APC slams Jonathan over reply to Obasanjo’s letter

The All Progressive Congress (APC), on Thursday, described President Goodluck Jonathan’s reply to an 18-page open letter written by Olusegun Obasanjo as reading like “the stuff of gossip magazines, and the exchange of words felt like what one would have expected in a beer parlour.”
Obasanjo, a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain and a former president of Nigeria, had earlier on December 2, 2013 written the letter, which detailed series of allegations against the Jonathan administration. [...]
The letter entitled “Before It’s Too Late” urged the president to act on the shortcomings.
Jonathan replied with an open letter of his own in which he described the Obasanjo letter as a “threat to national security as it may deliberately or inadvertently set the stage for subversion.”
Three days after his reply, the president at a Christmas service at the Cathedral Church of the Advent, Life Camp, in Abuja, also declared that Nigeria was not the property of any politician.
“For us at this time, especially we the politicians who think we own this country, we’ll begin to think about our next election and doing what we ought not to do, making statements we are supposed not to make and writing letters we are not supposed to write,” Jonathan said.

“I call on the clergymen and statesmen who really own this country, because this country belongs to our statesmen, the traditional rulers, our religious leaders and men and women and youths.”

Reacting to Jonathan’s reactions in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed, APC said that, while it is not interested in joining the fray over the issues contained in the letters written by both men, the decision by the President to go personal in his reaction brought the country into disrepute.
The statement noted that, in other countries, the President would have simply issued a terse response to such a letter denying the allegations that border on national security, if any, as well as saying the former President’s observations have been noted, and that the government would study them and then engage with the former President in private.
”Instead, the President’s response read like the stuff of gossip magazines, and the exchange of words felt like what one would have expected in a beer parlour. At the end of the day, the Presidency allowed Obasanjo to take the higher moral ground by simply insisting on the allegations he made in his letter and saying he would not respond to the presidency’s reply,” the statement read.

”The President, who accused Obasanjo of doing him a great injustice, has himself done a great injustice to the Presidency, which is an institution in which he is only a tenant. In the end, the President of Africa’s most populous nation, the leader of the foremost black nation on earth and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria simply desecrated his own presidency and allowed those who can only be likened to gravy train passengers, rascals and knaves to seize the initiative from him.

”This is what happens when a President is surrounded by self-serving, boot-licking and dishonest people, at the expense of seasoned technocrats and veteran policy makers, who would have reminded the President that while critics can afford to fire all sorts of darts at him, as the custodian of the presidency at this point in time, he cannot afford to respond in kind because, in doing so, he would be debasing the presidency as an institution,” APC said.

The party said the President was not unaware of this because he struggled in his letter to maintain some minimum level of decorum, and then quickly lost control and engaged in a bare-knuckle fight.

”To worsen matters, President Jonathan could not restrain himself from using even the revered and ecclesial (sic) platform provided by his appearance at a Church service on Christmas day to further lambast his critics and spew out hot words. This, surely, is not what is expected of a President, a leader and anyone who wants to be a nation builder. It is time to call a truce,” the statement concluded.