Catholic Church writes Tinubu, Sani over El-Rufai’s controversial religious comment

The Catholic community in Kaduna State has called on President Bola Tinubu and Governor Uba Sani to call the immediate past governor of the state, Nasir El-Rufai to order before he sets the entire country into a religious crisis.

This is against the backdrop of a controversial statement on Muslim dominance in the governance of Kaduna State credited to the former governor.

According to a trending video, El-rufai had in a meeting with some Muslim clerics, said in Hausa language that most Christians in the state did not vote for his party, the All Progressives Congress, hence the reason he orchestrated their exclusion from being even Deputy Governor.

The former governor also claimed that the APC can win elections in the state and the nation in general without the Christians.

However, in an open letter copied to the Presidency and the Governor of Kaduna State, the Nigerian Catholic Diocesan Priests Association (NCDPA), Kaduna State chapter asked Governor Sani to make his official position on El-rufai’s inciting utterances known because he (Sani) was at the event where El-rufai made the controversial statement.

The letter was jointly signed by chairmen of Kaduna Archdiocese, Rev. Fr Joseph Gandu, Kafanchan Diocese, Very Rev. Fr Douglas Rock and Zaria Diocese, Very Rev. Fr Samuel Ameh.

The Priests said they expected Uba Sani to use his good office to correct the fallacies that the former governor’s actions and comments have created and propagated in Kaduna State in the past eight years.

The open letter was copied to the Presidency, the three Catholic Bishops of Kaduna, Kafanchan and Zaria; Archbishop Matthew Man’oso Ndagoso, Bishop Julius Yakubu Kundi and Very Rev. Fr Michael Kagarko, respectively.

“We cannot fold our hands and watch unpatriotic persons who neither live in the state nor care about it, come and set it ablaze at will.

£More so, we and our congregations have prominently been at the receiving end of the terrors of ineffective governance, especially in the last eight (8) years.

“We are writing to you because we want you to succeed. Religion occupies the place given it under the Constitution, and should never be used as a cover up for incompetence and failure,” the letter partly read