Osinbajo justifies President’s alleged lopsided appointments

Vice President

Yemi Osinbajo, has rationalised the domination of the President Muhammadu Buhari government by northerners.

During a meeting with officials of the Adamawa State chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) on Wednesday night in Yola, he said the appointments of the Hausa /Fulani indigenes were to compensate them for their huge contribution to the president’s victory in 2015.

The visitor told his hosts that Buhari would make positive changes if re-elected to “complete the solid foundation the government has put on ground for the benefit of the people.”

However, he failed to secure the support of the clerics for his principal, as they held that the current administration let down the last Dapchi girl, Leah Sharibu, who is still in Boko Haram captivity for refusing to renounce her Christian faith, a year after her peers regained their freedom.

Presided over by the Catholic Bishop of Yola Diocese, Dr. Stephen Dami Mamza, and with the embattled Deputy Governor Martins Babale and others in attendance, the association demanded the whereabouts of the teenager from the vice president.

She was among the 110 schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist sect on February 19, 2018 from Government Girls’ Science and Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, Yobe State.

The Guardian authoritatively gathered that the CAN officials told Osinbajo that without Sharibu’s release, the votes of Christians in the state would go to her to celebrate her courage.

They lamented what they described as the selective release of the Muslim students that were captured along with her, stating that government went to sleep thereafter.

The clerics accused the vice president of “failing woefully to honour his promises” since he visited the field of killings in Numan council area of the state two years ago.

He was also confronted with the non-reconstruction of Christian worship centres and bridges destroyed by the insurgents in Michika and Madagali local councils, thus cutting off the people from others.

In a similar vein, Osinbajo has dismissed the claims of his marginalisation resignation from the Buhari administration.

The trending report was debunked by the number two citizen at an interactive session with young Christian leaders yesterday in Lagos.

He said: “The report trending on the social media that I have resigned was being speculated by the opposition because I could not attend the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting. There is also no iota of truth in the insinuation that President Buhari is planning to Islamise Nigeria.”

The vice president noted: “It was under the military regime of Gen. Ibrahim Babagida that the country joined the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC) in 1986.

The country also joined the Islamic Development Bank in 2005 under erstwhile President Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime and since then, every single finance minister in Nigeria is a director.”

The former Attorney General and Commissioner of Justice in Lagos State regretted that some politicians were spreading hate speech and capitalising on the nation’s fault lines of ethnicity and religion to further wreak havoc through the media.

A statement yesterday by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Laolu Akande, reiterated that the vice president was involved “in continuation of the Next Level engagements contrary to the fake news in circulation on Wednesday.”

Also yesterday, the presidential candidate of the Young Progressives Party (YPP), Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, distanced himself from media reports claiming that he had teamed up with his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) counterpart, Atiku Abubakar.

In a statement by the spokesman of the party’s campaign council, Jide Akintunde, he described the news as “fake and a deliberate misinformation.”