Amaka Obiefuna.

The Middle Belt Patriotic Front has faulted former President Goodluck Jonathan over his recent comments at the US Congress where he reportedly claimed that religion was tearing the nation apart.

Jonathan at the event revealed that his administration’s political will to halt impunity in Nigeria led to the localisation of religious extremism in the Northeast with occasional killings in other zones of the North.

Jonathan explained further that he also reached out to the “Muslim Ummah in Nigeria, His Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar III,” whom he was able to convince to “publicly condemn Islamic extremism in Nigeria.”

Speaking to journalists in Abuja, national chairman of the forum, Bishop Musa Fomson described the statement by the ex-president as reckless and unpatriotic.

He said, “It was the mindlessness of his administration that amplified the schism to a point where persons that were once neutral learnt to hate adherents of other faiths. It was Goodluck Jonathan that made religion and ethnicity into campaign issues in order to cover the incompetence of his rule in the quest for re-election.”

He accused the former president of sowing the seeds of division through his, “ill advised romance with the then President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, who even ran errand as weapons buyer, and was instrumental to reducing Christendom into the current level where whatever CAN has to say is being second guessed.”