LAGOS
By Rafiu Ajakaye
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has threatened to bring treason charges against the country's opposition which has urged parliament to begin impeachment proceedings against the incumbent.
In a statement late Sunday, the presidency dismissed the impeachment threat was a blackmail amounting to treason.
The presidency threatened, in reaction, it may bring treason charges against opposition politicians.
The opposition has claimed that the president was training snipers to liquidate some 1,000 people allegedly placed on hit list and urging the Parliament to begin impeachment proceedings against Jonathan.
It also repeated accusations of incompetence, corruption and ethnic chauvinism leveled by former president Olusegun Obasanjo against Jonathan.
Sheikh Ahmad Abubakar Gumi, Nigeria's most revered Salafist scholar who commands millions of following across Nigeria's northern region, on Sunday advised Jonathan to resign or be humiliated out of office through impeachment or "shameful" defeat in the 2015 election.
In a statement, Gumi claimed that President Jonathan had lost the moral stamina to govern the country amid rising claims of impropriety, citing Obasanjo's accusations against Jonathan.
In an open letter leaked to the media, Obasanjo, a former military ruler who was later elected president when Nigeria returned to democracy in 1999, accused Jonathan, his political godson, of running a "clannish and divisive" government neck-deep in corruption.
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