I won’t use Nigeria as negative example – Akufo-Addo tells Goodluck Jonathan

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has corrected an impression that he used Nigeria as a negative example in a recent speech in the UK.

The immediate past president of Africa’s most populous nation, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, is said to have mentioned Mr Akufo-Addo as passing disparaging comments about Nigeria.

“It is important to stress that the comments made by the former Nigerian President, at the inauguration of the first bridge built by Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State in Ado Ekiti, took the words of President Akufo-Addo completely out of context,” a release issued by Ghana’s High Commissioner to Nigeria, Rashid Bawa, sought to clarify.

Mr Bawa explained that his president at the Oxford African Conference, one of the instances cited by Mr Jonathan, did not use Nigeria in the negative sense.

“President Akufo-Addo, in many of the speeches he has made in Nigeria and elsewhere, since becoming President of Ghana, has described Nigeria as ‘a country I describe as my second home in the world’, and will never use Nigeria to make negative examples, as the former President Goodluck Jonathan sought to portray.

“President Akufo-Addo enjoys a very good relationship with President Muhammadu Buhari, as he has with many other Nigerian leaders.

“Ghana and Nigeria are like siblings, and it would be most inappropriate, because of politics, for anyone, regardless of his or her status in society, to try to sow seeds of discord amongst the leadership and peoples of our two countries.”