From Judex Okoro, Calabar
Bishop Emmah Gospel Isong, president of Christain Central Chapel International (CCCI) and national publicity secretary of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) has faulted the APC presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, over his holy communion and church rat metaphor.
Speaking in Calabar yesterday, Bishop Isong, director general of the Remedy for Victims of Religious Persecution and Discrimination Initiative (RVRPDI), asked the former governor of Lagos State to apologise to Nigerians and his millions of christian followers.
Tinubu, who spoke during his engagement with the Arewa Stakeholders in Kadunna, had compared Nigeria’s compliance with global climate change directives to preventing a church rat from eating poisoned holy communion.
He said the APC presidential standard bearer “erred and should withdraw his statement otherwise he will lose his teeming supporters. The statement is sarcastic, demeaning and misrepresentative of the Christian communion. Some of us, who have been his teeming supporters, feel the statement is derogative, misrepresenting, misinterpretative of the Christian communion, our highest sacrament, which is the death of Christ and his resurrection.
“The Christian faith holds the sacrament of the holy communion of the bread and wine very sacrosanct, highly supernatural, and very eternally significant.
“Therefore, by whatever mistake, that comment by APC presidential standard is going to affect sixty million of his supporters who take communion every week and month.
“In the wake of terrorism and anti- church activities going on including very myopic comments by people who the agenda of the moslem/moslem ticket is to dehumanise minority northerners and of course majority Christian’s in the south of the country, I condemn such utterances at this critical stage of electioneering.
“I hereby call on the presidential candidate to apologise immediately or else it will have a very serious negative effect on his person and his teeming supporters.”
He added that the former Lagos state governor should have been the last person to make such sarcastic comments about the Christian faith, emphasising that it was a wrong analogy to compare the holy sacrament of the Christian faith with climate change because it has no relationship.