By Ikeugonna Eleke
A rights group, International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) has said that the Papal Invitation to President Bola Tinubu for the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV was undeserved.
The group, in a press statement signed by its Board of Trustees Chairman, Mr Emeka Umeagbalasi, said this was because the killing of Christians in Nigeria rose under the watch of President Tinubu.
In the press statement which was made available to newsmen in Awka, the group said in the same way, many Christians and even priests had been abducted in Nigeria, some released after payment of ransom, while some others died in the hands of their captors.
The statement read in part: “The Leadership of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), has strongly declared as undeserved and totally rejected, the Papal invitation extended to President Ahmed Bola Tinubu of Nigeria to attend the inauguration of the 267th Pope of the global Catholic Church, Cardinal Francis Robert Prevost (as he then was), or ‘Pope Leo XIV.
“The global Catholics, numbering more than 1.4 billion have recorded serious denominational and religious retardation under-growth and under-development in Nigeria since the Boko Haram Jihadist uprising in July 2009 and the Jihadist Fulani State power conquest since June 2015 to date.
“President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his predecessor (Retired Major General Muhammad Buhari (as he then was) had sat under the situations of inaction, inability, unwillingness and complicity since then as the country’s leaders, and watched the country enter the World’s Hall of Infamy as the worst country on earth to practice Christianity and where one Christian is hacked to death on hourly basis.
“Nigeria under them has also unbeatably recorded the highest number of destroyed or burned down churches and Christian schools in the world.”
The statement further added that: “Emerging statistics have shown that apart from Nigeria’s Catholics losing about 16 dioceses and thousands of parishes and outstations to the country’s Islamic Jihadists or Radical Islamists and their patrons in the past sixteen years or since July 2009, the country is now home to dozens of Islamic Jihadists and jihadist elements/jihad enablers within the country’s security forces.
“The country’s Jihadists and their patrons have launched unchecked, untamed and untracked attacks on defenceless Christians and sacked or seized not less than 1000 indigenous Christian communities and occupied an estimated over 70% of Christian forests out of the country’s total of 1,129 forests.
“The Jihadists and their patrons have also seized and occupied over 20,000 square miles and hundreds of thousands of hectares of Christian farmlands and farm settlements covering Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, etc.,” the group insisted.
It also criticized some Catholic clerics, including high ranking bishops, who accompanied the President to Rome, saying that the implication was that they were hobnobbing with the same powers that had kept their faithful down for years.
