Jonathan’s Meeting with Abducted Chibok Girls’ Parents is Belated –APC Alleges

Posted by African Examiner Featured, Latest Headlines, News, Politics Thursday, July 17th, 2014

By Tajudeen Balogun

The opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) has criticized the late advance by President Goodluck Jonathan to meet with the representatives of the parents of the kidnapped Chibok Secondary school girls after meeting with the Pakistani teen education crusader, Malala Yousafzai, describing move as a “compound embarrassment”.

The party expressed this in a statement issued in Lagos on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed

It reads in part: ”President Jonathan, who has already embarrassed himself and the entire people of Nigeria by his inexplicable failure to visit Chibok since the girls were abducted over 90 days ago, has compounded the embarrassment and insulted Nigerians by waiting for Malala to goad him to meet with the girls’ parents, not in Chibok but in Abuja,”

APC wondered why the Presidency decided to blame the opposition, the patriotic and selfless Nigerians who have been campaigning daily, under the aegis of #Bringbackourgirls, when it failed to properly inform and invite the selected parents of the over 200 abducted girls, being held by the insurgents.

Alhaji Mohammed revealed that the accused have been exonerated when the Chibok community declared that the decision to cancel the visit was theirs and not instigated by anybody, adding that their plan to visit Abuja was to meet with the teen safety and child education campaigner who had arrived the country since last weekend to identify with them.

”With this explanation, one would have expected a presidency that has regard for the truth to immediately retract its earlier panic statement, which it issued to save face after what was nothing but a PR gimmick blew up in their face and apologize to the opposition and the #Bringbackourgirls group that were unjustly pilloried by them” the statement posited.

The party complained rather than apologizing to those earlier wrongly accused, the presidency has persisted in its distortion of truth, for which it said it has become infamous, “even as a new date has been agreed for the meeting”. The unfolding trend APC affirmed was ”unfortunate, condemnable and irresponsible”.

The party which observed that the accusation lacked logics, alerted Nigerians that the reason President Jonathan, whose wife “bullied and harangued the girls’ parents” on the grounds that they were lying and that no girl was missing, agreed to meet with the parents was to use the meeting as a “photo-op, after Malala pushed for it and the President’s US-based image laundering firm acceded” to the proposed meeting.

APC also declared that no amount of make-up that would change the fact that the aborted and rescheduled meeting were belated and influenced.

The statement also picked holes in the President’s Jonathan usual comparison with some Western leaders, citing the example of United States of America (US) President Barrack Obama whom it argued would not have refused to visit the parents of the abducted girls, if the abduction had occurred in US as the chief security officer of his country. It insisted an insurgent group like Boko Haram would have not have restricted Obama’s movement and advanced to the present alarming level.

APC reminded President Jonathan that neither in Nigeria’s culture nor in any other culture are those hit by tragedy invited to be “offered solace, adding that the practice amounted to visit those to be offered solace ‘in situ’.