The All Progressives Congress (APC) has warned religious leaders across Nigeria to stop using religion as a tool to divide the people, especially in the name of politics.
In a statement issued in Jos on Saturday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said the warning becomes necessary following the false messages being circulated via SMS to the effect that adherents of a certain religion were being killed in a part of the country and their houses of worship burnt on Saturday, when nothing of such happened.
”After receiving the text message, we investigated and discovered that nothing of such happened today, Saturday, Jan. 17th 2015,” it said
APC described as liars from hell and agents of evil those who are peddling such incendiary messages, because they (messages) are capable of pitting adherents of the country’s two main religions against themselves and setting the country on fire.
The party challenged the security agencies to investigate, arrest and prosecute those who are behind these serpentine messages, instead of chasing shadows and turning themselves into tools of partisanship in the hands of unscrupulous and shameless politicians.
”Those who will use religion to divide the citizens for political reasons are not men of God, whether they are Christians or Muslims. They are agents of darkness and posterity will not be kind to them,” it said.
APC said the same people have resorted to circulating, via SMS and e-mail, a fake list of the National Executive Committee of the APC to support their satanic claim that the party is an Islamic Party.
”Unfortunately for these evil people, Nigerians have resolved to repudiate those who have latched on to religion and ethnicity to divide them. They have rejected the characterization of a party that is chaired by a Christian as an Islamic Party, and they will punish, with their votes, those on whose behalf those lies are being peddled,” the party said.
It called on Nigerians to be very vigilant, especially in the run up to next month’s general elections, because lies will be packaged as the truth and circulated to unsuspecting citizens.
