the North has ever produced but I’m beginning to do a rethink. It takes provocations and incidents to bring out a man. When Buhari made that broadcast on radio in Kaduna where he was lambasting the Federal Government about the Boko Haram thing and comparing it with the late Yar’Adua’s efforts, everything about him disappeared in me; every respect I had went out. I began to thank God that he never became president; we would have been in trouble. And I pray he never becomes president. Any party that chooses him, that party will never win elections. Even the North will not vote him. That is not the kind of leader we want inNigeria. It’s very unfortunate that you allow such provocations. It’s a sign that it’s time for him to retire from politics before he messes up the rest of glory that he has left. If APC really wants to give Jonathan a good fight, they should bring out a man that is trulypatriotic.They should not commit the same sin they are accusing PDP of. Whether it is PDP, APC, ACN, ARN, all of them are the same. It’s the same autocracy that is taking place in ACN. You were one of the four Christian clerics who went to pray for the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. What was your experience there? You are taking us back to the Old Testament. It is part of the Bible. Besides, you promised to tell the world what transpired…. Well I don’t think I want to open that can yet. The day will come, maybe, after this government, we can talk about that further. This government is an offshoot of that government. Let’s allow that for now. But the truth is that I admire Yar’Adua for principles. He was one Muslim with a difference. He had his own pressure, Islamic pressure. Of course when a Christian is a president, Christians willpressurize that president and vice versa; but the president should be able to draw the line and know that he is a president for everybody. Vanguard News
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 04:56:10 +0000
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