Still on Nigeria’s clash of civilisations

The Nigerian Broadcast Commision is currently tongue-tied over a letter wrirten by the Sharia Board in Kano (Hisbah) to Cool FM Radio to stop using the term “Black Friday” in Kano State.

In the rest of Nigeria only the NBC has the right to regulate the activities of broadcast organisations until the dual ideology in Nigeria brought up Sharia rule in violation of the joke in the 1999 constitution that any law that is inconsistent with the provisions of the grundnorm shall be null and void.

The NBC Act states that the commission is the only organisation that has the powers to prescribe a code for broadcasters and sanction them.

On Thursday, the Kano State Hisbah Board, which is tasked with the duty of enforcing Sharia law in Kano State, wrote a letter to a radio station, in Kano State, 96.9 Cool FM, for using the term ‘Black Friday’.

Black Friday is an informal name for the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, which is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. The term is used worldwide to mean a day for promotional sales where goods are sold at discounted prices.

However,  a letter signed by Principal Executive Officer II, Abubakar Ali, on behalf of the Commander-General, Hisbah stated that Friday is regarded as a holy day in Islam and tagging it as ‘black’ is derogatory and would not be condoned.

The letter titled, ‘Letter of Introduction’ reads in part, “I am directed to write and notify you that the office is in receipt of a complaint for the conduct of ‘Black Friday Sales’ on November 27, 2020.

“Accordingly, we wish to express our concern on the tagging of Friday as ‘Black Friday’ and further inform you that the majority of the inhabitants of Kano State are Muslims that consider Friday as a holy day.

“In view of the foregoing, you are requested to stop calling the day ‘Black Friday’ with immediate effect and note that the Hisbah Corps will be around for surveillance purposes with a view to avoiding the occurrence of any immoral activities as well as maintaining peace, harmony, and stability in the state.”

This country has witnessed the raw deals a body like Hisbah is capable of metting in violent violation of the constitution and the further enforcement of anarchy the zealots are capable of rolling out as outlaws.

Nigerians would not forget in a hurry the 2006 sectarian roots over a cartoon in Denmark

The violence erupted as the Danish cartoonist whose drawings originally sparked the furore, Kurt Westergaard, used an interview with a British newspaper to defend the right to a free press – and said the Islamic faith provided ‘spiritual ammunition’ for terrorism.

More than two weeks after the controversy began, after-effects are still wee  felt around the world. The first protests in Nigeria flared in the provinces of Borno and Katsina: witnesses said hotels and shops were torched by protesters who ran wild after police fired teargas to disperse them.

The cartoonist at the heart of the row, who has gone into hiding after a bounty was put on his head and conducted his interview with the Glasgow Herald newspaper via written questions, said he had not expected such controversy but did not regret the drawings – the most controversial of which depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban – or their publication.

He defended it as ‘a protest against the fact that we perhaps are going to have double standards [in Denmark and Western Europe] for freedom of expression and freedom of the press’. The inspiration for it was, he said, ‘terrorism – which gets its spiritual ammunition from Islam.’

The Nigerian riots were the first protests in Africa’s most populous country, which is divided equally between Christians and Muslims. The worst of the trouble, involving 15 deaths, was in the north eastern state of Borno – a predominantly Muslim state with a sizeable Christian population. Troops were deployed in the state capital to restore order.

There was 2002 before 2006 when Isioma Nkemdilim Nkiruka Daniel, a Nigerian journalist with This Day whose newspaper article comment involving the Islamic prophet Muhammad sparked the Miss World riots and caused a fatwa to be issued on her life. She ultimately had to flee the country because of Jihadists. Only God knows her state of being now.

Then, the government of Nigeria’s Zamfara State called on Muslims to kill journalist Isioma Daniel over an article she wrote about the Miss World pageant, which was to have taken place in Nigeria.

The Zamfara state government has no authority to issue fatwa and the fatwa issued by it should be ignored by Nigeria’s Supreme Islamic Council.

Rioting that killed more than 200 people in the wake of the article prompted the organisers of the pageant to move the event from Nigeria to London.

Ms Daniel apologised for the article, which suggested that the Prophet Mohammed might have approved of the pageant.

The office of her newspaper, This Day, was levelled by angry Muslims during the riots in the heavily Muslim town of Kaduna.

A, fatwa (death sentence) was placed on the young lady by Zamfara government.

In 2012 when Mallam Nasir El Rufai in his attrition against Jonathan governmenf decided to use Jesus chrisf as his toothpck, the worst he got was a reprimand from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and not any threat to his life.

The harshest he got wad from CAN scribe, Mr Asake who  said there was a portion of the response that insulted the Christian faith, pointing out that the association is convinced Mr El-Rufai is set on a war path with Christians in Nigeria.

“We must state that unlike others, Christians do not shed blood, take life, kill or maim others at the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, we must warn El-Rufai not to take Christians for granted and to inform him that it is with great difficulty that we have had to restrain our youths from taking the law into their hands; which by extension means bringing El-Rufai to justice on account of his incitement and insult against the Christian faith.

“We may not be able to guarantee this restraint the next time he makes any other explosive statement that impugns on the Person of Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. He is, again, warned to desist from playing this dangerous and deadly game of Russian roulette.”

 

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