The General Overseer of the Latter Rain Assembly, Tunde Bakare, has described the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Party, Maj.-Gen. Mohammadu Buhari (retd.), as the most liberal Muslim he has worked with. In a video posted on YouTube on Monday, the cleric said those who tagged him an extremist could not find a proof to support the claims. In the video currently trending on the Internet, the Muslim-born pastor said he probed wide and deep in 2011 for a possible clue to establish the extremism claims but found them to be false. According to him, he accepted the invitation to run with the politician when he was satisfied that the speculations were unfounded. “People say Buhari is an extremist but he is a great personality. I have had the privilege of working with him at a very close range, especially during and after the 2011 presidential election. “There are a lot of propaganda out there surrounding this great man. Some would see him as an extremist, a fundamentalist and somebody who hates religion so hard that he can’t laugh or crack a joke. But I find none of these to be true,” he said. Bakare, who was a running mate to the ex-army chief in the 2011 presidential election, said the opposition camp fabricated “the lies” for fear of a Buhari government. He said, “These people fabricated all these lies against him because they know that if he wins the election, they would have to flee this country. He is not a fundamentalist.” The pastor recalled how Buhari’s driver approached him for prayer. He said he told the chauffeur he could not pray in Islam – just to find out that he was a Christian. He narrated, “I remember when he asked his personal driver to take me to Mallam Nasir el-Rufai’s house. The driver asked me to pray for him as we were about to leave. I told him straight away that I couldn’t pray in the Islamic way because I was no longer a Muslim and that I could only use the name of Jesus. But the driver said, ‘I am a Christian.’ “And I realised that he was not the only worker that was a Christian… His guards were Christians. He has Christian workers around him; yet people say he is an Islamic fundamentalist.” Bakare also gave an instance where the APC presidential candidate screamed, “Jesus Christ of Nazareth” when he staggered in his sitting room after a tough campaign programme. He said he was shocked and questioned whether it was not a “swear word” in Islam. According to him, Buhari laughed and said, “Pastor, you don’t have a monopoly of Jesus Christ.” He also wondered why Buhari would excuse his subordinates from official duties when he was in the force if he had no regard for other religions. The general overseer, who said God was a witness to his account on the presidential candidate, said Buhari’s decision to run with devout Christians each time he contested was a proof of his tolerance for other faiths. When he chose him, he said, Buhari was looking for a credible and honest Nigerian that would join him to redeem the country. It was not the first time Bakare would stick out his neck in defence of Buhari. In previous interviews, he had prayed Nigeria would not again miss the opportunity to redeem itself through his leadership. The video was released after the cleric had denied speculations that he collected a bribe to campaign for a change of leadership ahead the next month election. Bakare, who was paired with Buhari on the platform of the now rested Congress for Progressive Change, had challenged those with evidence to prove it. He said he was not saying anything new but merely giving a direction. Meanwhile, controversy continued to trail Buhari concerning the whereabouts of his secondary school certificate. This was however largely doused when he came out to affirm that he attended Provincial Secondary School (now Government College), Katsina and that he had formally requested his school and the examination authorities to supply his certificate. While this has also been done, President Goodluck Jonathan’s camp had continued to make issue out of it. On Wednesday, the Special Adviser to the President, Reno Omokri, mockingly urged organisers of the Gulder Ultimate Search to dedicate the next edition of the show “to the searching of the lost certificate.” He listed several achievements of Jonathan, which he said, would count for the Peoples Democratic Party in the coming election. According to his tweets, it is now possible to travel from Lagos to Kano with N1, 930 by train as a result of Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 03:45:59 +0000
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