The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Abbas

  • MUSWEN’s General Assembly

    Have you not seen how Allah has presented the parable of good deed like that of a fruitful tree which roots are firmly planted in the earth while foliage sprout gorgeously into the firmaments of the sky, yielding (edible) fruits every season by Allah’s permission? Allah addresses humans in parables that they may be mindful (of their deeds)”

    Qur’an 14 verse 24.

    It was a gathering of who is who among the Muslim leaders of the Southwest Nigeria last Sunday. The venue was the International Conference Centre of the University of Ibadan. And the event was that of the General Assembly, the first of its kind since the body came into existence seven years ago. Present at the Assembly were leaders and delegates of the Muslim State Councils /Communities, Muslim traditional rulers, representatives of the League of Imams and Alfas, including the Chief Imam of Ibadan as well as the Chief Executives of all prominent Muslim Organisations and professionals in the region.

    Chaired by the Acting President of MUSWEN, Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin JSC (rtd) CON, CFR, LLD who officially declared the whole day session open, the Assembly considered some important issues affecting the Ummah and summarised such issues in a communique that captured the thoughts and feelings of the Southwest Muslims about Nigeria thus:

     

    Communique

    “The first General Assembly of the Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria was held at the International Conference Centre, University of Ibadan, under the Chairmanship of MUSWEN’s Ag. President, Justice Tijani Bolarinwa Babalakin JSC (retired), CON, CFR, LLD.

    MUSWEN is the umbrella body for all State Muslim Councils/ Communities, Muslim Organisations and Muslim professional bodies in the Southwest of Nigeria.

    The General Assembly was well attended by eminent Muslim men and women leaders from the six states of the Southwest Region.

     

    Observations

    Given the current economic, political and religious situation in Nigeria, MUSWEN, through an appraisal at its first General Assembly observed as follows:

    •That the Southwest of Nigeria has a preponderance of Muslim population which forms a great workforce that helps in maintaining the perennial peace of the region despite constant unwarranted

    provocations from certain quarters.

    •That the situation of insecurity in the country today has reached such a dangerous stage where some ethnic groups and individuals are openly threatening the already fragile peace in the land without minding the implications and consequences of such threats.

     

    Religious leaders and politicians

    •That some religious leaders in the country who are supposed to use their good offices to douse any religious tension  as ordained by our various faiths refuse to live above board by clandestinely fueling unnecessary antagonism and mutual suspicion among the populace through their inflammatory utterances to the detriment of peace and tranquility.

    •That the public conducts of some politicians especially in the Southwest of Nigeria has become a serious embarrassment and big threat to the peaceful coexistence of the people in the region.

    •That majority of Nigerian youths, today, especially those of the Southwest, who possess qualitative education  and physical ability to contribute meaningfully to the region’s economic fortune are jobless for no fault of theirs.

     

    Resolutions

    Consequent upon the aforementioned observations therefore, MUSWEN’s

    General Assembly, resolved as follows:

    1.That the Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria totally condemned the bloody and destructive activities of Boko Haram insurgents who are masquerading under the garb of Islam to perpetrate unprecedented atrocities in some parts of the country. Islam stands for peace in all its ramifications and the perpetrators of such atrocities can only be called renegades as their actions are grossly antithetical to the tenets of Islam.

    2.That the Federal Government should quickly devise a means not only of addressing the fundamental causes of insecurity in the land (i. e joblessness, poverty and corruption) but also of rescuing the Chibok children criminally abducted by Boko Haram insurgents and thereby bring relief to the distressed parents of those children as well as all the internally displaced people in the Northeast region.

     

    Special prayer

    3.That all Muslims in the Southwest region should organise a special prayer in all Mosques on  Sunday, February 1, for a successful conduct of the forthcoming elections and peaceful coexistence of all Nigerians now and in future.

    4.That all Muslims in the Southwest region should endeavour to obtain their permanent voter cards in order to participate effectively in the current democratic process through the forthcoming general elections.

     

    Self-arrogated groups

    5.That certain non Muslim groups in the Southwest who have been parading themselves as the representatives of the region under different names and disguises to the exclusion of the multitudinous Muslims, (as demonstrated in the case of nomination of delegates to the last National Confab where Muslims were totally marginalised) should stop such arrogation henceforth in order to sustain the existing peace in the region.

     

    Dwindling economy

    6.That in view of the current dwindling income from Nigeria’s mono economic standing represented by petroleum, a veritable and effective agricultural policy aimed at engaging millions of idle Nigerian youths as a way of curbing unnecessary restiveness among those youths becomes a matter of urgent necessity.

    7.That to further advance the country’s economic tentacle, both the federal and state governments should immediately embark on massive training and provision of tools for Nigerian youths of various categories to enable them become entrepreneurial in their own right through artisan-ship thereby propelling their economic wherewithal if only to minimise the spate of idleness that engenders insecurity in the country.

     

    INEC’s neutrality

    8.That the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) should maintain neutrality in the coming general elections and ensure impartial conduct of those elections starting with distribution of the Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) while politicians should cooperate with INEC by maintaining peace and tranquility in the country before, during and after the elections.

     

    New leadership

    9. That the General Assembly of MUSWEN has elected the erstwhile acting Deputy President, Chief (Dr.) Saka Olayiwola Babalola, CON, FFP, DSC (Honoris Causa), popularly known as Chief SOB, as MUSWEN’ substantive President for a renewable three years tenure. Some Committee Chairmen were also elected while the ratification of the Board of Trustees and membership of the Central Working Committee (CWC) was also done along with the affirmation of the adoption of MUSWEN’s constitution. All the Chairmen, Secretaries of Muslim Organisations as well as the elected and ratified Committee Chairmen are automatic members of the CWC.

     

    Departed souls

    10.That in its deliberations, the General Assembly of MUSWEN remembered and prayed for the souls of the Muslim leaders who have departed this world, including Professor Aliu Babatunde Fafunwa (the first President of MUSWEN); Alhaji Abdul Azeez Arisekola Alao (the Aare Musulumi of Yorubaland and Deputy President-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) who was also a trustee of MUSWEN; Sheikh Mustapah Ajisafe, the President of the League of Imams and Alfas in the Southwest region as well as a host of other demised prominent Muslim leaders. The communique was jointly signed by the new President, Chief (Dr.) S. O. Babalola, CON, DSC and the Executive Secretary, Professor D. O. S. Noibi, OBE, FIAC, FISN.

     

    About MUSWEN

    For those who did not know, Muslim Ummah of South West Nigeria (MUSWEN) is the umbrella body for all Muslim organisations and institutions operating in the Southwest geographical zone. This is the area comprising the present Ekiti, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo states.

    The idea of forming MUSWEN as the umbrella body for the Southwest Muslims started in March 2004 at the instance of ‘The Companion’, a Lagos based Organisation of Muslim business and professional youth elite. The body was inaugurated in Ibadan on August 10, 2008 with the attendance of virtually all the front line Muslim Obas and Chieftains.

    His Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto was the Special Guest of Honour on that occasion where all Muslim organisations in the Southwest were duly represented not as guests but as full members. Their presence indicated their commitments.

     

    Vision

    MUSWEN’s vision is of a united and effective voice for Muslims in the region under a strong, veritable and collective leadership. This had eluded the region for a very long time but the right time has come.

    The overall aim is not just to raise the profile of the Muslims in this part of the country but also to imbue the Muslim youth of the region with the necessary Islamic ethics that will enable them live as true Muslims as ordained by the Qur’an and Sunnah.

    The present situation of Muslims in which youths are still largely not educated at a benefiting level is quite unfortunate and intolerable. It is in order to end this gloomy situation and ignite a glow of hope that MUSWEN came to life as a formidable platform for the Muslims of the South West to prove their mettle.

    But why is MUSWEN so named and why is it restricted to the Southwest of Nigeria?

    The history of Islam and the conditions of the Muslims in the Southwest Nigeria are so unique that they require a special and appropriate attention. The presence of Islam among the Yoruba people who inhabit the area now called Southwest that even extended to the present day Kwara and Kogi dates back to centuries before the advent of Christianity and the coming of the British colonialists in 1842.

    Islam, being a religion of literature and education, had thus brought civilisation to West African for the first time, which tremendously impacted on the language and culture of the Yoruba people. At that time, Yoruba language was committed to writing in Arabic alphabets.

    Arabic, therefore, became the language of literacy and the medium of communication and scholarly discourse among Yoruba Muslim scholars.

    It is rather a matter of concern and even an irony that the same Muslims are now far behind their Christian counterparts in Western education. How did this irony come about? How can it be reversed?

    These questions will be answered in this column at another time In sha’Allah.

  • Fed Govt’s betrayal of conscience

    Fed Govt’s betrayal of conscience

    Nigeria’s Federal Government openly traded off its dignity in what amounted to a betrayal of conscience penultimate Tuesday night (December 30, 2014). This occurred at the United Nations Security Council meeting where voting on a proposed resolution to stop the perennial Israeli occupation of West Bank area of Palestine took place.

    The proposed resolution was to be an historic anticlimax of the 66-year-old Israeli/Palestinian conflict with a view to paving way for a two-nation solution. If passed, the resolution would have ventilated a peaceful atmosphere for the Middle East and by implication, the entire world.

    In the YES or No voting of the 15 member-nations of the Security Council, nine votes were required as the simple majority to determine the liberation of the Palestinian people from the political and economic siege of Israel.

     

    Voting pattern

    Out of those 15 member-nations, eight voted in favour of the liberation while two voted for continuous Israeli siege on Palestine. The eight nations that voted for the latter’s liberation were Argentina, Chad, Chile, China, France, Jordan, Luxembourg and Russia. Those that voted against liberation were the United States and Australia.

    The five remaining countries that opted for abstention were Lithuania, South Korea, Rwanda, Britain and Nigeria. Incidentally, two years prior to this stage of determining the fate of the Palestinians (2012), Nigeria’s permanent representative at the United Nations, Prof Joy Ogwu, had glowingly supported the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and statehood and reiterated Nigeria’s recognition of the State of Palestine. That was one year after Nigeria confirmed her diplomatic relation with Palestine on October 31, 2011. And definitely acting on the instruction of her home government, Professor Ogwu at that time voted in favour of the admission of Palestine into UNESCO as a full member-state, despite a fierce opposition from the US and Israel.

    During her speech at the UN General Assembly in 2012, Prof Ogwu underscored the right of the Palestinians to live in freedom thus: “It was quite fitting that the international community had given Palestine a non-member observer state status in the United Nations. This was not only timely but also right and just.” She then went ahead to pledge Nigeria’s commitment to working towards Palestine’s admission into the United Nations as a full member state.

     

    Dramatic u-turn

    But dramatically, when the matter came up on December 30 2014, Nigeria suddenly made a u-turn that held the entire diplomatic world nonplussed. Rather than living by her words as a dignified nation, she shamelessly cheapened out and threw her conscience to the winds apparently in return for a clandestine agenda yet to be fathomed.

    Thus, to the amazement and perhaps disappointment of most members of the Security Council, including those that voted to block the Palestinian right to a home, Nigerian government betrayed that glory as its negative decision became pivotal to UN’s rejection of the long awaited resolution that would have brought peace to the Middle East.

    The implication of this is that with the blocking of peace in the Middle East in which Nigeria played a principal role, the rest of the world, including Nigeria cannot sleep with both eyes closed for now.

    This is because, the Middle East conflict especially between Israel and Palestine has been the major determinant of global peace or otherwise since 1967 when Israel, aided by the imperialist West, further occupied the Arab lands which she has since consistently refused to relinquish thereafter despite all efforts.

    Before the voting, the anxiety created by the impending abstention of certain member-states had put a global diplomatic focus on Nigeria being an African champion of liberation movements in the past. It will be recalled that Nigeria’s role in championing the cause of liberation especially for African countries before now was legendary.

    The tenacity of such role (during the cold war years) as a vital part of Nigeria’s foreign policy that aided the independence of countries like South Africa, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Algeria and others had once pitched the country against the imperialistic tendencies of some Western countries.

     

    How Nigeria broke

     relation with Israel

    It was against such imperialistic tendencies that Nigeria’s Federal Government under General Yakubu Gowon broke diplomatic relations with Israel for 19 years from 1973 to 1992 when the Military President Ibrahim Babangida restored that relation. In those years, religion was not at all in consideration as the issue of liberation was seen purely as a humanitarian affair which deserved human feeling rather than sheer political contention or religious sentiment.

    If religion had been at the front burner of Nigeria’s foreign policy, General Yakubu Gowon, a Christian, would not have taken Nigeria into the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) in observer status in 1969 and General Ibrahim Babangida, a Muslim, would not have restored Nigeria’s diplomatic relation with Israel in 1992 after 19 years of break (since 1973).

    Thus, through her consistency in human face foreign policy, Nigeria had earned tremendous prestige in the comity of nations and this had earned her the appellation of ‘Giant of Africa’ which she still enjoys today as a special privilege.

    Now, by deviating from that highly prestigious foreign policy and by pitching its tent with the imperialist countries the government seems to have sacrificed conscience on the platter of unwarranted and irrelevant religious sentiment which is a reflection of the situation at home in Nigeria under the current regime.

    This may be linked to fortuitous diplomatic visit of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to Nigeria among other African countries in June 2014 in preparation for the unfortunate betrayal for which the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked and praised President Goodluck Jonathan for a job well done.

    Nevertheless, Nigerians are urged to overlook the embarrassing diplomatic goof and wait for another chance bearing in mind that no diplomatic policy is permanently static. God bless our country!

     

    Clarification on

     published fables

    In a front page lead story (without a by-line) published in Sunday Tribune of December 28, 2014 and entitled ‘Division Within Core North Widens’, the Ibadan-based newspaper claimed that “the elite and opinion leaders among the Hausa-Fulani stock are split down the line about who to support between the two major contenders (President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari).

    The newspaper went further to state that “the elites who lined up behind General Buhari included the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa‘ad Abubakar, who is leading some northern Emirs; 11 Arewa turks, led by former minister Mallam Nasir El-Rufai; four core northern Governors led by Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of Kano State and a loose coalition of clerics said to be linked to various street groups across the northern region ……..”

     

    Fabricated news story

    Under the same news headline, Sunday Tribune came up with a sub-heading entitled ‘South-West Muslim Council Backs GEJ’, and quoted one Mallam Hakeem Adelani who it called the Secretary-General of the ‘Muslim Council’ as saying that since ‘Yoruba Muslims were not goats and rams’ they would rather vote for Jonathan than Buhari’.

    The quoted fake secretary was also reported to have said that a mosque-to- mosque campaign would soon commence in the region to sensitise the Muslim Ummah towards the clandestine political agenda of some evil politicians who want to use the name of Islam for their evil machinations.

    The concern of the Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria (MUSWEN) here is not about Nigeria’s political murky water in which some dirty elements in the society are swimming, but about the smearing tendency of some dirty minds in the region who think they can drag Islam and some highly placed Nigerian Muslims into their murky water. In view of the above, therefore, the following clarifications are necessary:

    The Role of MUSWEN

    The Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria (MUSWEN) is the main umbrella of all the Muslim organisations in the Southwest and it does not have the so-called ‘Muslim Council’ (of no particular state) on its membership list.

    MUSWEN is the only Muslim body authorised to speak for the entire Muslims in the Southwest through its Executive Secretary, Prof D.O.S. Noibi or its Media Consultant, Alhaji Femi Abbas.

    Any other person or persons claiming to be speaking on behalf of the Southwest Muslims without the authorisation of the above mentioned duo can only be a fraudster using a Muslim name to tarnish the image of Islam in the region.

    The fictitious name called Hakeem Adelani said to be the Secretary-General of   the Council is not known to MUSWEN or recognised by any of its member organisations in the region.

    MUSWEN is neither a political body affiliated to any political figure or party in the country nor is it involved directly or indirectly in Nigerian partisan politics.

    As a credible religious body which fervently believes in freedom of expression and association, MUSWEN has never and will not be involved in partisan politics let alone influence the electorate’s voting rights along religious line.

    The frivolous statement published by Sunday Tribune in the name of the Southwest Muslims is therefore a mere fabrication by enemies of Islam aimed at subjecting the name of the highly revered religious body to ridicule.

    Consequently, MUSWEN calls particularly on all Muslims in the Southwest and the country in general to ignore the insensitive and irresponsible statement reported in the cited Sunday Tribune and credited to a fictitious Mallam Hakeem Adelani who may be non-existent in reality.

    Meanwhile, MUSWEN hereby calls on the Federal Government once again to urgently address all forms of insecurity in the land with particular attention to the socio-economic sources of unrest by taking bold and practical steps towards stamping out corruption and indiscipline through the leadership’s personal examples and thereby strengthen God’s consciousness in all Nigerians.

    Finally, MUSWEN admonishes all Nigerian politicians to refrain from heating up the polity through incendiary utterances and public actions in their campaigns towards the elections that will begin in February 2015 and remember that there can be a Nigeria to be called their country only if there is peace. God save Nigeria!

     

    The ranting of a dubious cleric

    “A man who does not wear dignity as a dress cannot proclaim dignity by demand through sheer bravado” By an Arab poet.

    Self-respect is like a glass house. Anybody who values it will surely not throw out a stone from it. And when a pig decorated with a valuable ornament takes it to a refuse place it must not be a surprise. Refuse bin is the natural habitat of the pig.

    Nigerian Muslims should not be bothered by a recently published ranting of a so-called Nigerian cleric leader of the Christian faith whose antecedent is very well known. In the two parts publication in a Nigerian national newspaper last Friday and last Monday, the self-glorified irritant turned himself into a Mr. know all and quoted the Qur’an copiously out of context giving it a drunkard’s interpretation to incite Nigerian Christians against Nigerian Muslims.

    The megalomaniac wanted Nigerians to believe that the only way of ‘curbing insurgency’ in the country is to either wipe out the Qur’an from existence or edit it to suit his own satanic thinking.

    In his devilish search for a solution to insurgency, after a long, unwinding rigmarole typical of an evident ignoramus, he concluded that unless the Qur’an is edited to suit his own parochial way of amassing devilish wealth in a typical capitalist manner, the world would not know peace. To him, Qur’an (which has been in existence for over 1400 years) is the main cause of the five year old insurgency in Nigeria.

    Such an evil conclusion by a criminally avaricious agent of devil cannot surprise any sane person. Some recent exposures about his clandestine activities have confirmed his satanic tendencies.

    Rather than compounding a fundamental national problem like insurgency with a satanic solution this self-appointed public tutor should have explained to Nigerians his own role in the recent illegal currency trafficking that caused a face-off between Nigeria and South African.

    The total amount of money said to be involved in that devilish deal was $15 million. This is not the right time for any diversionary tutoring. But since people who are not related to relevance often recourse to irrelevances as a proof of their existence, the diversionary tactics can be understood even as the commercial cleric needs to be pitied. However, for the benefit of relevant information and knowledge about the divine Book called the Qur’an, a full reaction to that provocative, inflammatory outburst will be published in this column in a foreseeable future, in sha’Allah.

  • Letter to Chibok parents

    Letter to Chibok parents

    “…And fear a calamity that may afflict not only those who caused it but also the (innocent) ones who had no hands in its cause. And be warned that Allah’s retribution can be very severe (on evil doers)” Q. 8:25

    Dear Parents of Abducted Chibok Girls,

    Writing this letter to you at this precarious time of your lives has put this writer in a confused dilemma. Ordinarily, a dilemma should provide opportunity for choice be it positively or negatively but a confused dilemma leaves no room for such a choice. In a season like this, one should be felicitating with most of you at this festive period of the Yuletide. But how can one felicitate with people in the predicament of an indelible sorrow?  For almost nine months (since April 14, 2014) you have been agonising sorrowfully over the plight of your abducted dear daughters whose whereabouts still remain unknown today. If it were in Nigeria’s days of sanity, this letter would have been written in red ink to indicate the calamitous mood of the moment.

     But sanity has since taken flight from Nigeria with one of our inherited cultural values (kindness), courtesy of evil politics and audacious corruption with impunity. It is only a matter of personal conscience that this letter is being written to you with sorrowful tears rolling down the cheeks of this writer. Those tears are an evidence of heavy mind encapsulated in implacable agony. Your current fortuitous plight is, no doubt, an unprecedented calamity not for you or your relatives alone but also for the entire country called Nigeria. That calamity was precipitated not just by those agents of evil (called Boko Haram) who callously hold your daughters captive in an unbearable environment but also by those who facilitated the plight through endemic corruption and misrule in the name of governance.

    At the bracket adolescent age of your daughters (generally deemed innocent), those girls had been perceived as today’s dream that would fetch tomorrow’s reality. Each of them had constituted a potent arrow firmly fixed to your bows with hopeful intention to shoot through the iron gate of life. Thus, from the infancy of those girls to their present adolescent age, you (as parents) must have been full of prayers and hopes for their brighter future just as they stand as the footprints for your worthy legacies. In a nutshell, you might have seen each of those girls as your chief asset either in your lifetimes or after your demise or both.

    When hope turns forlorn

    Unfortunately, however, your dreams as well as those of your daughters’ are now being turned into a paroxysm of despair not out of your carelessness or neglect but out of the making of some satanic forces, in our country, who are evidently nonchalant to the plights of others which they covertly created. By that making, those forces have enabled the Lucifer to hijack the destiny of your daughters (albeit temporarily by the grace of God) in a manner never envisaged in Nigeria. Yet those forces are now celebrating with their own children not minding the calamity they have unleashed on the children of some fellow Nigerians, especially your daughters. Ah! THERE IS GOD OOOOO!

    In retrospect

    When your daughters started to write the West African School Certificate Examinations early this year, they were the delight of your hearts as you fervently prayed for their success in those exams.

    Which worthy parent would not do that anyway? The mere writing of that examination did not only heighten your hopes for their greater tomorrow. It also served as an impetus for you to further tighten your belts for their rise to higher pedestals in life. The anticipation was that by July this year, they would have obtained the needed results of those examinations to enable them join thousands of others in seeking admission into higher institutions through the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) examination.

    But alas! Man proposes and God disposes. Against all thoughts and premonitions, here you are today still waiting anxiously to take a glimpse of your daughters who are now in the gulag of unforeseen machinations of life. It was unimaginable, even after writing one of their examination papers on April 14, 2014 that a monumental misfortune was lurking around the corner to assail them just like that in a country that claims to have a government with a formidable security outfit.

    Incidentally, in the early morning of that same day, a dare devil group allegedly working as an arm of Boko Haram had wrecked a fortuitous havoc in Nyanyan, Abuja, through bomb explosions that claimed 77 innocent lives. That globally condemned barbaric incident has also become a calamitous chapter in the history of our country.

    But who could have imagined that, far away in a remote town of Chibok, in Bornu State, some hundreds of innocent girls had also been earmarked for a devilish abduction by some satanic scoundrels? Some hundreds of other innocent men, women and children have been abducted thereafter.

    Stories and rumours

    Ever since the abduction of your daughters, the story has been changing in contents and in essence depending on the source of the scaring rumours generating it. For instance, we were once told that following their kidnap your daughters were taken straight to a forest called Sambisa, near Nigeria’s border with Cameroon, which is mainly inhabited by dangerous animals, reptiles and poisonous insects. Then we were told that some of those girls were lucky to escape the kidnappers’ dragnet when one out of about 25 vehicles used by the insurgents to convey them broke down. Then we were told that the girls were divided into smaller groups and distributed to different neigbouring countries, such as Cameroon, Chad, Niger Republic and Central African Republic, where they were sold into slavery. Then we were told that some non Muslims amongst those girls were forced to convert to Islam while some had died of snake bites and malaria. Then we were told that some or most of them were daily being raped by the ‘beasts’ who are now criminally keeping them in custody. Then we were told that some or most of them were forcefully married to those criminals illegitimately.

    The stories were as many as the agonising rumours that gave vent to them. What would have been pleasant in those rumours was the fortuitous news of a successful military rescue of those girls as officially announced by Nigerian military spokesman to the delight of all and sundry but which eventually turned out to be a hoax as the same official spokesman later claimed to have been misled. This was followed by another official rumour of the killing of Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, whose fake dead body was displayed on Nigerian television and put on the internet. It also turned out to be a ridiculous hoax, especially when the supposed dead man (Shekau) resurfaced to mock the rumour of his death and labeled the mongers of the rumour blatant liars. This was also followed by another seemingly pleasant rumour of the release of all the girls through an official negotiation brokered by an Australian expert (Stephen Davies). And after a wild jubilation in ecstasy across the land, this also turned out to be another hoax. All these vividly showed the true colour of our central government.

    Meanwhile, following the abduction of your daughters on April 14,

    2014, when the government was expected to promptly embark on rescue

    mission, it was the political train of the ruling power that moved to Kano the following morning (April 15, 2014) to initiate a national campaign for ‘continuity’ (of governance). And for three weeks thereafter, the debate at the corridor of power was on whether or not your daughters were truly missing.

    Agony of parenthood

    Today, you are in as much anguish as your daughters. And thus, most of you have been forced into permanent fasting and sleeplessness as your case is a vivid reminder of a Yoruba adage that says that: “a child is better lost to death than to a clueless abduction”.

    Who could have thought that in this age of technology, when civilisation is almost at its peak, an evil occurrence like Boko Haram designed slavery would rear its ugly head again in Nigeria in our very presence while we remain helpless? Is it not curiously shameful that with a population of about 170 million people only an infinitesimal group of criminal insurgents could render our government so helpless while the lives of our daughters remain dangerously on the line?

    Reactions

    For weeks after the abduction of those girls, this writer could not sleep. My constant thought was based on the imagination that one or two of them could have been my daughters. And it could not be imagined that any sane parent or family who heard of the criminal abduction would sleep or live a normal life for weeks or even months thereafter.

    But incidentally, both the thought and the imagination were discovered to be an error as some people were totally and insensitively indifferent, an indication of heartlessness or insanity on their part.

    Such people who openly described the incident of abduction as a diversionary tactic which they alleged to have been fabricated by certain fellow politicians were rather concerned with the political continuity of the current rot in the country.

    Their show of shame was such that portrays anything different from such continuity programme as criminal. In other words the story of your daughters’ abduction, no matter how painful, and the subsequent public demand for their return were labeled as criminal especially when the children of none of them were involved. It even got to a stage where the campaign for your daughters’ return with the slogan ‘BRING BACK OUR GIRLS’ was mocked and ridiculously countered with a similar slogan coded in a political jargon to boost the propaganda for continuity.

    At a time, the Nigerian press, in collaboration with the ‘Bring back our girls’ campaigners called on Mr. President to pay a sympathy visit to you in order to console and assure you on the determination of the government to rescue your daughters. But the hawks in government would not hear of it. They dissuaded the President from doing that on the argument that it was not the President that caused the calamity. Thus, your daughters’ case is one of a turbulent life on which the Almighty

    Allah had admonished thus:

    “….And We will most certainly try you with fear and hunger, loss of property and lives as well as farm crops.  But give good tidings to the patient ones who when afflicted by a calamity only remember to say ‘we are from Allah and to Allah we shall surely return…..”Q. 2:155-156.

    America for instance

    It will be recalled that when the Western allied forces’ war againstterrorists in Afghanistan was fiercely raging, the United State’s Presidents George Bush Jnr and his successor, Barack Obama, visited the American forces in that country as a demonstration of courage in leadership and as a morale booster to the American troops. And at home in America, they also visited the parents and families of some of those troops who lost their lives in battle. But in the case of Nigeria, such was considered a taboo by the national lotus eaters who are greedily feeding fat at the corridor of power. Rather than doing same here in Nigeria to show care and sympathy, it was you (parents) who were tacitly coerced into paying a visit to Mr. President in his Abuja Presidential palace called ‘Aso Rock’.

    When a country is globally known for these types of insensitivity and injustice with impunity anything including an emergence of the likes of Boko Haram insurgency could be the outcome. That is where the Qur’anic verse quoted at the opening of this article becomes very relevant. Thus the unfortunate case of your daughters’ plight seems to be one of the results of injustice perpetrated in the land by some demagogues who never thought of its consequences.

    Meanwhile, having waited for over eight months for the return of your daughters without hope, some of you (parents) might have given up by accepting your fate and by considering your plight as your own sacrifice to a nation in which you have totally lost trust. But there is nothing too difficult for Allah to achieve. The same God who rescued Prophet Yunus (Jonah) from the belly of a whale after several months can still rescue your daughters miraculously from the satanic enclave of Boko Haram. And we pray that He does so in no distant future. Allah never sleeps nor slumbers and He is ever mindful of any sincere prayer offered to Him. By the grace of Allah, your daughters shall be out of that evil gulag to the disappointment of those who are directly or indirectly linked to that calamity. Just continue to believe that in all these “THERE IS GOD OOOOO!”

  • No! Not like Jesus

    Whoever believes in God and the Day of Judgment should either lip well (talk responsibly) or keep mute”.

    Hadith of Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

    Monologue

    Column writing is like a shopping mall. As a consumer, you enter it with a product in mind and find a gross of other tempting products trying to lure you into purchasing them. Unless you are disciplined enough to stick to your budget, you may end up overspending your budget without meeting your need. The problem of most columnists is not a dearth of ideas but rather a deluge of them. Without stringent discipline in the choice of topics, a columnist may derail and lose the readership of his column. The planned topic for this column today is not what is appearing here. And that is because one cannot be indifferent to an urgent matter of communal interest.

     

    Dignity and pedigree

    In a Yoruba adage, words are said to be like eggs. Once they drop and break, they cannot be reassembled. A man’s private or public utterances are a major factor in assessing his dignity or otherwise.

    And dignity is a man’s vivid reflection of his pedigree. In a nutshell, an impeccable pedigree is a rare virtue which no money can purchase.

    Contrary to the above quoted Hadith and in what sounded like a toothpick blasphemy by a ‘lotus eater’, Dr. Doyin Okupe, a supposed senior special assistant to President Goodluck Jonathan on government ‘defence and attack’ otherwise called Public Affairs, was widely reported in Nigerian media last Monday, as comparing his boss with the unblemished person of Jesus Christ in conduct and mannerism.

    He is yet to deny that report. While answering reporters’ questions during a press interview, Okupe was reported to have said: “People do not understand the burden this President (Jonathan) is bearing. He’s like Jesus Christ. He’s bearing the burden of everybody….”. This outrageous blasphemy was reportedly expressed in Okupe’s vain struggle to defend the indefensible and attack some perceived political foes of Mr. President.

     

    Rental crier

    As a hired presidential praise singer, that was one of his ways of keeping his job not minding the implications of such obnoxious statement and its entailed spiritual repercussion. After all, without inconsequential deification of their employers, people in such positions will easily get fired by those who hired them. But if a gentleman is sent on a slave errand with a confidential message shouldn’t he deliver the message in a gentleman’s manner if only to prove his freeborn pedigree? But in this case, the owl-like random cry of official rental criers cannot be a surprise to any discerning observer.

    Ordinarily, Doyin Okupe’s right to public utterances as regards the Presidency cannot be faulted no matter how much irritatingly sacrilegious such utterances may sound especially since the main purpose of hiring and paying him from our common treasury is to flute the tune of his employer. Thus, such random calamitous statements should rather be pitied than allowed to bother anybody knowing the man for what he is and his antecedent.

    Sometimes, when a handshake tends to go beyond the elbow, it may become necessary to reshape the boundaries of friendship. That is what this article is all about. Religion is a spiritual constituency which abhors trespass and should not be dragged into the murky waters of politics by any sycophantic political charlatan. Let the impeccable name of Jesus be kept out of Nigeria’s dirty, corrupt politics.

    Doyin Okupe, a medical doctor, like a square peg in a round hole, is not a first timer in this kind of odd PR job. He once did it for the former President Olusegun Obasanjo who had to show him a red card when he realised his error in hiring a misfit as a ‘tailor’. What else could any leader of worth have done in such a circumstance? After all, a mechanic put in a clinical theatre to carry out a surgical operation on an ailing patient in the name of a doctor can only end up causing a monumental disaster. Thus, it should be strange that this man behaves like a blind bull struggling to pass through the hole of a needle on a job outside his familiar terrain. It is a matter of stomach infrastructure which is now a political manifesto in certain political quarters. We can still recall with nostalgia, the good old days of crack professionals like Muhammad Haruna, the late Tunji Oseni and the late Remi Oyo in a similar job. And whatever anybody’s feeling may be about Reuben Abati’s (a professional) performance as the Federal Government’s spokesman at the seat of power, the clear difference is still manifestly perceivable.

     

    Jesus in the Qur’an

    By the way, before some subsidiary rental criers begin to haul verbal missiles at yours sincerely over my concern in any blasphemy against the revered person of Jesus Christ by a supposed Christian ‘PR’ man, it may be necessary to make certain clarifications here.

    Jesus, like Abraham, Moses and Muhammad (SAW) is (in Islam) a frontline Prophet of Allah. And by virtue of that venerable position, he is to the Muslim world what he is to the Christian world, diversity of interpretations in revealed Books notwithstanding. The spiritual reputation of Jesus Christ in the Qur’an is such that his name is mentioned with reverence 37 times in that sacred book. Besides, a whole chapter (19) is divinely dedicated to his mother (Mary) in that glorious Book of books. And the second longest of the 114 chapters in the Book (Suratu Al-Imran) is dedicated to the family of Mary.

    Thus, it is only an ignorant Christian who will query the concern of a Muslim in the revered personality of Jesus Christ or claim any monopoly of that great Prophet of Allah. The blatant ignorance in which religion is shrouded in our own part of the world may be a major cause of mutual hatred and rancour but it cannot obliterate the sacredness of religious norm.

     

    Comrades in blasphemy

    Maligning or denigrating Allah’s Apostles is not restricted to this era. Over the centuries, many charlatans had done it to their own peril and they ended up regretting the rest of their lives. Even during the political campaigns towards Nigeria’s Second Republic in the late 1970s, for instance, a self-adulated politician openly compared himself with Jesus and Muhammad (SAW) and concluded that he was better than both of them. Of course, consequently, he lost that election and the subsequent ones even as he eventually died in political ignominy. And in a Southwest state recently, a political demagogue adopted a slogan of ‘a vote for….is a vote for Jesus’. What an insult? Does Jesus need anybody’s vote to be what he is? And, of course, like his predecessors in blasphemy, he also lost out.

    We can also recall the 1989 plight of one Salmon Rushdie, the infamous Indian author of ‘Satanic Verses’. His intention to write that evil book with which he maligned the person of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was, as usual, to make money. But, eventually, he neither made the expected money nor lived a normal life subsequently. Today, he is half alive and half dead without knowing where he actually belongs.

     

    A fool’s paradise

    Equating with impunity the sacredness of the spiritual life with the crudeness of mundane life is like calling the bluff of God and challenging Him to a duel without a wherewithal to bear the consequence. The tempting aura of office can sometimes be as intoxicating as a fool’s paradise. But invariably, those who are caught in such a deceptive web hardly realise (until it becomes too late) that every mundane office is as transient and ephemeral as the spider’s web.

    However, it is one thing for praise singers to deify their principals just to curry favour and maintain stomach infrastructure, it is another for the deified principals to know the limit of flattery, reject the label of infallibility and call the flatterers to order particularly where excesses are too conspicuous as in the case of the sacrilegious comparison under discussion here. Where are the principals of yesteryear?

     

    Egyptian episode

    Perhaps, a pseudo PR man like Okupe needs to be reminded of a political episode in Egypt of the 1970s. That was the time the Egyptians began to feel insecure neither because of their war of attrition with Israel, nor because of poverty arising from that war but because an Anwar Sadat had become an irredeemable monster equating himself with Egypt in the name of President. In his last years in office, the man was virtually the law of Egypt. He was not just the executive arm of the government, he also usurped the legislative and the judiciary powers to the absolute irritation of his countrymen. (In recent times, similar traits began to manifest themselves in Nigeria).

    In their war against Israel, the Egyptians lost almost everything they possessed, including their youth (the presumed future leaders) who physically fought that war. The only thing they did not lose was hope.

    And, that was because President Jamal Abdul Nasir, Sadat’s predecessor in office, had ensured the keeping of hope in the citizenry before his death in 1970. The hatred of the Egyptians for Sadat reached its climax in 1978 when, in a live Presidential press chart, he told the citizens that Egypt was Sadat and Sadat was Egypt. He was answering the question of a female journalist who asked him where he got the money with which he built a whole city named after himself (Madinatus Sadat: City of Sadat)

     

    Public Reactions

    Coupled with his earlier unilateral decision to commence peace negotiation with Israel without any meaningful consultation with other Egyptian stake- holders, Sadat’s arrogance became so unbearable to an average Egyptian that whenever he wanted to address the nation, people just turned off their television sets and jumped on to the streets driving around with iron buckets tied to the boots of their cars. The irritating noise coming from those cars was believed to be a show of the extent of nuisance which Sadat had constituted to the nation. But the irony of all these was that either Sadat did not know  the extent of people’s contempt for him or he pretended not to know because he still enjoyed the flattery of a few sycophants around him who continued to benefit from the largesse of his misrule. Today, if Sadat’s name is mentioned publicly in Egypt, only a few Egyptians will not say “a’udhu billah minas-shaytan rajim”.

     

    Security issue

    Nigerian government needs to know that the constituents of security are many but they do not vary. To speak and tell the truth; to make promises and fulfil them and to uphold trust without betraying it; those are the basic qualities with which Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said a gentleman is known. But the Prophet put it in a different way. He said: “Hypocrites are known by three shameful acts: when they talk they lie; when they make promises they renege and when they are trusted they betray the trust”. From that clear description of a hypocrite will it be out of place to conclude that today’s leadership in Nigeria is hypocritical? How will the ‘PR’ Okupe react to that?

    Nigerians have been told endless lies. They have been promised in vain.  Their trust in the leadership has been betrayed. Thus, the only thing that seems to remain in their possession is forlorn life. Yet the same leadership continues to preach patriotism to the hopeless populace as if patriotism is a diehard substance achievable in a vacuum.

    Is it not a matter of morality that those who are calling for equity must come with clean hands?

     

    The good old days

    What is most painful to most Nigerians in all these is the remembrance of the good old days with nostalgia. At least they can still recall that despite the general belief that the late General Sani Abacha brought a political Tsunami to Nigeria, his regime can still be taken for a paradise compared to the one. Abacha’s evil machinations were expected because nobody voted for him. He staged a coup to serve Nigeria, and since he had nobody’s mandate to rule, his atrocities did not come as a surprise to anybody. Abacha had political enemies, no doubt, but he did not extend his enmity to the masses. By the time Allah finally accepted the peoples’ prayer and terminated Abacha’s regime in a miraculous way, Nigerians still had some flesh with which to cover their battered skeletal bones.

    In the regime, those bones were the first target of the political arrows coming from the government. The situation of Nigeria today has enabled the people to know that devils too are in sizes and degrees. Thus the masses have stopped saying Amen when prayers are officially offered for the  leadership.

    Rather than serving as an attack dog for the government, what ‘PR’ Okupe should do is to study the lifestyle of Umar Bn Khattab, the second Caliph in Islam. That great Caliph was exemplary in governance, not only for the Caliphate but also for the entire world. And, from his experience, the world came to realise that the greatest achievement that any man can betroth to his people as a legacy is positive service to humanity. That is what any genuine PR man of worth should ensure that his principal engages in. Public attack or comparing Jonathan with Jesus cannot work any miracle. This is a lesson in PR job for those who crave incursion into other peoples’ profession.

  • ‘Political Red Herring’

    ‘Political Red Herring’

    Today’s article in this column is not through the pen of yours sincerely. It is written by a well known Nigerian journalist and front line human rights activist, Richard Akinola, of the Christian faith.

    The article which is originally entitled ‘Pastor Bosun Emmanuel: The Political Red Herring’ was first published in The Sun earlier this week. It is being republished here because of its relevance to the current situation in the country. However, it had to be sub-edited to reduce its length and get it accommodated within the limited space in this column. Thus, the sub-headings in it are as a result of editing. Every other thing is quoted verbatim. Here it goes from the horse’s mouth:

    “In the long term, we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars”

    Richard Nixon (the 37th American President, January 1969-September 1974)

     

    Preamble

    Richard Nixon was being futuristic when he made this statement several years ago. He apparently never knew that there would come a time in the history of one country called Nigeria, where political actors, buoyed by some of their friends in cassock, would be fanning the embers of religious war.

    I am not by any stretch of imagination, discounting the several human and material losses of Christians in several sectarian crises in the Northern part of the country over the years, accentuated by the Boko Haram insurgency, which unfortunately had been used to misinform people as being programmed against President Jonathan, being a Christian. Boko Haram did not start under President Jonathan. As a matter of fact, late president Umaru Yar’Adua had a running battle with this bunch of demented terrorists. The insurgency actually gained prominence with the killing of its leader, Mohammed Yusuf by security forces in 2009 under the government of Yar’Adua. In 2009, following various assaults in Yobe, Bauchi and Borno states, the security forces killed over 1000 of the insurgents. It would therefore be false, to claim that Boko Haram insurgency is as a result of Nigeria having a Christian president.

    As l have always argued, the Boko Haram variant of Islam is antithetical to the mainstream Islamic teachings, just like Uganda’s terrorist group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), purporting to be fighting for my Jehovah God, cannot be representative of Christians.

     

    Satanic CD

    There is this CD that is being well-circulated among Christians in various churches. It’s a political message by a pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Bosun Emmanuel, where he launched into an Islamophobic tirade against Muslims and the All Progressives Congress (APC), which he declared as the Islamic Brotherhood of Nigeria.

    The General Overseer of Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor E.A. Adeboye had denounced this divisive message and directed his church members to discountenance the message. Unfortunately, the message has gone viral. It was soap-box rhetoric, using the pulpit as a campaign platform for President Goodluck Jonathan, urging Christians to vote for Christian candidates.

    Using the pulpit to campaign for either PDP or APC or any other party for that matter is an abuse of the pulpit. We need to be careful and circumspect, particularly religious leaders in their association with politicians. Religious politics is dangerous, like Roger Ebert once said: “Lebanon was at one time known as a nation that rose above sectarian hatred; Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East.

    All that was blown apart by senseless religious wars, financed and exploited in part by those who sought power and wealth”.

     

    Religion in the Southwest

    Over the years in the South West, religious politics had never been an issue. When Chief Olagunsoye Oyinlola was the Governor of Osun State, Erelu Olusola Obada, a fellow Christian was his deputy, in a state that has a preponderance of Muslims. In Edo State, both Governor Adams Oshiomhole and his deputy, Dr Pius Odubu are both Christians in a state where there is a substantial percentage of Muslims, particularly in Edo North. But because religion had never been an issue in electoral contests in Edo State, it was difficult for anyone to make a political capital of a phantom marginalisation of a religious group in the state.

    Due to their cosmopolitan nature and level of political awareness, Lagosians have never really bothered about the religious faiths of their governors, until the politics of 2015 crept in. Yes, in fairness to the proponents of this move, there has been the preponderance of elected Muslim governors in Lagos State. However, my take is that l would rather prefer good governance, bolstered by a didactic leadership, than pander to religious sentiments. And l say this with due respect to the proponents of Christian governor.

    Come to think of it, if we look at it from the time of Alhaji Lateef Jakande, till now, with the exception of the lackluster government of ‘Baba go slow’, Chief Michael Otedola, (a Christian) of blessed memory, the state has witnessed remarkable developments and giant strides. And this has nothing to do with the religious persuasion of Tinubu and Fashola but the product of good leadership.

    The current magnificent edifice of TREM headquarters at Anthony, Lagos, could not have been today if not for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a Muslim, who overruled his ministry of environment which had wanted to stop the construction based on the discovery that the property stood in the path of a major drainage.

     

    Use of Hijab

    Interestingly, it’s another Muslim governor, Raji Fashola that banned the use of Hijab in Lagos public schools, a move that irked the Muslim faithful who dragged the governor to court on the issue but the court ruled in favour of the state government. And this is despite the fact that both the Governor and the Speaker, Adeyemi Ikuforiji are both Muslims. Of what use is having a Christian governor while it is possible to have a Muslim-dominated House of Assembly which if it wants to push for Islamic-inclined laws can easily do it and the Christian governor would have no choice but to implement? Since the tenure of Tinubu till date, Lagos State’s annual thanksgiving service, organised by the governor every January, has always been anchored by Pastor E.A. Adeboye. Yet, Tinubu and Fashola are Muslims. Pastor Emmanuel uncharitably branded APC as ‘Islamic Brotherhood of Nigeria’. I am not a member of APC. But by using the pulpit to preach hateful politics, he had removed whatever credibility that may be attached to his said message. I would have taken the same position if he had used the pulpit to promote APC and demonise PDP. And his premise for labeling APC an Islamic party was so puerile, disingenuous and downright illogical. He went on to authoritatively state that the chairman and all other officers of APC are Muslims….”

     

    Religious Politics

    “If we assume for the purpose of argument that APC is a Muslim party, are we then to assume that PDP is a Christian party led by an Alhaji Mua’zu, a Muslim. Isn’t that preposterous? I ask because Pastor Emmanuel said that in 2015, Lagos Christians should vote for a Christian candidate for governor but with a caveat that they should not vote for a Christian candidate from an Islamic party!

    We are playing a very dangerous religious game here. That was how the Hutus and Tutsis pogrom in Rwanda started in 1994, leading to the extermination of over 800,000 Rwandans, to the extent that even the priests became victims- massacred by fellow Christians inside the church….”

     

    Problem of religion

    The problem of Nigeria is not the religious persuasion of our leaders but that of leadership deficit. It is only when you have nothing to offer that you resort to religion and ethnicity. No government has raised the bar of religious politics like the current Jonathan government and some pastors and Christians unfortunately fell for this bait. That is why Pastor Emmanuel can state with temerity in the CD that President Jonathan was not elected to fight corruption or tackle the economy but there to fulfil God’s mandate. Really? What balderdash! No wonder he went on to declare with magisterial candour that the best leader this country ever had was General Sani Abacha because he deposed the Sultan! Can you imagine such gibberish?

    So, as long as you are a Christian by name, we should support you. It doesn’t matter if you had used a seven-day old child as ritual to get into office. Or was it not in this same country that a Southwest governor(now an ex-governor) forced all members of the House of Assembly into a ritual process which was done with all of them naked before a shrine, just to extract oath of loyalty and allegiance from them? And this same governor would always grace the Holy Ghost night at the Redemption Camp with his plastic permanent smile for the cameras to show that he is Christian. If just being a Christian is a yard stick to win election, how do you situate the case of a prominent Christian woman banker, who was convicted by the EFCC for fraud and had to do a plea bargain with the EFCC to return N191 billion to the government coffers?.

     

    Boko Haram Insurgents

    When the demonic Boko Haram insurgents entered Mubi and people were running out of town, nobody asked the drivers if they were Muslims or Christians. All they were after was to get out into safety. Both Muslims and Christians are victims of the scourge. Or how many air travellers, upon entering an aircraft, insist on knowing the religious persuasion of the pilot and the co-pilot, whether Muslim, Christian or Atheist? How many Christians and Muslims have resigned from their jobs because their bosses are of different religious faiths?

    If we stretch the argument further, are we saying Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by a lunatic called Joseph Kony, who had waged over 20-year war of attrition against Uganda, raping, maiming and terrorising people, are fulfilling God’s mandate just because their creed is to rule by the Ten Commandments? These brigands are like the Boko Haram of Nigeria. (Yet, Muslims did not say they were fighting for Christ).

     

     

    Neither Cross nor Crescent

    It is not about the cross or crescent but about leadership qualities.

    The Dubai that many of our Christian brethren go and spend holidays, are they being ruled by Christians? In 1991, Dubai was just bare. But with visionary leaders, it has been turned into a tourist haven. North Korea, China and Russia are advanced technologically but they are not Christians. Many of them don’t even believe in God. Moammar Ghaddafi turned a desert country into a well-irrigated country. After the first Gulf War in 1990 and despite all the massive bombings by the allied forces, there were still street lights working on the streets of Baghdad. Go to Egypt, Morocco and other North African countries, they look like Europe. Yet, they didn’t carry the Bible to build their countries. Please, don’t get me wrong. Being a good Christian with leadership potentials is an added advantage. Core competence should override any religious or tribal consideration.

    Our problem is that we are so religious but not godly. Our values are warped and upside down. We go to churches and mosques but our hearts are very far from God. On December 31 of every year, we fill up the churches for the cross-over night to the New Year but by the 1st of January, we start plotting the downfall of our fellow human beings.

    The fact is that our hearts are very far from God. Most times, we shift our responsibilities to God. I believe so much in prayer. I do pray a lot but there is a time to pray and a time to use your head. To whom brain is given, sense is expected….”

     

    By God and not by Man

    “The truth of the matter is that from being a deputy governor, to governor, to vice president, to acting president, up to being a president, God went ahead of President Jonathan. He didn’t fight anyone before he got there and nobody then talked about him being a Christian or a southerner. But now, out of desperation, his Christian cheer leaders are deceiving him as the anointed, using the religious mantra. But the man himself knows that God is not in this his current agenda, irrespective of what his spiritual consultants tell him; because his current endeavour is all by flesh. That is why just like when God left Saul, he went to seek the witch of Endor when the Philistines came after him. Our dear president too, surrounded by his Philistines, this time the opposition, has resorted to self-help by also seeking from his own variant of witch of Endor- police and other arms of security forces, to fight his opponents through dictatorial tendencies and resorting to religious and ethnic sentiments, which he did not do before he got to the throne….”

    “God is still God. He can use anyone to accomplish His purpose. What

    we need are visionary and competent leaders, and being a good, God-fearing Christian would be an icing on the cake. But insisting on a Christian president or governor, even if he is a cultist and the most corrupt person, would be stretching it too far. And mischievously labeling a party as an Islamic party is pure hogwash.  Fela Anikulapo-Kuti once titled one of his albums, l would tell Pastor Bosun Emmanuel, ‘Teacher, don’t teach me nonsense”.

     

    • Akinnola is of Christians in Politics Initiative.

  • On memory lane

    On memory lane

    Monologue

    What can one say of a man who fixes his eyes on the sun but does not see it? Rather, he sees a chorus of flaming seraphim announcing a paroxysm of despair. That is the similitude of a country called Nigeria a country in which the   formation of the head and the body of her populace is a paradox of inexplicable nature. And her existence to this stage is a miracle of inestimable nuisance.

    Or how can one classify a situation in which some parents were weeping and wailing over the mass murder or maiming of their children by the evil insurgents called Boko Haram somewhere in the Northeast of the country while some so called leaders were jubilating and chorusing political songs in the capital city of the same country all within an interval of 24 hours?

    Today’s article is motivated by the recent dedication of a library to the memory of Alhaji Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. That historic dedication was a great reminder of a great past in Nigeria which the present generation seems to have consigned to the debris of history. The opening monologue is a mere digression meant to reflect the current mood of the nation.

    This column will never be tired of quoting Arab poets because it is in the residue of those their poems that wisdom can be found. Thus, one of such poets is hereby quoted again in relation to topic at hand. It goes thus: “Eight conditions of life are inevitable for man. And there is no single living human being without the eight. These are: happiness and sadness; meeting and parting; fortune and misfortune; then, sickness and healthiness.”

    When, as a human being, you are not happy, you must be sad. When you are not meeting with some people, you must be parting with some. When you are not fortunate in a venture you must be unfortunate in it if momentarily. And when you are not healthy you must be sick or ill.

     

    Conditions of Life

    Happiness, meeting, fortune and healthiness, all may seem to show the positive side of life just as their abstract counterparts may reflect its negative side. But the reality is that not everything that glitters can be gold.

    Happiness may be Pyrrhic. Meeting may cause trouble. Fortune may be short-lived. And healthiness may engender restiveness. Incidentally, however, it takes both the positive and the negative sides of life to keep the world of man going.

    Life is neither static nor rigid. Rather, it randomly changes like weather. If it brings you happiness today, do not expect it to remain so tomorrow. Life is like a horse. You can ride it only if it surrenders itself to you. But as soon as it becomes tired of you and beckons to a new rider, you automatically become its own horse and it may then ride you to death.

     

    Sources of happiness

    In life, happiness is not about money or position. Neither is it about power or governance. Each and every one of these is transient even as the life of its custodian is ephemeral. As a matter of fact, there is no cause of happiness that cannot be a cause for sadness. The only known source of genuine happiness from the primordial to the modern time is contentment guaranteed by conscience. And that is the only passport on which the visa of paradise may be issued. Without contentment based on conscience, no one can appreciate the bounties of God.

     

    Past leaders

    Looking at the phenomena of human life critically, one may conclude that human world is depreciating geometrically. The men of yesteryear were greater than those of today. Their lives were more qualitative.

    Their thoughts were richer. Their intentions were purer. Their gazes were more visionary. Their dispositions were more human. It is upon the foundation of their thoughts and deeds that today’s technological pyramid is built. Yet, they did not allow their reasoning to be driven by the material life of their time.

    Fearing for their hereafter, some disciples of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) once asked him a probing question about the quality of their lifestyle saying in a quivering voice thus: “Dear Prophet! The wealthy ones amongst us seem to have gone to the world beyond with all the existing rewards. They worshiped Allah as we are worshiping Him. They fasted as we are fasting today. Yet they were giving in charity, huge amounts of resources according to the sizes of their wealth. What is then left for us, if the paradise will be determined by the amount of our rewards?”

     

    Exemplary Hadith

    Replying, the Prophet said: “Has Allah not endowed you with what can fetch you the ticket to paradise? Every glorification of Allah you chant is charity; every praising of Allah you engage in during days and nights is charity; every deification of Allah you do in thought or in action is charity; encouraging good deed is charity; admonishing against evil is charity; even, mating with your wives is charity”.

    Piqued by the last assertion, the disciples asked the Prophet in unison: “Haba! Dear Prophet, how can mating with one’s wife fetch ticket to paradise?” The Prophet in a jovial tone but serious mood retorted thus: “Don’t you know that mating in the manner of an adulterer can fetch hell (because it is evil deed)? Thus, mating with legitimate wives can fetch paradise (because it is a good deed).”

     

    Nigeria’s founding fathers

    In semblance of the above, the great fathers of Nigeria’s independence left a legacy that can be called a footprint on the sands of time. By whatever standard they are measured today, the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello; Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa; the first Premier of Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his counterpart of the Eastern Region, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe as well as Mallam Aminu Kano and Chief SLA Akintola were all exemplary in their styles of life, their personal weaknesses notwithstanding.

    Their legacy is a fortune which amazingly turned into misfortune in the hands of the military rascals who succeeded them. Thus, the great hope which those fathers had embedded into our destiny became colonised and turned into personal property by their political heirs.

    Were those great fathers to wake up from their graves today and see what has become of their sweat, they would just shake their heads in sorrow and return quietly into their graves without comments.

     

    Dream and despair

    It is rather a luxury that those of us who were children during Nigeria’s independence can still talk of hope even if in retrospect.

    Neither the children of today nor those of tomorrow have the benefit of such a luxury. If the future generations of Nigerians will lay claim to any heritage from the current leadership, it is a paroxysm of despair. And when the morrow of a country depends on despair rather than hope what else should be expected other than ruins?

    Against our initial prayer and wish as a people, our country became a lily by the mossy stone in recent years. At the dawn of Nigeria’s 4th Republic in 1999, an unexpected bull strayed into our national china shop and before we knew it the falcon had lost contact with the falconer. Things fell apart and the centre became the seat of the Lucifer. Thus, a bud of thorny mistletoe grew wild under the armpit of a magnificent almond tree thereby making normal access to the tree impossible.

     

    Wishes and intentions

    Incidentally, most human prayers are erroneously based on wish out of sheer ignorance. But since unlike humans, Allah judges by intention and not by wishful action He granted us our prayer and not our wish.

    And that was because He knew that wish is like a whirlwind which could blow in any direction and blind the wisher.

    As our Creator, He knows what is best for us and the right time for it. He is too kind to be indifferent to our plight and too wise to make mistake.

    Now, having realised that we need a new round of prayer, we must learn not to take wish for intention in prayer again. If our prayers seemed unaccepted in the past we must re-examine ourselves. “God does not change the situation of a nation unless the people of such a nation change their ‘negative’ way of life to a positive one”. Q. 13:11

     

    Thanking God

    We thank You oh Allah, for taking us through decades of undeserved hardship imposed on us by a political clique of evil agents in the name of rulers. During those unbearable decades, many people lost their lives, many lost their jobs and many more lost their wealth without any hope of a better tomorrow.

    At the instance of evil policies and vindictive attitudes of those we call leaders, Nigerian youths have become wild and heartless, parents have become helpless and frustrated, families have become dismembered, patriots have become rebels, genuine businesses have folded up thereby paving way for dubious ones, innocent men and women have been viciously hounded in jail or wallowing in penury even as friends have become foes.

     

    Painful reminder

    Shortly after the commencement of the current republic, the great serenity expected to come with democracy vanished into thin air while the future became bleak even for those who should ordinarily have a stake in it with confidence and hope. Except for Your grace and mercy Oh Allah, no one knew what the next day would bring at that time. It was one seemingly tortuous but undeclared war, the end of which only a few could hope to see.

    But by your grace we endured it all and waited patiently to bid the demonic sphinx that cast that spell on Nigeria adieu forever. Why won’t we thank You once again for granting us that wonderful gesture.

    The year 1999 started with a rain of hope but a vicious rain maker thought that what we deserved was storm rather than rain and opened the furnace of tempest on us. Yet, we survived it all. When we became like a cow without a tail, it was only your grace that scared away the flies from feasting on our wound. Your promise has never been in vain.

    Thank You for bailing us out of a mental and psychological gulag into which we were then hounded by the new-colonialists of those days who were masquerading in the cloak of democrats. We shall forever be grateful to You as long as we remain alive.

    Incidentally, however, while we were glorifying You for giving us a fresh opportunity to dream and expect the transformation of our dream into a positive reality, a new calamity struck. The symbol of that dream was suddenly taken away from us like a star that turned into a meteor. And, now, we are back in a ship being piloted by a sailor who neither knows his destination nor possesses a compass with which to find his way.

    Yet, we know that you do not do anything without reason and whatever comes the way of man from You is in the best interest of man even if he does not know it.

     

    New Appeal

    Once again, we want to appeal to you Oh God to please equip us with diving suits with which to swim across the ocean of life as the present ship is heading for the rock.

    Give us a leader from amongst us whose piety will be the basis of his leadership; whose conscience will be the scale of his conduct; whose words will match his deeds and whose temperament will check his greed and avarice. Select a leader for us who will be meek and affable and not one whose ambition will be so blind as to render him desperate for power at all costs.

    Choose a leader for us Oh God who will be disciplined enough to know that leadership is a privilege and not a right and therefore remember that he will one day vacate the office of power and recall his achievements or otherwise in quiet retrospect.

    Bless us with a leader who will not promise us light and spend our hard-earned billions of naira to throw us into a permanent dungeon of darkness. We pray for a leader who will not promise us employment and use our resources to render us jobless (husbands and wives) through deliberate impoverishing policies after selling our national heritage to himself and his cronies.

    Appoint a leader for us who will not grant a paltry salary pay rise to an insignificant percentage of the citizenry and then turn round to inflict unbearable hardship on the overwhelming majority of the populace through unjustifiable price increases on our social amenities and thereby further aggravate poverty in the land.

    We are at your door oh! Allah, raising up our hands to You in prayer and placing our final hope on You without an iota of doubt. To You alone we pray and from You alone we expect mercy. AL-FATIHAT!

     

  • Declare fatwah now

    Whoever (amongst you) sees an abomination should endeavour to change it with his hands; if he is incapable, let him change it with his tongue (by condemning it); and if he is still incapable, let him change it with his mind. That (third option) is the weakest sign of faith”.

    Hadith of Prophet Muhammad (SAW)

     

    Genesis of heresy

    History will never cease to repeat itself that man might learn from its lessons. But man seems to have become so much deaf and dumb that he can hardly finds any lesson to learn from history. The current ongoing heresy by a group of rascals called Boko Haram in Nigeria is not new in history. Shortly after the demise of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), two groups of evil elements emerged in Arabia with a sectarian heresy similar to that of Boko Haram. One was led by a man called Musaylimah (the liar) from Yemen. The other was led by a woman called Sajjah from Yamamah.

    These two heretics falsely proclaimed themselves as Prophets of God and dished out certain hallucinatory utterances which they called revelations. Both of them had started operating skeletally in the last days of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) when the latter had no time to tackle them. And when Sayyiduna Abu Bakr became the first Caliph, they intensified their evil activities with a view to eradicating the message of Allah and replacing it with their heretic ideologies. Their declaration of Islamic government as illegal and proclamation of heretic government in its place led to an outbreak of war between them and the forces of Islam.

     

    War against heresy

    In the melee, many Qur’an memorisers among Muslims were killed as the conflict named ‘RENEGADES WAR’ lasted for quite some time before it was brought to an end. It took a strong will of the Muslim leadership and loyal cooperation of the Muslim Ummah to surmount that obnoxious situation. Before the outbreak of that war, the Caliphate had made overtures to those renegades with a view to making them see reason.

    But when all efforts to resolve the crisis failed as the renegades kept killing innocent citizens who refused to renounce Islam and follow their heresy failed, an official fatwah was issued to excommunicate them from Islam and formally declare them as heretics.

    (Fatwah is an official declaration of the position of Islam by the topmost echelon of Islamic clergy on a matter affecting the public).

    Thus, the fatwah so declared in those early days of the Caliphate became an immediate precipitate of the war of renegades. The rest is history.

     

    Modern day heresy

    Today, over 14 centuries after the above narrated episode, a similar situation has come to rear its ugly head in Nigeria in the name of Boko Haram. Disturbingly, the unrepentant rascals who constitute that group continue to perpetrate their dastardly acts under the cloak of Islam while they allegedly demand for the imposition of deeper Shariah in northern Nigeria as a pretext for claiming to be Muslims. The irony in this is that most non-Muslims and even ignorant Muslims now perceive Islam through these vandals and use such wrong perception as a generalised yardstick for measuring the values of Islam. If atrocities of some adherents were to be used as the mirror with which to view any religion, then no religion in the world today would possess the validity of divine message.

     

    Identity of a Muslim

    Islam is not to be judged by the outward appearance or activities of its adherents. On the contrary, Islam should serve as the mirror through which Muslims should viewed and assessed. Anybody who does not understand Islam cannot accurately assess genuine Muslims as distinct from fake ones. When Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was asked how piety could be recognised in a person he touched his heart and told his disciples that “Islam resides here”. And when he was asked who a Muslim was he said “A Muslim is a person who ensures the safety of other peaceful people from the evils of violent tongues and deadly hands”.

    The atrocities of Boko Haram have abundantly proved that such an evil group could not have had any connection with Islam. And by now, the Nigerian ‘Ulamau (learned scholars) ought to have come together to issue a strong fatwah excommunicating that atrocious group from Islam if only to save the divine religion of Allah from heretic tendencies of some satanic deviants. If the truth must be told, it is the Muslims (and not anyone else) who can and should checkmate the abominable excesses of Boko Haram in Nigeria. This is not only because members of that group live among Muslims but also because the group still claims to be of Islam even when its evil activities are objectionable to the tenets of Islam. Killing and maiming of fellow human beings under any guise are universally acknowledged to be abhorrent to Islam.

     

    Islamic regulations about war

    Even in a war situation, Prophet Muhammad strongly warned Muslim soldiers not to kill women, children, armless people and people found in places of worship no matter their religion. He also warned against the cutting down of fruitful trees, poisoning of rivers, destruction of farmlands, killing of domestic animals (except for food) as well as demolition or burning of places of worship. Whoever contravenes these instructions has committed heresy by transgressing against Islam and should be made to face the maximum penal sanctions under Islamic Law.

    Personally, I see human killers of fellow human beings extra-judicially as sheer beasts who should not live in a civil society.

     

    Reminder

    In an article published in this column on March 12 2010, entitled ‘ISLAM’S CHARTER WITH CHRISTIANITY’, yours sincerely stated as follows:  “Each time I hear of killing, maiming or resorting to terrorism in the name of religion I feel scandalised. This is not just because I belong to a religion and I am involved in its propagation but also because I know the value of life and the vice in terminating it extra judicially. Personally, I see those who kill people of other religions for the simple reason of difference in faith as animalistic vandals waging war not just against humanity but also against God.

    Anybody who kills or maims or indulges in terrorism may claim to belong to a religion but cannot genuinely claim to be acting for that religion. No divine religion prescribes killing or maiming as an act of worship. Religion may be used as a cover for such heinous acts but the real motive is far from religion”.

     

    Living in Peace

    The peace of every individual is in every other individual. Whoever wants peace must give peace a chance. This is without prejudice to the factors of security which every responsible government must provide.

    In modern time as in some times past, security in a pluralistic society is beyond the use of weapons against armless people as is usually the case in Nigeria where ordinary commercial drivers are killed by the police for not dropping N20 in the extortion market.

    Genuine factors of security must include adequate feeding for all citizens; jobs for able-bodied people as well as reasonable and free education for all children of school age. If all these are provided, the citizenry will take care of the rest and few people will pay attention to the style of governance. As a matter of fact, no sane human being will want to commit suicide (which is now rampant in Nigeria) for whatever reason. And if anybody is pushed to that level he or she will surely have no respect for the lives of others.

     

    A case for state police

    By now, one would have expected that since the Federal Government alone cannot afford to bear the cost of security in Nigeria, the issue of state police ought to have been resolved. If it was reasonable in the past to post policemen from Katsina to Anambra State or from Oyo to Plateau State, it is no longer reasonable. Such policemen cannot maintain any security because they are neither familiar with the terrain, nor understand the language spoken by the local people. In a nutshell, people who are alien to a culture cannot watch over such a culture for the purpose of security.

    That is why President Jonathan’s public statement in recent time that Nigeria is not ripe for state police is suspicious. When will Nigeria be ripe for state police? When most Nigerians might have been killed in cold blood by the likes of Boko Haram? Sincerely, politics must not be pushed beyond its elasticity limit. If there is any time a state police is most desirous in Nigeria, it is now. This is also the right time for the restoration of the traditional rulers’ authorities which the colonialists usurped for their selfish exploitation motive. It is those traditional rulers who know which boy or girl comes from which house. It is a sheer delusion on the part of the federal government to think that voting as huge amount of money as almost one trillion naira for security will solve the problem of insecurity in Nigeria. If only half of that amount is earmarked for job creation the problem would have been half-solved.

     

    Islam’s charter with Christianity

    As for Christian/Muslim relationship which is grossly misconceived in Nigeria, it is necessary to recall an excerpt from the above mentioned article published in this column in 2010 as a reminder of Prophet Muhammad’s attitude to Christianity. In the year 628 CE, a Christian delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery approached the Prophet and sought his government’s protection against any possible aggression of the then Persian Empire. In response, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) granted them a charter of rights as follows:

    “This is a message from Muhammad the son of Abdullah (Please, note the opening of that covenant. The Prophet did not call himself Prophet because he knew such could amount to imposition of self on people of other faiths) serving as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far that we (Muslims) are with them. Verily, I and all the servants of God, as well as the helpers of Islam hereby make promise to defend Christians because they are my citizens and by God! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them (concerning their way of worship). Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one should destroy a house of their religion or damage it or loot it.

    Whoever violates this has breached God’s charter and disobeyed His Apostle. Verily, Christians are my allies and have my secure charter against all they hate. No one should force them to fight for a cause in which they have no belief or compel them to migrate against their wish. Neither is the sacredness of their covenant to be violated nor their Churches to be disrespected.  And if any damage should happen to their Churches, they must not be prevented from repairing them. No Muslim should disobey this covenant till the Last Day (end of the world)”. For further information on this Charter, please, see www.aljazeera.com and check Aljazeera Magazine under Middle East Online.

     

    Validation of the charter

    By this charter, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) asserted that Muslims and Christians were brethren in faith and no one of them should fight against the other on the basis of religion. Thus, by validating the charter till the great Day of Judgment, the Prophet had precluded any future attempt to revoke the privileges therein by any nation, group or individuals. By implication, those privileges were meant to be inalienable and they are supposed to remain so till today.

     

    Remarks

    A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it did not stipulate any condition for those Christians to enjoy the privileges.

    Believing that being followers of Jesus Christ was enough a condition, the Prophet had assumed that the Christians, as People of Book, would surely reciprocate this unprecedented gesture wherever they coexist with Muslims not only by tolerating the latter’s mode of worship and way of life but also by refraining from any act of provocation against them which could advertently or inadvertently precipitate religious rancour.

    Another noticeable aspect of the charter is the Prophet’s silence on any payment by the protectorate Christians which was the practice in those days. Thus, that ‘Charter of Rights’, the first of its type in history, was a free gift.

    From this charter, the reason became clear why the Islamic State under the command of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) or any of his rightly guided disciples never crossed swords with any Christian group or nation in their lifetimes. If any fight like the crusades ever broke out subsequently between Muslims and Christians, it was centuries after the demise of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). And that was because either or both sides breached the charter. Thus, the above charter is a confirmation that there is no conflict between Islam and Christianity.

    And if there is any seeming conflict between those two religions, today their adherents should be blamed for breaking the historic charter cited above.

     

     Responsibility

    Front line Nigerian Muslim Clerics have responsibility to apply a Hadith of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) to the lives of ordinary Nigerians at this precarious time in Nigeria. The Hadith went thus: “Assist your Muslim brother whether he is oppressed or he oppresses”. Then, the Companions asked the Prophet for clarification by saying: “Dear Prophet, we can understand a situation where we can assist our Muslim brothers when they are oppressed. But how can we assist them when they oppress others?” In response, the Prophet said: You can assist your oppressive Muslim brothers by chiding them for oppressing others and by confronting them over oppression”. Based on these facts, there can be no better reason or better time for declaring a fatwah against Boko Haram in Nigeria.

  • Eight years on the throne

    Preamble

    Time flies. Eight years ago when His Eminence, Dr.  Muhammad Sa‘ad Abubakar, CFR, mni ascended the Sokoto royal throne as the 20th Sultan was like yesterday. The historic date was November 6, 2006. Until then, the lofty man’s name did not ring any bell in Nigeria. And he was probably not conscious of the royal blood in him. If he was conscious of that at all, his humble nature did not reflect it. But the thinking of man is quite different from the will of Allah. And when the thinking of man clashes with the will of Allah, the latter automatically prevails.

    For Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, ascending the throne of the great Sokoto Empire was like the rise of the sun anon meridian. When it beams its rejuvenating ray, all the stars in the galaxy take their bow.

    History and man are like Siamese twins. The one cannot do without the other. History makes man just as man makes history. And the reciprocal baton continues to change hands between them as long as they remain in existence.

    Thus, the sudden emergence of the 50- year-old Brigadier General Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar as the successor to the exalted throne of the great Sokoto Empire without controversy came as a surprise to many Nigerians. His own father, Sultan Sadiq Abubkar ascended the same throne at the age of 37. Surely, the name ‘Muhammad Sa‘ad’ played a significant role in the emergence of its bearer as Sultan.

    The Mystery in Name

    There is something mysterious about name which humanity is yet to comprehend fully. A puzzling secret seems to exist in the vocabulary of life which sticks to every man like a second skin. That secret, pearled in the yoke of name, is an effective evidence of destiny in man. Our names are the light that glows at night to lighten up our ways through the threshold of life. And when the dawn comes to render the glowing light ineffective, the bearer bows out into the recluse of death leaving behind an indemnified signature on the sands of time.

    This was the case with Prophet Muhammad (SAW), the greatest man that ever lived on the surface of the earth. Even as an unlettered son of Arabia who was born in an era of blatant ignorance, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) introduced into the world, an unprecedented civilisation that opened the eyes of humanity to everlasting guidance. In recognition of his human exemplariness, the Almighty Allah said of him in Q 33: 21 thus: “You have a good example in Allah’s Apostle for anyone who looks to Allah and the Last Day and remembers Him always”.

    When Name Matters

    The name Muhammad which means ‘Praiseworthy’ was never known to be borne by any prominent person in Arabia before the birth of the Prophet. And no other person of prominence was known for bearing that unique name in Makkah and its environs until after his call to the office of Prophet-hood when Muslim parents started naming their children after him in emulation of his exemplariness.

    Today, at the mention of Prophet Muhammad anywhere in the world, everybody around responds with thunderous traditional chanting of ‘Salla Llahu alayhi wa sallama’ meaning: ‘Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him’. The chanting is even sometimes done unconsciously by some non-Muslims.

    Peculiarities in Name

    Sultan’s first name is Muhammad which he bears in emulation of the Prophet. His second name is Sa’ad meaning ‘Good ‘Luck’ which makes him a name-sake of one of the Prophet’s disciples (Sa’d bn Abi Waqqas) who was a great Army General of Islam. And his (Sultan’s) surname is Abubakar which means ‘father of youths’, a name which he shares with the first Caliph in Islam (Abubakr Siddiq). In every one of these names is a profound meaning with profound influence on the personality and conduct of the current Sultan. As an Army General, like Sa’d bn Abi Waqqas, Sultan is demonstrating the courage of a brave leader. As the father of the youths, like Abu Bakr, he bridges the gap between leadership and follower-ship by breathing a breeze of hope into Nigerian Muslim youths.

    Identity of a Leader

    A leader is known, neither by the aura of the office he occupies, nor by the enormity of the power wielded in that office. Rather, a leader is known   by the magnanimity with which he exercises the power entrusted to him and the humility he demonstrates in his interaction with the people. This is the lesson that Prophet Muhammad’s leadership taught Muslim rulers in one of his Hadith when he said: “A powerful person is not the one who can suppress others (with the instrumentality of office) but the one who can resist the temptation to use such power”.

    Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar seems to have exemplified this prophetic teaching as a Muslim ruler and a faithful one for that matter. And through his humble interaction with all Muslims in Nigeria irrespective of tribal or geographical boundaries, he has become the first Sultan create a strong feeling of a united Muslim Ummah in Nigeria under a competent leadership.

    Reorganisation

    At his instance, the Abuja National Mosque has been reorganised in such a way that no Muslim part of the country feels neglected again.

    Today, the Friday sermon in that Mosque is not only delivered in the three major languages (Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba) in addition to Arabic and English, three deputy Imams were also appointed to join the Chief Imam in rendering the Jum‘at sermon in rotation every Friday. These Deputy Imams were from the North, the Southwest and the Southeast respectively.

    Besides, a number of committees have been set up to take charge of certain necessities concerning the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) and the National Mosque. These have given the Nigerian Muslim Ummah the needed comfort with which to surge ahead as a single body of believers.

    His Eminence’s Itinerary

    By speaking out incessantly against policies which may seem to deliberately impoverish ordinary Nigerians, irrespective of tribes or religions, Sultan Muhammad Sa‘ad Abubakar has brought a lucky era to this country and the Muslims are the luckiest for it. Such a leader deserves absolute allegiance, loyalty and regular prayer from the followers.

    Besides, the itinerary of his Eminence’s exemplariness is not limited to Nigeria. He has severally been invited as guest speaker on interfaith and conflict resolution as well as peace management in many international fora, including Harvard University in the United States and Oxford University in Britain. And in all these, he has proved to be a worthy leader indeed. Today, he is on the list of the 50 most influential Muslims in the world on which list he ranks 16th.

    It thus becomes obvious that with a very solid military background combined with a unique diplomatic experience and a modern global exposure, this Sultan has become a millennial royal Captain divinely designated to pilot the affairs of Islam and the Muslim Ummah in Nigeria.

    Philosophers’ Theory

    Philosophers who assert that every new century has a way of producing a great leader may be right after all. The example of His Eminence, Dr. Muhammad Sa‘ad Abubakar, is a manifestation of that assertion. Ever since he assumed the exalted royal office eight years ago, this great man has convincingly exemplified all the qualities of genuine leadership by all standards. Every statement he has made socially, religiously or politically and every action he has taken privately or publicly has proved to be a school from which all well-meaning people have learnt one lesson or another.

    Attestation

    An American President, Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), once described a true leader as “a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don’t want to do and like it”. This is an axiomatic attestation to Sultan Abubakar’s centenary leadership. Through his activities and functions so far, His Eminence has proved Truman right by demonstrating to Nigerian Muslim Ummah that this is the right time for the reformation of the Sultanate and the unification of the Muslim Ummah in Nigeria.

    When he first assumed office in 2006, His Eminence hinted that the Sultanate would be put on the internet to enable all educated Muslims have access to their leader.  And in this age of computer, can anyone lay claim to any serious information or knowledge without adequate access to the internet? That is why he decided to start the reformation of the Sultanate through the instrumentality of the internet. And as an exemplary leader, he personally demonstrates his intellectual prowess with mastering fingers on the computer.

    Education as Law

    In Islam, education is the first law. That was why the very first Qur’anic revelation to Prophet Muhammad (SAW) ordained education thus: “Read in the name of Allah who created; He created man from clots of congealed blood; Read! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, Who taught man by the pen; He taught him what man did not know…”Q. 96:1-4. And to further emphasise the compelling need for education in Islam, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said “knowledge is a lost treasure. All Muslims should look for it and pick it wherever they can find it”.

    Without education there can be no information. And without information there can be no knowledge. By implication, this means that without knowledge, there can be no progress for humanity. That is why the Sultan started his reformation of the Sultanate from the premise of education. It is only with education that most problems in this world can be solved without much ado. The Sultan also believes that education without social harmony is like a virtue without value and that there can be no harmony in a society where people are overwhelmed by ignorance and penury as is the case with Nigeria. Thus, he has consistently championed the campaign for both.

    Sultan as Chancellor

    At his first convocation as the 6th Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University in   November 2010, His Eminence told the crowd that the current socio-economic indices in Nigeria were a clear indication that the country had begun to drift. He lamented the dwindling standard of education and the growing rate of poverty in the land despite the nation’s unprecedented wealth which he said had failed to aid national development.

    In his words: “…Corruption has emasculated our progress even as poverty and unemployment have pushed citizens to the brinks thereby fuelling social conflicts and inter-communal crises which have extracted heavy toll in both human lives and property….”. He went further by saying: “Persistent insecurity has generated panic and anxiety; our social and physical infrastructures are far from meeting the needs of the nation; the country appears to be adrift and at the core of all these is moral decay engendered by ignorance and greed.”

    To further emphasise his fervent belief in education, he also noted that the reform of the tertiary education sector could not be effective without putting in place the required progressive developments at the basic and senior secondary education levels. He insisting that: “our state governments, especially those of the North, must begin to realise the enormity of the challenges facing the education sector and take urgent and necessary steps to address these challenges.”

    That is a renascent Sultan for you, a man who is at the topmost echelon of the tree of comfort but feels so much concerned about the condition of the peasants who feel deliberately consigned to the weeding of shrubs at the bottom of that tree by the system in place.

    At home in Nigeria, he has never relented in his advocacy for good governance and denunciation of corruption and religious intolerance just as he has consistently campaigned for religious peaceful coexistence at the international fora.

    At Interfaith Conference

    When he was invited in January 2010 as a Special Guest of Honour to a religious seminar organised by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) with the theme: ‘Knowing Your Muslim Neighbour’, Sultan Sa‘ad Abubakar delivered an historic speech that reverberated meaningfully across the entire world. And in May, same year, he also invited the leadership of CAN to a special conference of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) held in Kaduna. The theme of that conference was: ‘Islam in the Eyes of the Christians’. He is the first Nigerian first class monarch ever to engage in such an interfaith affair at the national level and his speech on that occasion was also electrifying.

    Agenda

    In what looked like his royal agenda in respect of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, His Eminence rolled out at that conference certain fundamental programmes to the utter delight of all Nigerian Muslims. Please read an excerpt from his speech at the above mentioned Interfaith Conference as presented below:

    “….we initiated, as we had done for the Jama‘atu Nasril-Islam (JNI), a thorough review of the activities of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs [NSCIA] and an extensive reform of its structures.

    It is our firm belief that these reforms are not only desirable but necessary to reposition the Council to play its strategic role as the apex Islamic body in the country and to respond, effectively and meaningfully, to the challenges facing the Muslim Ummah in a multi-cultural and multi-religious society. We have had extensive consultations over the last one year and have received very useful inputs on the reform agenda from all the constituent bodies of the Council. Our strategic objectives in this exercise had been and shall remain the following:

    First is the promotion of Muslim Unity and Solidarity to accord the Ummah the ability to speak with one voice and to act and work together for the advancement of Islam.

    Second is the development of Education and Economic Enterprise, to enable the Muslim Ummah play an active role in the socio-economic life of Nigeria.

    Third is to promote peace and religious harmony both within the Muslim Communities and between the adherents of Islam and Christianity.

    Fourth is to establish effective linkage with Government, at local, state and federal levels, to safeguard the interest of the Ummah and to build consensus on those vital issues that bind us together as a nation….

    It is therefore our hope that as we bring this reform process to its logical conclusion, we will receive the support and patronage of the entire Muslim Ummah as well as the co-operation of all stakeholders, including state governments and indeed the Government of the Federation”.

    “….the task of overcoming Nigeria’s problems calls for sacrifice, dialogue and understanding; and all national stakeholders must overcome the myopia of greed and self-centredness to move this great nation forward and safeguard its strategic interests…. Unless and until we do that our nation will continue to be haunted by unholy alliance between fraudulent elections and illegitimate electoral outcomes the consequences of which we all know very well. We must break away from this vicious circle and confer on Nigerians the power and indeed the ability to decide, freely and willingly, who leads them at all levels of governance.

    “….there is also the urgent need for us to re-evaluate our conception of leadership as a nation…. needless to add, that there is no way we can make genuine progress as a nation when a significant number of our populace wallow in abject poverty unable to secure the requisite means for their sustenance and to cater for the health and educational needs of their families. Democracy must build a humane society capable of looking after the legitimate needs of its citizenry. For it to be truly successful, it must be able to bring real progress for all sectors of our diverse society.

    “Finally we must all work hard to limit the influence of wealth in our society and to support those values that promote social responsibility, excellence and hard work”.

    That is Sultan Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III a leader who knows the problems of his followers and associates with them in solving those problems.

    This column, ‘The Message’, hereby joins millions of other Nigerians home and abroad in saying CONGRATULATIONS to His Eminence on the eighth anniversary of His Eminence’s royal regale on the throne praying for Allah’s continuous guidance to accompany him in his life’s odyssey.

    Long live the Sultan! Long live the NSCIA! Long live Nigeria.

  • Happy New Year

    Preamble

    The appearance of today’s title in this column once in a year often looks strange to most readers since this is not January.  In Nigeria, like in most other African countries, the idea of ‘New Year’ is ignorantly believed to be peculiar to January which is the first month of Gregorian calendar. That is the effect of colonialism in our continent. From whichever angle it is viewed, European colonialism has a thick Christian coloration that still paints African culture in the rainbow of colonial tradition.

    Islam has its own calendar. And, like other calendars of the world, there is a beginning and an end for every Hijrah year. Unlike other calendars which are manmade however, Islamic calendar, otherwise known as Hijrah calendar, is divinely ordained. This is confirmed in chapter 9, verse 36 of the Qur’an as follows: “Surely, the number of months ordained by Allah when He created the heavens and the earth is twelve. Therefore, do not wrong yourselves in them….”

    The twelve Islamic months are as follows: Muharram; Safar; Rabiul Awwal; Rabiu-th-Thani; Jumadal Ula; Jumada-th-Thaniyah; Rajab; Shaban; Ramadan; Shawwal; Dhul Qadah; and Dhul Hijjah.

    The four months specifically designated as sacred months are the last four months of Hijrah calendar. They are Ramadan, Shawwal, Dhul Qa’dah and Dhul Hijjah. Some of these months have 30 days. Others have 29. No more, no less.

    Tomorrow (October 25, 2014) is the first day of Hijrah year 1436. It follows the last day of Dhul Hijjah which ends today. Dhul Hijjah is the last month of Hijrah calendar. It takes a well educated person to understand this and relate to it as such. This is what distinguishes Osun State Governor Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola from all other governors, especially in the Southwest of Nigeria. The declaration by him of public holiday for the event is a clear evidence of justice which had hitherto been denied to the Muslims in the state.

    To demonstrate similar justice, it is hoped that other governors in the region will follow suit as a mark of civility.

    Genesis

    Hijrah calendar took its name from Prophet Muhammad’s emigration from Makkah to Madinah in 622 C.E. The use of Hijrah calendar began when Umar Bn Khattab, the second Caliph, suggested that Islam should have its own distinctive calendar saying Hijrah, the Prophet’s emigration, was so much a significant landmark in Islam that it could not be overlooked. As a matter of fact, Hijrah is one of the three main factors responsible for the survival of the religion of Islam. The other two were the victory of the Muslims in the battle of Badr which was waged by Makkah pagans against them in Madinah shortly after the Prophet’s emigration. And the third is Allah’s great promise that became an everlasting fulfilment. That promise is contained in Chapter 15 verse 9 of the Qur’an thus:

    “It was ‘We’ (Allah) who revealed the Qur’an and We will preserve it…’ and who can doubt the Almighty Allah the Creator of the entire universe and its preserver”. But for these three fundamental factors, perhaps Islam or the Qur’an would have joined the legion of defunct religions. With Allah, all things are possible.

    Significance

    In Islam, the first day of the first Hijrah month (Muharram) is more significant than Mawlidun- Nabiyyi (the birth day of Prophet Muhammad (SAW)). The Prophet had existed for 40 years before ‘The Message of Islam’ came to him and nobody celebrated his birthday. Thus without

    ‘The great Message of Islam’ he would have had no cause to emigrate.

    And if he had lived for 40 years without being known in history before he became a Prophet, why should his birthday now take precedence over ‘The Great Message’ which made him the greatest man that ever lived?

    Basically Hijrah institutionalised three important aspects of life: social, economic and political. In the social aspect when the first revelation was made to the Prophet (SAW) a period of twelve (12) years was devoted by him towards inculcating the religion in the minds of individuals while no pattern of a collective life based on true religious concepts could be presented to the world. The status of the Muslim individuals in Makkah gave rise to the misconception that Islam, or rather, believing in the mission of the prophet was one’s personal affair. This was believed to pertain only to the hereafter which had nothing to do with people’s collective life.

    Social Effect

    It was only after the Prophet’s emigration (Hijrah) that people began to see Islam clearly as a way of life which paid attention to and reformed every facet of human existence. It then became evident that Islam was the religion that gave directions regarding almost every moment of a believer’s conscious life. Hijrah also enabled the Arabs in particular to see what a Muslim’s matrimonial home should be in a Muslim society. Hence, it was only after this event that the world could see the aspect of human social decency and decorum prescribed by Islam.

    The second reason for the importance of Hijrah is its economic significance which manifested in the lifestyle of the pioneer Muslims’ emigration to Madinah led by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) himself. The unsurpassable hospitality of the people of Madinah towards the Muslim emigrants did not only provide a new peaceful home for the newcomers.

    It also showed the hosts’ passionate self-sacrifice. And with Hijrah, the Makkan emigrants who became immigrants in Madinah vividly came in contact with advanced agricultural acumen and ingenuous artisanship never experienced before.  These resulted in an unprecedented economic revolution for the city. Since the hosts shared virtually everything they had with the immigrants when the latter first arrived, a lesson was learnt by the immigrants not to continue to be a burden on their brotherly hosts. Thus, every one of them adopted legitimate ways of earning righteous income.

    Moral Effect

    Initially, the Muslim Immigrants in Madinah worked as labourers in the fields, gardens and construction works. But later, they, being traditional traders, started small trading activities which brought them into an economic competition with the Jews of Madinah. One aspect of the economic revolution was that the Muslim immigrants paid the right price for every product they consumed since the Prophet had forbidden the practice of acquiring products on reduced prices in return for loans given to the artisans or to the land cultivators. The practice was prohibited because it was considered to be a form of usury.

    Thus, it was only after Hijrah that agriculture, industry and trade freely helped the Muslims to bring about an integrated, balanced and unfettered economy for the Ummah.

    Judicial Effect

    The third reason which made Hijrah a very important event is the political freedom for the Muslims. Before Hijrah, the Muslims in Makkah had no say in any matter, internal or external. They were a minority against whom the hearts of the majority were full of enmity simply because they were an insignificant part of the dominating unbelievers’ society in Makkah.

    It was Hijrah, therefore, that made the Muslims Masters of their internal affairs, external relations and matters relating to war and peace. If there was any disagreement between the Muslims and the non-Muslims, the final decision was to be made by the Prophet. This indicated a kind of autonomy to be enjoyed by the Muslims for the first time. And it was the nucleus of a city-state which, within a period of ten (10) years in the life time of the Prophet expanded to the entire Arabian Peninsula. It is thus evident that the event of Hijrah turned a few hundred Muslims resident in Madinah into a highly successful society.

    An erroneous act

    If the Nigerian Muslim leaders were adequately informed at the time they were negotiating religious holidays for Nigerian Muslim Ummah they would have asked for Hijrah rather than Mawlidun-Nabiyyi. Apart from coming into the world through birth like any other human being, there is nothing the birth of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) contributed to the unprecedented revolution called Islam. And, the Prophet himself did not believe in the aristocracy of birth which celebration of birthday is all about. That was why he (the Prophet) never celebrated his own birthday the way some Muslims do on his behalf today. What is more, the Prophet’s birthday is never celebrated in Saudi Arabia where he was born. What is rather celebrated in that country is Hijrah Day.

    Whereas Mawlidun-Nabiyyi is about the personal life of Prophet Muhammad alone, Hijrah Day is about Islam and the entire Muslim Ummah.

    While celebrating Mawlidun-Nabiyyi, you can only praise the Prophet and nothing more. But when celebrating the Hijrah day, you are celebrating not only the Prophet’s migration but also the triumph of Islam as the everlasting password of the Universe. That is why we exchange pleasantries by congratulating one another and by chanting the slogan HAPPY NEW YEAR!

    Compared to Hijrah calendar the Gregorian calendar is not only artificial but alien to Christianity. It was only adopted some centuries ago as a way of distinguishing the religion of Christ fromwhatever preceded or succeeded it. While writing about how Gregorian calendar came into existence, a British writer and newspaper columnist, Ben Snowden said in a descriptive article entitled ‘The Curious History of Gregorian Calendar thus: “September 2, 1752, was a great day in the history of sleep.

    That Wednesday evening, millions of British subjects in England and the colonies went peacefully to sleep and did not wake up until twelve days later. Behind this feat of narcoleptic prowess was not just some revolutionary hypnotic technique or miraculous pharmaceutical discovered in the West Indies. It was, rather, the British Calendar Act of 1751, which declared the day after Wednesday the second day of that month to be Thursday the fourteenth day of the same month.

    Other calendars

    Prior to that cataleptic September evening, the official British calendar differed from that of continental Europe by eleven days—that is, September 2 in London was September 13 in Paris, Lisbon, and Berlin. The discrepancy had sprung from Britain’s continued use of the Julian calendar, which had been the official calendar of Europe since its invention by Julius Caesar (after whom it was named) in 45 B.C.

    Caesar’s calendar, which consisted of eleven months of 30 or 31 days and a 28-day February (extended to 29 days every fourth year), was actually quite accurate: it erred from the real solar calendar by only 11½ minutes a year. By the sixteenth century, it had put the Julian calendar behind the solar one by 10 days.

    In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error: century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 400.

    If somewhat inelegant, this system is undeniably effective, and is still in official use in the United States. The Gregorian calendar year differs from the solar year by only 26 seconds—accurate enough for most mortals, since this only adds up to one day’s difference every 3,323 years.

    Despite the prudence of Pope Gregory’s correction, many Protestant countries, including England, ignored the papal bull. Germany and the Netherlands agreed to adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1698; Russia only accepted it after the revolution of 1918 and Greece waited until 1923 to follow suit. And currently many Orthodox churches still follow the Julian calendar, which now lags 13 days behind the Gregorian.

    The use of calendars

    Since their invention, calendars have been used to reckon time in advance, and to fix the occurrence of events like harvests or religious festivals. Ancient peoples tied their calendars to whatever recurring natural phenomena they could most easily observe. In areas with pronounced seasons, annual weather changes usually fixed the calendar; in warmer climates such as Southern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, the moon was used to mark time.

    Unfortunately, the cycles of the sun and moon do not synchronise well.

    A lunar year (consisting of 12 lunar cycles, or lunation, each 29½ days long) is only 354 days, 8 hours long; that is unlike a solar year which lasts about 365¼ days. After three years, a strict lunar calendar would have diverged from the solar calendar by 33 days, or more than one lunation.

    The Muslim calendar is the only purely lunar calendar with widespread use today. Its months have no permanent connection to any particular season. Muslim religious celebrations, such as Ramadan, may therefore occur at any date of the Gregorian calendar.

    To compensate for the difference in the solar and lunar year, calendar makers introduced the practice of intercalation (the addition of extra days or months to the calendar) to make it more accurate.

    Gregorian calendar

    Despite its widespread use, the Gregorian calendar has a number of weaknesses. It cannot be divided into equal halves or quarters; the number of days per month is haphazard; and months or even years may begin on any day of the week.

    Since the time of Pope Gregory XIII, many other proposals for calendar reform have been made. For instance, in the 1840s, philosopher Auguste Comte suggested that the 365th day of each year be a holiday not assigned to a day of the week.

    The French Revolution also made an attempt to introduce a new calendar. On October 5, 1793, the revolutionary convention decreed that the year (starting on September 22, 1792—the autumnal equinox, and the day after the proclamation of the new republic) would be divided into 12 months of 30 days, named after corresponding seasonal phenomena (e.g. seed, blossom, harvest).

    The remaining five days of the year, called sans-culottides were considered feast days. In leap years, the extra day (Revolution Day) was to be added to the end of the year. The Revolutionary calendar had no week; each month was divided into three decades, with every tenth day to be a day of rest. This clumsy calendar, however, perished with the French Republic because of its clumsiness.

    Conclusion

    Of all the existing calendars, only Hijrah has been generally acknowledged as unique in effect and in workability. In commemoration of the great occasion of Prophet Muhammad’s (SAW) emigration from Makkah to Madinah in 622 CE, both the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) and the Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria (MUSWEN) have sent messages of felicitations to Nigerian Muslim Ummah

    just as ‘The Message’ column also says HAPPY NEW YEAR!

  • Mazrui: A falcon flies

    Mazrui: A falcon flies

    Surely, man becomes a subject of talk after his demise; therefore, endeavour to remain a good talk among those you are leaving behind”.

    By an Arab poet

    Preamble

    Life is a pilgrimage from the unknown to the unknown. No one knows whence he emanates or whither he is bound. As humans, we only found ourselves on the earth without being able to retrace our steps back to where we were coming from. And we just discover that we are on a journey without being able to pinpoint our destination with precision.

    For people who can ponder, the journey of life is a mystery which only Allah can unravel. And the cycle continues ad infinitum.

    In the introduction to his autobiography entitled ‘My Odyssey’ published in 1970, Nigeria’s first President, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, made an allusion to this mystery in his highly philosophical theory about human life as follows:

    “Man comes into the world and while he lives, he embarks upon a series of activities absorbing experience which enables him to formulate a philosophy of life and to chart his causes of action. But then, he dies. Nevertheless, his biography remains a guide to those of the living who may need guidance either as a warning on the vanity of human wishes or as encouragement or both”.

    Observation

    Perhaps no other African intellectual of contemporary time exemplifies the above philosophical quote as much as Professor Ali Al-Amin Mazrui who died in Binghamton, United States of America early last Monday (October 13, 2014) and will be buried at the 900-year-old Mazrui family graveyard near Fort Jesus in his home town of Mombasa, Kenya, in accordance with his Will. His corpse is expected to arrive in Kenya today.

    For African men and women of letters and intellectual prowess, the name Ali Mazrui cannot sound strange. This household name was a super star that dominated the intellectual orbit of Africa like a colossus in the decades of the 70s, the 80s and the 90s. His vertical stance against the horizontal posture of most of his academic colleagues depicted him a role model of rare stature. He was Africa’s darling intellectual to which the literary world of the 20th century beckoned with impeccable historic laurels. He was the answer to many questions about Africa while alive and he will remain the question on the lips of many lettered African generations in death. In a nutshell, Mazrui was an issue of substance alive and he will remain so in death for many decades.

    Who was Ali Mazrui?

    Since his profile may look exaggerated in the writing of a distant journalist like yours sincerely, the real identity of this African colossus is better left to some other African journalists who knew him more closely. One of such journalists is BBC’s Frenny Jowi who, in reaction to Muzrui’s death just looked back at how the Kenyan academic and political writer influenced a post-colonial generation. Here is what he said:

    “Mr. Mazrui has been a household name in Kenya and beyond. Born in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa on 24 February 1933, some 20 years before the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonial rule (in that country), he always portrayed himself as a true patriot. In his series of essays On Heroes and Uhuru-Worship, he wrote as an African scholar deeply involved in the fight for the freedom of his people, expressing empathy with those on the front line of the battle against colonialists.

    “….Mr. Mazrui’s writings, though embedded in history, still resonate because he talks about the need to recognise national heroes, without worshipping them. They also gave insight into some of the greatest concerns currently facing the world as he wrote about terrorism and Islam”.

    Literary Works

    “In one of his books: ‘Islam between Globalisation and Counter Terrorism’, he explained how the religion was entrapped in the danger of rising extremism. “Even the very vices of Western culture are acquiring worldwide prestige”

    Throughout his career, he wrote numerous books and expressed strong opinions in widely published papers. In the 1970s, Mr Mazrui’s sharp criticism of the then-Kenyan and Ugandan regimes – led by Daniel Arap Moi and Idi Amin respectively – displeased the ruling class, leading to his exile in the US.

    Ali Mazrui lamented the growing influence of Western culture. At the time of his death, he was an Albert Schweitzer professor in the humanities and Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in New York.

    And to complete Jowi’s historical perception of Mazrui, another journalist (a female) and a columnist, Evelyn Musambi of Nation Media Group of Kenya   had the following to say:

    “He (Mazrui) wanted to become a jurist in Islamic law, as his father was the Chief Kadhi of Kenya in the 1940s. Though his father died when he was only 14, Prof Mazrui’s dream to follow his (father’s) footsteps was hindered by his poor results after secondary school in Mombasa, with other students going to Makerere University for further studies while he was left behind.

    His first job application was for a bank teller at Barclays, where he failed the urine medical test in 1948, though the diagnosis was later proven to have been wrong. Prof Mazrui was then hired by a Dutch multinational company, the Twensche Overseas Trading Company in Mombasa, as a managerial trainee, though his tender age denied him an opportunity to be employed after the training.

    He later was employed by the Mombasa Institute of Muslim Education (Miome) as a junior clerk and rose to be a boarding master”.

    Scholarship

    “His speech in 1952 in celebration of Prophet Mohammed’s birthday earned him a scholarship. Prof Mazrui, while still working at Miome, spoke at an event attended by the governor of colonial Kenya, Sir Philip Mitchell. He was later invited to chat with the governor, who asked him about his educational plans.

    He (Mazrui) spoke of his interest in legal studies and though the governor discouraged him from pursuing law, he recommended him for a scholarship, first at Huddersfield College in the UK to finish his secondary education, then to a British University to study for a bachelor of arts degree. He developed his writing and public-speaking skills through the media. He worked as a local correspondent for the Mombasa Times and the Arab Guardian along with hosting a weekly half-hour radio show in Sauti ya Mvita.

    In search of the Golden Fleece

    He (Mazrui) left Kenya in 1955 for Huddersfield College, where he met his first wife, Molly Vickerman. Prof. Mazrui and Molly met in a literature class and later married, siring three sons together. Prof. Ali Mazrui, as Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, was conferred with a doctoral degree (Honoris Causa) at a graduation ceremony. His first son, Jamal, was born in the year when Kenya became independent.

    Though Prof. Mazrui and his wife had moved to Uganda where he was working at Makerere University, his friends insisted that he had to name his son “Jamal” because it was close to “Jomo”, the first President of Kenya. His third son, Kim Abubakar, adopted his wife Kay Forde’s name to become Kim Forde Mazrui and has professional links to his father.

    The adoption of a wife’s family name was common in British culture, where a man from a lower-status family who married the only daughter of a higher-status family would adopt her family name.

    Kim wanted to be a lawyer like his father while still young, but he went into the scholarly world, rising to become a professor at the relatively tender age of 32 (in the year 2001). Ali Mazrui rose to the rank of full professor at exactly the same age of 32 (in the year 1965). Both father and son have never been assistant professors since they rose from lecturers to professors.

    And in 1986, he produced a nine-hour TV-series, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage”, which The People Magazine in its September 1986 edition described “as one of the most controversial series ever seen on American television.”  Incidentally, that was the programme that gave him the greatest fame of his life.

    Ali Mazrui married his second wife (Pauline Uti, a Nigerian teacher) while he was on a sabbatical leave at the University of Jos, Nigeria.

    Together, they had two sons, Farid and Harith. After their marriage, Pauline travelled to Mombasa in 1999 to meet Prof. Mazrui’s family.

    This was years after their marriage, as she had not acquired permanent US residence that would have allowed her to join her husband in that country. Mazrui lived with his grandson, Little Ali, who is Al’Amin’s son, after Little Ali’s mother, Jill, died of cancer in 2004.

    Professor Mazrui was awarded the national title of Commander of the Order of the Burning Spear (CBS), First Class, by the then President Kibaki because of his profession as an educator. Earlier, in 1986, he produced a nine-hour TV-series, “The Africans: A Triple Heritage”, which The People Magazine of Kenya, in its September 1986 edition described “as one of the most controversial series ever seen on American television.”  Incidentally, that was the programme that gave him the greatest fame of his life.

     Tributes

    Since the death of this legendry personality a few days ago, many tributes have poured in from various parts of the world, foremost among whom is His Eminence, The Sultan of Sokoto, and President-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, (NSCIA) Alhaji Muhammad Sa‘ad Abubakar CFR, mni. But only a few can be accommodated here. Please, read on:

    The Sultan of Sokoto:

    “I followed very closely, Professor Ali Al-Amin Mazrui’s academic brilliance for years. His ingenuous contribution to African cultural development through political history from Islamic perspective made such tremendous impression on me that I became convinced that an African can reach any height in human endeavour after all, given the right environment. As a professor of Political History and a product of Oxford University, London, this academic colossus stood out of the pack even among his Western colleagues and changed the hitherto perception of the Western intellectuals who believed erroneously that nothing good could come from Africa.

    In the three decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, he was the dominant academic towering stature of reference not only in Africa but also in Europe, America and Asia. His BBC programme of 1986 entitled ‘Africans: A triple Heritage’ which was copied by many other television stations around the world exemplified his ingenuousness in intellectualism. He was a teacher of teachers, a Professor of Professors and an intellectual of intellectuals, a rare academic feat that earned him the appellation of ‘Nwalimu’ by which he was well known. It is delightful that despite growing up among non-Muslims and interacting closely with them throughout his life, Professor Mazrui never deviated from the right path of Islam. His death on Monday, October 13, 2014 at the age of 81 has left a big vacuum not only in the African intellectual realm but also in the global social-cultural sphere.

    I heartily condole with the government and people of Kenya, his family and the academic community of Africa and pray the Almighty God to grant them all the fortitude with which to bear the agony and to maintain the footprint which he left behind”.

    Professor Ishaq O. Oloyede (a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, Nigeria and former President of Vice Chancellors of African Universities):

    “He was a passionate scholar who devoted his entire academic life innately to Islamic scholarship. Unlike many of his colleagues, he did not see Islam as a mere religious dogma meant for worship and rituals alone. He rather saw it as a profound philosophy divinely formulated to guide the way by which its adherents live on a daily basis.

    Though Professor Mazrui was not a specialist in Islamic Studies, his intellectual analysis of the religion vis a vis the contemporary Western  way of life came to open the eyes of his Western colleagues in the academia to the reality of Islamic religion. He was not a mere academic theorist as he lived by every word he expressed in the hoisting of Islamic banner as embedded African culture. We thank the Almighty Allah for endowing him with an Islamic life and for enabling him to die as a Muslim.  We pray Allah to repose his soul in eternal bliss”.

    Professor Oloyede is the current Secretary-General of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA).

    Toyin Falola, a Nigerian Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, United States:

    “….Mazrui’s intellectual assembly was a combination of the plurality of issues, the plurality of subjects, the plurality of perspectives, and the plurality of languages. But that plurality of languages was enfolded in what I have identified as the recourse to orality, the constant references to fragmented histories and memory. But as Mazrui deployed the English language, he needed to fracture and fragment himself, that is, his own being and body; his presentation of the past, grounded in orality, sometimes became “mythical.” Indeed, he often took the Islamic as “indigenous,” thus casting its impact in mythical ways as well.  This is where Mazrui not only betrayed his preference but his transparency: the Western and the Christian became patriarchal and masculine, in opposition to the innocence and femininity of the mythical.

    The dominance and status of the English language in Mazrui’s work are clear. The English language was used to present Africa to Africans and to the world, and to re-Africanize Africans in drawing from lost traditions. A blended language, the “Englishes” with doses of Swahili and Arabic revealed creativity but drew attention to curiosity as well. Creativity and curiosity raised questions not just about intellectual innovations, but the content of ideas. A language has such a powerful linkage with culture that writing in English does not mean a rejection of one’s cultural immersion. Let me illustrate this point with a citation from The Power of Babel…”