Yakubu Dati has accused Yakubu Dogara of trying to stoke the embers of discord among northern Christians.
In a statement, yesterday, claimed that after the former speaker failed in the bid to be nominated as running mate to Bola Tinubu, he launched a war against the ruling party.
Dati said Dogara could only fool those who do not know him too well and his past narcissistic tendencies that always becloud his sense of judgment.
“Let us start from the former Speaker’s Constituency of Bogoro/Dass/Tafawa Balewa Federal Constituency. Though the Constituency has a good mixture of Muslims and Christians, no one has raised the religious card when he was elected into the House of Representatives for a record four times!
“In a constituency that has three local governments and strongly believes in rotation, one would have expected Dogara to lead by example by upholding equity through a rotational system that would have accommodated the others. If Dogara believes in equity and fairness why has he not made sacrifice to allow the two other local governments produce the Reps member for the constituency after he had served two terms in the House as has been the practice. As a good Christian that he claims to be that would have served to establish that he believes in justice and fairness,” Dati said.
He wondered why Dogara is miffed that he was not selected as vice presidential candidate of APC and said that if there was anybody who should have been vexed with Tinubu for not picking him as running mate, it should have been the Governor of Plateau State, Simon Bako Lalong who has given his all to the APC.
“At the time under consideration, Lalong remained the only APC Christian governor in Northern Nigeria and is privileged to be chairman of the Northern Governors Forum but when the party went ahead and nominated another for the position of running mate, he did not try to bring down the house but took it on good faith. This is unlike Dogara who left the party at its trying moment and came back only when the party has consolidated its hold on the polity,” Dati said.
Dati claimed Dogara has been trying hard to sound like a statesman by suggesting the APC ticket had placed state-building ahead of nation-building suggesting that it is akin to placing the cart before the horse.
“The former Speaker said more but his comments did not go beyond his usual championing of selfish interest under the guise of religious equity and failed to contextualize his understanding of what state and nation building constitute in the current political dispensation. One would have thought that if the former Speaker understands thoroughly the concept of nation building, that he would have appreciated the bid to move the psyche of Nigerians from primordial sentiments to issues of development as there is nowhere in history that staying trapped in the past has served as a sine qua non for development,” he said.