The Advocates Forum of the ruling All Progressives Congress has turned to the Bible to justify the government’s positon that the embattled Sheikh Isa Ali Pantami, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, is indeed a changed man.
In their defence of the Minister on the controversy surrounding past extremist views, the group said that the minister is like the Biblical Apostle Paul who got converted on his way to Damascu.
As such, the group said, the minister should not be judged by his past.
“Dr Pantami is one Nigerian who has had to speak in positive terms in the past out of his conviction as an impressionable Islamic cleric, about AlQaeda and Osama Bin Laden at a time many other clerics in Nigeria believed that Saudi Arabia was doing the right thing,” Convener of APC Advocates Forum, Comrade Kabiru Duhu, said at a press conference in Abuja on Monday.
He added that “along the line, he (Pantami) had an experience similar to what the Holy Bible told us that Apostle Paul had on the road to Damascus after he was exposed to fresh evidence”.
Pantami has been in the eye of the storm since a newspaper alleged that the minister had been placed on the United State of America’s terror watch list for his past comments that showed his extremist views.
Several groups and individuals have called for his resignation and in the absence of that, for President Muhammadu Buhari to sack him.
The forum said Pantami thereafter openly recanted his previous comments and took it upon himself to preach against Islamic extremist ideologies across major cities of Northern Nigeria and which has over the years made him a target for Boko Haram.
“So, whereas many Nigerians from the South first heard about Dr Pantami when President Muhammadu Buhari named him the Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) and subsequently as a cabinet member, he had for at least 10 years been a known figure in the North for his itinerant anti-Boko Haram preachings,” Duhu said.
“He was in fact one of the few Islamic preachers that dared preached publicly against the deadly sect, before it was designated as a terrorist group, and which was why Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the insurgent group in February 2020 issued a fatwa on him and reminded Nigerians how his group shot and killed other preachers,” the group said. stated.
