Fiery cleric and politician, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has disowned media reports that he predicted President Goodluck Jonathan’s ouster before his term expires in 2015.
Bakare was quizzed for some eight hours yesterday at the Shangisha Lagos office of the State Security Service (SSS) and indications are that he regained his freedom by disowning the statement credited to him by the media.
“I was wrongly quoted,” Bakare told SSS chiefs, according to an AIT report.
Transport & Business Express reports that Bakare had in a sermon last Sunday in his church, the Latter Rain Assembly, Lagos, predicted confidently that Nigeria would hold another general elections before 2015.
The Latter Rain Serving Overseer who spoke on the theme “How to change government peacefully and make society better,” had advised President Jonathan to “choose between the options to resign, be impeached or worst still face people’s revolt.”
According to Bakare, “The bewildering exposure of the level of corruption in almost every arm of government as well as governmental agencies and parastatals, calls for a change of guards– more so when the president has openly admitted that the security situation in the country has changed his pre-election agenda. And in spite of the president’s promises to deal with insecurity head-on, this government appears helpless because it cannot see the linkage between corruption and violence.”
Shortly after news of the sermon broke in the media, the SSS wrote to invite the activist pastor for a discussion yesterday afternoon.
Bakare was the vice presidential candidate of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in last year’s general elections. He is also the Convener of the Save Nigeria Group (SNG) which organised the “Occupy Nigeria” fuel protests that crippled much of the country last January.
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