The Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) yesterday lamented the “lopsidedness in the constitution of the delegates” to the ongoing national conference, saying that the 38 per cent Muslim delegates in a country with Muslim majority might discredit the confab and put questions on the acceptability of its outcome.
The organisation, which decried the timing of the conference so close to the 2015 general elections, said with the outcome of the confab subjected to a national referendum or approval of the National Assembly, the lawmakers should have handled the agenda instead of wasting huge amounts of money that would have been better spent in arresting the poverty and insecurity ravaging the country.
Its Secretary General, Khalid Aliyu, who condoled with the families of the applicants who died during the Nigerian Immigration Service, said “many Nigerians, including the leadership of the Muslim Ummah, have expressed various concerns regarding the confab.”
He said: “Nigerians have warned that the confab is ill- timed given that electioneering is about to kick-off. The sheer lopsidedness has shown that the outcome of the conference may not be acceptable to the people.
“While Muslims constitute the majority in the country, Christians, who are not more than 40 per cent of the country s population, ironically constitute 62 per cent of the total delegates. We find it a great disregard and disrespect to Muslims that of the 20 delegates of the federal government, only six are Muslims, of the 18 security experts (retired security men) only 4 (22.2 per cent) are Muslims.
“We are worried that the process of selecting participants to the conference has been observed to have thrown away all the known dictates of fair representation in a democracy which will no doubt affect the credibility of the outcome of the conference.”
