Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Yusuf Tuggar, cautioned on Tuesday against faith-based agitations that he described as precursors to national disintegration, citing Sudan’s experience as a warning to Nigeria, accordingtoArise news.
His comments came during a tense interview on the Piers Morgan Uncensored show, while addressing claims of targeted attacks on Christians in the country.
The interview, which, some analysts say, was poorly handled by Tuggar, particularly in allegedly not having the full grasp of Information on insecurity and number of casualties in the country became cintoversial as the minister demanded that the script must be published all at once.
They argue that the exercise was a complete waste of Nigeria’s resources as well as bad public relations for the country.
Tuggar in the interview said, “We’ve seen these sorts of agitations by faith-based organisations. That is a prelude to the breaking up, to the dismemberment of countries. We’ve seen it in Sudan. We know this playbook. It’s happened. There were agitations to create South Sudan, which was expected to be a predominantly Christian country, separate from North Sudan, which is meant to be a Muslim country.”
He added, “Now we have a situation where there’s fighting, continuous fighting in South Sudan. There’s another round about to kick off. The same thing in North Sudan. We don’t want to be the next Sudan. We will not allow ourselves to be the next Sudan. Where are the faith-based groups that were agitating to be dismembered? They’re no longer there to fix Sudan.”
The discussion on Morgan’s show centred on allegations of religiously targeted violence in Nigeria, including claims of Christian persecution.
When pressed by Morgan on reported figures of Christian casualties, Tuggar insisted he was not evading questions, but challenged the numbers and the framing of the violence solely along religious lines.
