The All Progressives Congress has emphasized the urgent need to confront the weaponisation of ethnicity, religion, and misinformation ahead of the 2027 general elections.
The party recently urged its spokespersons across Nigeria to rise to the challenge and address these issues decisively.
Speaking at a capacity-building seminar for APC Zonal and State Publicity Secretaries, the party’s National Secretary, Ajibola Basiru, highlighted the positive impact of President Bola Tinubu’s economic reforms.
According to him, Tinubu removing the fuel subsidy and unifying exchange rates has gone a long way towards delivering infrastructure development and economic opportunities across the nation.
Expressing concern over the increasing ethnic divisions in Nigeria, Basiru stated that the lack of unity was very obvious during the 2023 elections.
“This gathering is also important because even before the 2023 election, we have seen the weaponisation of falsehood as an instrument of politics in Nigeria. Now, people will go and pick images from Somalia, images from Chad, images from where there is war ravage, and put an address to it in Nigeria in order to create misinformation.
We also have a situation where people who have had the opportunity of governing the sub-national, and without any achievement beyond establishing their factory, will come and be telling us what happened in China, in Malaysia, when at the backyard of their own yard, their community is ravaged with floods, and they did not put a single school building for eight years of administration.
So this gathering is important for us to be able to tackle those who have also weaponised ethnicity. Growing up in Nigeria, ethnic fault lines were not as pronounced as they have been made ahead of the 2023 election, and unfortunately, they are still carrying that over post-2023 election,” he said.
He further noted that present data show that the economy is performing strongly and that the APC-led Federal Government has earned its praise from credible and knowledgeable sources.
He concluded by saying that weaponization of falsehoods during Tinubu’s reign must be tackled quickly.
“Another front line is that of religion — the weaponisation of religion on the grounds of politics. Even people whose sanctimonious attitude is very dubious now try to wear the toga of religion for the purpose of political ascendancy. These are part of the efforts that we need to put in place. How do we effectively tackle the weaponisation of falsehoods, the weaponisation of ethnicity, and the weaponisation of religious bigotry in our country?
So we, as a government, must also show that contrary to the doom-based scenario of people who thought the Naira would climb to 2,000 and beyond 2,000, the Naira has become one of the best-performing currencies in Nigeria. It showed that what President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has done is to let us get integrated into the structure of the global economy, and that has also brought investment, massive ones into the Nigerian economy.
Today, our oil production is now peaking at 1.7 million barrels per day because they were able to attract investment in those areas,” he added.
