Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti says the claim that the Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket being fielded by the APC for the 2023 elections is solely based on competence and not religious consideration is false.

Mr Fayemi, the chairman of Progressives Governors Forum, said the “decision was not on grounds of competence because we have competent Christians all over Nigeria but on grounds of strategic political moves.”

He stated this while hosting new executives of the Ekiti State Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria on Friday in Ado Ekiti.

The governor said the party should have engaged Christian leaders to explain the rationale for their same faith ticket in order to secure their confidence.

“Even if they don’t agree with our choice, they would have seen the sincerity of purpose.”

“We have to look at scenarios and calculate where the votes would come from, it is a game of numbers,” he added.

Mr Fayemi said it was time Christians stopped their abhorrent disposition to politics because “When serious Christians committed to the ideals of social justice and the common good turn away from politics, they open the door for unprincipled opportunists to take power.”

“I think it is time for Christians to move away from the theology of disengagement — the notion that politics is dirty and that it is not for a child of God,” he added.

The Ekiti governor enjoined the Christian leadership to use the current challenge as an opportunity to present a charter of demands to all political candidates, especially the APC, outlining the irreducible minimum conditions acceptable to Christians in the next political dispensation.

Sharp criticisms have trailed the decision of the APC presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu to field a fellow Muslim Kashim Shettima as his running mate for the 2023 election.

Critics see the decision as a divisive politics of exclusion that would widen dichotomy between the the two dominant faiths in the country.

The Gazette had exclusively reported that the State Security Service in a secret memo to President Muhammadu Buhari warned that Mr Tinubu’s  choice of vice-presidential candidate for the 2023 presidential election would trigger a sectarian crisis that could destabilise Nigeria.