The Presidency, on Wednesday, said President Muhammadu Buhari inherited a ‘terribly’ divided country from his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, in 2015.
Presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina, who featured on Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’, said the Presidency was not surprised at the recent comments by Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka and former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
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Adesina noted that Soyinka had been a government critic for decades and had even criticised Buhari when he was a military head of state in the 1980s, hence.
“There is no government he has not criticised.
“The only government he has not criticised is the Olusegun Obasanjo government.
“So, that kind of person has a right to air his opinion and you also have a right to take it or not to take it.
“Obasanjo had been critical of every past government and so his recent statement would not bother the Presidency.
“Nigeria had always been divided. Always.
“Right from amalgamation in 1914, Nigeria has always been divided.
“Nigeria is an inconvenient amalgamation but we have worked at it and I tell you that there is no time in the history of this country that the country was not divided but then we had kept at it and we were trying to make it work.
“As of 2015, when President Buhari came, Nigeria was terribly, terribly divided; divided along religious lines, divided along ethnic lines; divided along language, divided hopelessly, terribly and that is the division that the President had been working at.
“But you see that a lot of people instead of letting harmony return to this country, thrive and luxuriate in widening the gulf.
“They play politics with everything.”
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