APC chides Jonathan over delayed meeting with Chibok girls’ parents

The All Progressives Congress (APC) has described as an embarrassment the fact that it took a 17-year-old girl-child education campaigner, Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, to visit and convince President Goodluck Jonathan to agree to a meeting with representatives of the parents of the kidnapped schoolgirls.
 
‘’President Jonathan, who has already embarrassed himself and the entire people of Nigeria by his inexplicable failure to visit Chibok since the girls were abducted over 90 days ago, has compounded the embarrassment and insulted Nigerians by waiting for Malala to goad him to meet with the girls’ parents, not in Chibok but in Abuja,’’ the party said in a statement issued in Lagos on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Lai Mohammed.

It said after the meeting failed, because the parents were not properly informed and invited, the Presidency turned around to blame the opposition and the patriotic and selfless Nigerians who have been campaigning daily, under the #BringBackOurGirls group.

‘’Fortunately, and to the eternal discomfiture of the Presidency, the Chibok community has said the decision not to meet with President Jonathan in Abuja was theirs and theirs alone, and that they took that decision because their sole reason for coming to Abuja was to meet with Malala, and not the President, who did not invite them anyway.

‘’With this explanation, one would have expected a Presidency that has regard for the truth to immediately retract its earlier panic statement, which it issued to save face after what was nothing but a PR gimmick blew up in their face, and apologise to the opposition and the #BringBackOurGirls group that were unjustly pilloried by them.

‘’Instead, the Presidency has persisted in its distortion of the truth, for which they have now become infamous, even as a new date has been agreed for the meeting. This is unfortunate, condemnable and irresponsible,’’ APC said.

‘’If indeed, as the Presidency claimed earlier, that the opposition was behind the earlier refusal by the parents and escaped girls not to see the President, what has then happened to make them change their minds? Has the opposition now asked them to meet with the President?’’