Wednesday 25 February 2015

Yes, CAN Received N7bn Bribe from Presidency – Pastor

Borno State-based pastor, Kallamu Musa-Dikwa, who accused the Christians Association of Nigeria of collecting N7bn bribe from President Goodluck Jonathan to campaign against the APC and Muhammadu Buhari has insisted that the CAN collected the said amount.

Pastor Musa-Dikwa on Monday in Kaduna insisted that the Jonathan government gave CAN N7bn to campaign against the APC candidate, Maj. Gen Muhammadu Buhari (retd.).

The cleric insisted that CAN collected N7bn from Jonathan.

Amaechi had alleged that unnamed leaders of the Peoples Democratic Party paid N6bn to Christian clerics to campaign against the APC. The allegation has caused uproar among the Christian community, with the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria and the Northern State Christian Elders Forum asking Amaechi to name the church leaders who collected the N6bn.

Reacting to the Northern States Christian Elders Forum, Dikwa, who is the Executive Director of the Voice of Northern Christian Movement, had told journalists in Kaduna last Thursday that the said money was channeled through CAN.

He said the Christians body got N7bn on January 26, 2015 and disbursed N3m each to state chairmen of the CAN across the country.

Dikwa also added that CAN had started threatening Christians in Borno that they must re-elect President Jonathan in the rescheduled election.

He said that he fell out with the national body of CAN when sometimes in 2013 some clerics from the United States (Christians Association of Nigeria-Americans) visited Nigeria and donated the sum of $50,000 to the victims of the Boko Haram violence in Borno State.

He explained that rather than disbursing the money to serve the purpose for which it was meant, CAN merely gave the victims a paltry N100,000.

The cleric added that when he asked the leadership of the body about the $50,000 for the victims, they became furious. “This was the beginning of our disagreement with the national body of CAN,” he said.

On the alleged N7bn bribe money, Pastor Musa-Dikwa played a recorded audio of someone confirming that CAN had collected the money before members of the Correspondents’ Chapel of the Kaduna Council of the Nigeria Union of Journalists in Kaduna on Tuesday. He said when Amaechi first accused the clerics of collecting bribe to campaign against the Buhari candidacy, “I [sent a] text to the leadership of the CAN to repent or be exposed.