David Cameron and Ed Miliband have highlighted the persecution of Christians in their Easter messages.
The prime minister said it was "shocking" to know people abroad were
still being "threatened, tortured - even killed" because of their faith.
Labour's Mr Miliband wrote that people in the UK "must do
everything we can" to condemn oppression, highlighting the plight of
Christians in Syria and Iraq.
Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg condemned Thursday's killings in Kenya.
Some 148 people were killed as militant group al-Shabab attacked students at Garissa University.
'Freedom of belief'
As the pace of general election campaigning slowed on Easter Sunday, Mr Cameron published his Easter message on YouTube, highlighting the role of the Church at home.
The
prime minister hailed the Church as a "living active force doing great
works" for the poor and homeless and urged Britain to "feel proud to say
this is a Christian country".
This election issue includes foreign policy and the role of UK’s defence forces at home and abroad.
The Conservative leader, whose severely disabled son Ivan died in
2009, said that he knew "from the most difficult times in my own life,
that the kindness of the Church can be a huge comfort".
And on the
oppression of Christians, he said: "We have a duty to speak out about
the persecution of Christians around the world too.
"It is truly
shocking to know that in 2015, there are still Christians being
threatened, tortured - even killed - because of their faith".
He added: "In the coming months, we must continue to speak as one voice for freedom of belief."
'Speak out'
Mr Miliband, who published his message on Facebook,
highlighted statistics from the International Society for Human Rights,
which suggest Christians are the victims of 80% of acts of religious
discrimination in the world.
David and Samantha Cameron attended Easter Sunday service in Oxfordshire
The Labour leader wrote: "We
must all do everything we can to speak out against this evil and work to
alleviate the suffering of those who are persecuted simply for their
creed."
He also praised church members and charities who "provide support and hope to those in need" in the UK.
He
wrote: "In the months to come I hope that we will all stand up for
justice, serve the most vulnerable and work to positively transform our
communities together."
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg,
meanwhile, wrote on Twitter: "While politicians in the UK are busy on
the campaign trail, we must not forget the cruel and barbaric killings
that took place in Kenya."
He added: "The thoughts of people here
are very much with the families and friends of the murdered students in
Garissa University."
Mr Clegg said later that Easter was "a time
of reflection and renewal" when everybody has a chance "to take stock of
what is truly important to them and their families".
And he hailed "the moving and powerful story of Jesus's sacrifice and resurrection".
UKIP leader Nigel Farage wished people "a restful and enjoyable day".
Says , "Am Vindicated".
The prophesy. “President has become a bad luck., The multitude of our youths, the
quality young men, quality young women, brilliants youths but nobody has
plans for any of you. Our so-called leaders should come and apologize.
In 2015, it shall not continue like that. By the grace of God, by the
power of the Holy Spirit, we are announcing spiritually, change! 2015
should not be a year of any hooligan maneuvering to hijack power. This
is our New Year message. Listen, when you go home, tell anybody you see
that from the oracle of the Holy Spirit, we are announcing change
The Goodluck met Yar’Adua and Yar’Adua died. Before you know it, the
Goodluck met our oil and the oil had a bad luck and poured away, before
we knew it, the Goodluck met our naira, our naira had a bad luck. Where
are we going? What is the fate of this country? Shall we continue like
this, we need change“
Posted by Ambassador T. Brikins
Controversial cleric, Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka of the Adoration Ministry, Enugu
has congratulated General Muhammadu Buhari on his victory at the
presidential election.
Mbaka, whose New Year Message entitled
“From Goodluck to Badluck” drew mixed reactions across the country,
described Buhari’s victory as a divine victory for Nigerians.
The priest, spoke through the minitry's spokeman Barister Maximus Ike Ugwuoke in a press brief on Thursday, told the
President-Elect to focus on problems
facing the country.
Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka also says he has been vindicated at last as Buhari’s victory was a fulfillment of his prophecy in the New Year
Message. He also urged Buhari to seek divine wisdom before appointing
people into his cabinet noting that President Goodluck Jonathan’s
biggest problem was that he surrounded himself with the ‘wrong people.’
The cleric said, “It is with vindictive joy and glory to God that the
Adoration Ministry, the nation and indeed the world saw the fulfillment
of Fr. Mbaka’s New Year prophesy of change with the miraculous,
victorious emergence of Gen.Muhammadu Buhari at the March 28 polls as
the President-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
“We wish to restate that before President Goodluck became the President
of this country, Fr. Mbaka prophesied it in his message titled ‘Okolo.’
“Today again, Buhari’s victory among other lessons it portends for
Nigerians has once more confirmed to all and sundry that Fr. Mbaka is
indeed a true Prophet of God and that his New Year message was indeed
from the Oracle of the Holy Spirit as he declared.
“The ministry with magnanimous heart holds no grudges against anyone who
attacked it in one way or the other at the rage of the controversies
surrounding Fr. Mbaka’s message and view their actions as being
orchestrated by their misconstruing of Fr. Mbaka’s prophetic calling.
“The Ministry joins the rest of Nigerians to congratulate Muhammadu
Buhari as God’s chosen instrument of change to tackle the myriads of
problems facing Nigeria and pray God to endow him with the wisdom to go
about this onerous task.”
Mbaka, whose New Year Message, “From Goodluck to Badluck,” became a
major talking point during the campaigns for the election, said Buhari’s
emergence was a divine victory for all Nigerians.
Andrew HardingAfrica corresponden
BBC
After the anxiety and drama of the
past few days in Nigeria, it is tempting to get carried away by the
impact of this ballot - what it represents for both Africa's largest
democracy and for those countries on the continent still wrestling with
the notion that power can change hands without the world coming to an
end.
The significance of General Muhammadu Buhari's victory should certainly not be underestimated.
An
electorate that has savoured the rich experience of ousting an
incumbent by the mere act of voting cannot easily be persuaded to forget
it.
And that must surely be a contagious experience on a
continent where, it is often said, roughly one in five people are
Nigerians.
An international force has had recent success against Boko Haram
Besides, this was no "people's
revolution" - something that the continent's remaining strongmen could
loudly dismiss as a dangerous threat to the natural order of things.
Instead Nigeria's election was something much more prosaic, and more subtle - a challenge to entrenched autocracy.
It
was, despite the disruptive efforts of a few, a very ordinary thing: A
peaceful, modern, well-monitored, uncontestable transfer of power.
Nothing to be feared. A casual precedent that should echo loudly around the region.
"It
establishes a link between performance and accountability - knowing
that if you don't perform you can be thrown out of power by the
electorate, not by the military," Adekeye Adebajo, from the Centre for
Conflict Resolution in Cape Town, told me by phone.
"It's an incredibly powerful incentive for better governance in the future.
"It sends a strong signal to the rest of the continent. There will be
autocrats in Khartoum, in the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda, who are thinking
of staying on in power. They won't welcome this."
International clout
The
election also gives Nigeria more credibility and clout within the West
African grouping Ecowas, at the African Union, and internationally, as
the continent seeks to shrug off the enduring influence of former
colonial powers like France.
Nigeria's leaders can no longer be
dismissed as hypocrites when they lecture neighbours like Mali, Niger,
Guinea and Guinea Bissau, on the need to keep the military out of
politics. That can only be a good thing for African democracy.
On a more nuts and bolts level, these past few days have been a
valuable reminder of quite how difficult it is becoming to rig an
election.
Social media, fingerprint scanners, and an army of young
volunteer observers armed with mobile phones have all played their role
- as they have done in other recent African elections - in limiting the
possibilities of ballot stuffing and other shenanigans.
That's not to say people didn't try to rig this election - and won't in the future.
But once the data is out there - posted online - it becomes much harder for the backroom cheats to cook the books. Then
there's President Goodluck Jonathan's abrupt decision to accept defeat -
a move made, I'm told, without consulting some key officials and
against the wishes of many in his party.
It was a bold, selfless move that may well have saved many lives in Nigeria.
It
will go down as a new milestone for African democracy, and may help
redeem Mr Jonathan's presidency, at least partially, in the eyes of his
many critics.
Does that mean Nigerian democracy is safe? Perhaps not.
Challenges ahead
A new man may be coming to power.
But Gen Buhari is not young, and he presides over an untested coalition.
He
is inheriting an empty treasury - broken by falling oil prices, the
cost of supporting the national currency, and now threatened with more
looting by sticky-fingered officials heading for the door.
Boko Haram's insurgency in the north-east remains a huge challenge to a corrupt and humiliated army.
Perennial frustrations in the oil-rich south of Nigeria could well begin to boil over. The list goes on.
And
now comes a six-week period of administrative limbo - another new
experience for Nigeria - as the old regime prepares to empty its desks,
and a new team is formed.
Gen Buhari has much to do, and to prove, in a short time.
Muhammadu Buhari: "The victory is yours"
Who will he chose to run the
economy? How can he prevent any last-minute looting? Can he get the army
to secure, and build on the territorial gains it has made against Boko
Haram in the last few weeks?
And how will he balance the need for
a smooth transition against what must surely be his instinct to make an
example of those public officials who have been greedily stealing from
Nigeria's oil revenues for years?
Nigeria, by all accounts, is not an easy country to run.
As
we saw on Tuesday night with the state television's reluctance to even
broadcast news of an election upset, there are entrenched interests here
that will struggle to adapt.
After a political earthquake, aftershocks are almost inevitable.
But for now it is the optimists both in Nigeria and around the continent who must, surely, have the upper hand.
The
uncontestable fact of a democratic transfer of power trumps any
legitimate, but unrealised concerns about whether a different president,
and a different party, will actually make life better for the people of
Africa's most important nation.
Posted Ambassador T. Brikins
What kind of people are sex workers? In Australia, hundreds of them are telling the world about themselves using social media.
"College student. Aspiring lawyer. Activist. Daughter, sister, sex worker. I don't need rescuing".
These
are the kinds of statements that hundreds of Australian sex workers are
making about themselves using the #facesofprostitution hashtag. It was
started last Sunday on Instagram by 21-year-old sex worker and history
graduate Tilly Lawless. She was responding to an blog post
re-published last week in the popular online Australian women's
magazine, Mamamia. The blog was written to mark the 25th anniversary of
the prostitute-meets-prince-charming film Pretty Woman, and argued that
the reality of sex work was much uglier than in the movie.
Tilly
Lawless was angered by the way the piece "generalised sex workers" and
"depicted all prostitution as harmful". She herself has been working as a
sex worker for two years but only started identifying publicly as a sex
worker two months ago in Sydney, where prostitution is legal. She
decided to post a picture of herself on her Instagram feed to show
another face of prostitution - the face of a young woman who had made an
informed choice to be a sex worker - as a protest against the blog.
Shortly
after, Tilly was contacted via the Scarlett Alliance - the Australian
Sex Worker's Association - who asked if she would post the hashtag on
Twitter. And then it began: a mass of hundreds of mostly Australian and
mostly female sex workers posted images showing their faces to the
world, many coming out publicly as sex workers on social media for the
very first time.
"I was really pleasantly surprised," Lawless
told BBC Trending, because sex workers "are very rarely humanised as
individuals, so often our bodies are spoken about but putting our faces
on social media is such a powerful thing". Many
of those joining in shared her objection to the original article. Sex
worker Holly, pictured above, said her main issue was the photo used - a
harrowing photo of a sex-trafficked Eastern European woman. "That's not
our face," she told BBC Trending, "not our lived experience". "The
article was downright offensive," Australian sex worker and actress
Madison Messina told us, because it "uses the argument of sex
trafficking to silence our voice whilst simultaneously silencing the
voice of victims who are trafficked too".
The
Pretty Woman blog post had originally appeared on the site of a
Missouri-based Christian group, Exodus Cry, which says it is committed
to "abolishing sex slavery". The article's author, Laila Mickelwait
claimed that the film had lured young women into prostitution and
subjected them to a life of abuse and trauma.
She told BBC
Trending that she stands by what she wrote despite the sex workers'
campaign, and that legalised prostitution creates an environment where
illegal sex trafficking can then occur. "Just because there's a handful
of women and men who are posting pictures on Twitter saying this is an
empowering job doesn't make it true about the industry," she said. "They
have a voice but they're the voice of a very small minority who have
the privilege of getting on Twitter and being able to post those kinds
of pictures".
Tilly Lawless told us she remains angry about these
arguments, which "allow us to be oppressed in similar ways to women
being trafficked, undermine our independence and autonomy and take away
rights from us". Reporting by Gemma Newby
Comment: The face of the end time!? I really don't know whether this "public boldness" is a surprise or quetion. What's on your mind? BBC Trending Posted by Ambassador T. Brikins
Muhammadu Buhari was congratulated by President Jonathan in an unprecedented phone call
The editor of the BBC Hausa service, Mansur Liman, explains how he broke the story of The historic phone call from Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan to admit election defeat - and how it almost didn't happen.
I
was at the election results centre in the capital, Abuja, and at around
17:00 (16:00GMT) the votes from all but three states had been declared.
Muhammadu
Buhari, the candidate for the opposition All Progressives Congress
(APC), had a big lead over incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan.
During
a break in the results, it became obvious to me that the lead was
unassailable and I began wondering about what was going on in the APC
camp. Were they celebrating or still anxiously waiting?
Going by
previous Nigerian elections, when rigging and results fiddling has
allegedly taken place, nothing could be taken for granted.
Mansur Liman:
It
turns out that so many calls were coming through that there was no time
to answer them all - and Gen Buhari did not even know where his phone
was. I
thought that there would still be some more bumps on the road, given
the passion in the campaign and the fact that a governing People's
Democratic Party official had already tried to halt the count.
I
have a lot of contacts within Gen Buhari's circle and I know him
personally so I decided to try and call someone who I knew would be with
him to find out the mood.
After he missed my call, and I missed his response, I eventually got through.
'Unimaginable'
I asked him what was going on, given that there was no way President Jonathan could win and I was surprised by the response.
When PDP agent Godsday Orubebe interrupted the results there were fears the process would be questioned
He told me that Gen Buhari had just received a phone call from his rival, in which the president conceded and congratulated him.
I
did not doubt that this was true as I trusted my source, but given what
has happened before in Nigeria, this kind of concession was up to that
point unimaginable.
I was pretty sure that I was the first
journalist to get the story so as soon as I got off the phone I alerted
the BBC's election desk and tweeted the details. There were, of course, people who were very concerned about what could happen if the result was contested.
And
I have since discovered that members of the National Peace Committee,
which is headed by former President Abdulsalami Abubakar, visited
President Jonathan as the results were being announced.
I
understand they were the ones who persuaded the president to do
something to avoid any trouble, and shortly after the visit he made the
call.
'Pick up the phone'
But
even making the call was not straight forward. I heard later that the
president could not actually get through to Gen Buhari.
He rang all the numbers he had for people in his camp, but no-one answered.
It
turns out that so many calls were coming through that there was no time
to answer them all - and Gen Buhari did not even know where his phone
was.
President Jonathan resorted to sending a messenger round to
his rival's house to tell him that the president wanted to speak to him.
And that he should pick up the phone the next time he tried to call.
APC celebrations greeted the result but things could have been very different
By making that call the
president saved Nigeria a great deal of pain. If the PDP had insisted
that they had won the election, and the APC had said the same, the
country would have been in chaos.
Lives would have been lost and
property would have been destroyed. That call showed that in Nigeria,
people can put the country first.
I have heard from PDP supporters
that the president took the decision to make the call without
consulting anyone. They told me that if he had talked to some of his
advisers, they would have objected.
Institute
on Religion and Democracy Evangelical director Chelsen Vicari speaks at
the Family Research Council on April 1, 2015 in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON
— Evangelical churches need to focus more on preaching biblical truth
in order to prepare children to defend historic Christian teachings on
social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion from the "distorted"
theology being propagated by the Christian left, evangelical author
Chelsen Vicari said Wednesday.
At a Family Research Council discussion on her new book, Distorted: How The New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging Faith,Vicari
explained that as more mainline Protestant denominations are starting
to affirm same-sex relationships and other issues that Christ has
labeled as sinful, young Evangelicals are susceptible to caving in and
embracing the liberal agenda that they encounter on college campuses and
in youth groups, because they don't know enough about the Scripture to
defend its guiding principles.
Vicari, who's the evangelical
program director at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, shared her
own story about how when she was going through her undergraduate
studies, her strong conservative Christian convictions were tested and
ostracized by left-leaning Christian groups on campus. She eventually
folded her convictions to believe that it's acceptable for Christians to
be accommodating toward sinful behavior, such as homosexuality. Although
Vicari rediscovered her Christian conservative principles after going
to the evangelical Regent University for graduate school, she said many
other young Evangelicals are dealing with their own hardships as they
are being called "homophobic" and "bigots" when promoting the Bible's
teachings on highly contested social issues. She added that young
Evangelicals are more likely to buy into the Christian left's notion
that, if they want to be "compassionate" like Jesus, they need to be
more accommodating and compromising on same-sex relationships and
abortion.
"That's why I wanted to write Distorted,
to give ... the grownups a glimpse into the world of a millennial and
what we deal with in churches, what we deal with in youth group, and
what we deal with on college campuses where our parents think everything
should be fine and dandy and that we should be protected — and that is
not necessarily the truth," Vicari explained.
"It's always hard to
be ostracized and to be the one who is called these horrible names and
hated on Twitter," Vicari, who's also a Christian Post op-ed
contributor, added. "But there is a problem in evangelical churches and
young people don't know enough about their faith to defend it, and that
is making them much more susceptible to deception."
Vicari
additionally claimed that many evangelical churches have gotten caught
up in a trend of not preaching about biblical teachings on hard-pressing
issues and focus simply on Jesus' love and faith, rather than "the
truth."
"Evangelicals have a lot of catching up to do. … I am a
Sunday school teacher right now, and I will tell you that there is a lot
of fluffy curriculum out there and we aren't doing a great job of
[teaching] the next generation of Evangelicals, which is making us
susceptible," Vicari asserted. "We are not talking about the hot issues
of abortion and same-sex marriage in Sunday school or in church even.
There is a huge trend among evangelical pastors to talk about faith and
love and never bring up truth, which is just as important."
Vicari
is concerned about the fact that some evangelical churches are
following in the footsteps of Protestant denominations, like the
Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church, and are starting to become
more affirming of homosexuality.
"What a lot of young Evangelicals
don't know is that mainline denominations used to have the most
prominent Christian social witness in this country. … Unfortunately,
they did start to compromise Christian teachings," Vicari said.
"Evangelicals kind of came up and filled that role, if you will. What
former [IRD] President Diane Knippers recognized early on was that
evangelical churches and leaders were following this same strategy, this
same route that the mainline denominations had followed that made them
sideline denominations."
"We have to pay attention. And we have to
learn what the threats are and how to discern truth and how to discern
orthodoxy, and what that means and what that stands for if we are going
to defend the faith and not follow in the footsteps of the mainline
denominations," she said.
(Photo: The Christian Post/Samuel Smith