The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has described the decision by erstwhile Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, to dump the All Progressives Congress, APC, as a clear vindication of its oft-repeated statement that the opposition party is made up of “bloodthirsty, religious and ethnic bigots averse to the unity of the country”.
The ex-minister had on Monday in a lengthy statement announced that he was withdrawing his membership of the APC and returning to the ruling PDP.
He stated that his decision to retrace his steps back to PDP was informed by the opposition party leadership’s intolerance of divergent views, “sympathy for Boko Haram and the insistence of its leadership to put up a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket in the forthcoming Nigerian presidential elections”.
Fani-Kayode, who recently denied that his visit to the presidential villa, where he held a private meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan, was not an indication that he was planning on dumping the APC, said he was now comfortable returning to the PDP since its immediate past national chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, who he said demonstrated sympathy for the extremist Boko Haram sect, had been sacked from office.
In a stament on Tuesday issued in Abuja, the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, also said “the revelation by the former minister that the APC has sympathies for insurgents further confirms PDP’s earlier position linking APC’s utterances to the spate of insurgency and sectarians violence in the country”.
“We have now been vindicated. The truth may be hidden for sometime but it has a way of expressing itself. The world can now see that we do not speak for nothing when we describe them in their true nature; a cult, a hypocritical lot, wolves in sheep skin, devils who, through their utterances, stoke the fires of violence by night only to wear messianic robes in the morning to shed crocodile tears for their victims.
“Nigerians are no longer at loss regarding who their real enemies are. They can now see why the APC feels no pain but seeks always to gain political capital out of the bombings and killings in our country. Having realized that they have been rejected by the people, they resorted to using dastardly means including promoting violence and falsehood to further their plot to destabilize the polity, balkanize the nation and truncate the democratic process, a scheme which has already failed”, the statement said.
Metuh pointed out that a lot of reasonable and respectable Nigerians still in the APC will soon join the PDP as they have now discovered that the agenda of the opposition party is to promote violence and the personal agenda of a few unpatriotic individuals.
Stating that it remains committed to the national interest, the PDP maintained that its doors are wide open to all well-meaning Nigerians irrespective of religious, tribal, ethnic, or regional affiliations.