THE Sharia hullaballoo allegedly originated from a bigoted professor who at a meeting with his benefactors mooted the introduction of Sharia to the South-West. He was immediately honored with an Islamic title to express their imprimatur. He has presumably been mandated to ensure full implementation of Sharia in the South-West. Little wonder he is pursuing this agenda with unparalleled zeal, thus consolidating his position as their most worthy grunt. One would have thought that with his level of enlightenment and educational attainment, he would demonstrate a great sense of rationality in his utterances, so much the more, on a very sensitive religious matter as Sharia. It is bewildering therefore that a man of his caliber would make this despicable and ridiculous submission in which, he equated unconscionably, sustainable peace with Sharia practice on a public television programme. Is there any positive correlation between Sharia implementation and peace sustainability anywhere it is being practiced, be it Nigeria or any part of the world? I believe that he is deliberately manipulating information to shape a narrative that serves his interest or agenda. The southwestern part of Nigeria for centuries had developed its homegrown variant of Islam, before the destructive and violent brand, for the promotion of camaraderie, tranquility, good neighborliness, and peaceful coexistence among its people. Consequently, we have lived harmoniously on that premise which some jaundiced and demented elements have sworn openly to disrupt or truncate.
While growing up in Lagos, I witnessed excitedly a naming ceremony of a Muslim neighbour where the Christians were invited to conduct the naming ceremony first, which was immediately followed by the Muslims. Such was the camaraderie and the conviviality in existence among our people that a bigoted professor and his collaborators are striving relentlessly and acrimoniously to destroy. The time to cure this cancer of bigotry and terminal delusional disorder is now. Our people are not known to degenerate to this level of abominable depravity such that they would remain unfazed by the killing of their kinsmen. I alluded to this in an earlier article. The predecessor of this prejudiced, dogmatic, opinionated, and Christian-hating professor never agitated for Sharia implementation in Yorubaland. What I find very disturbing and unacceptable is his inordinate desire to remain a perpetual stooge of the caliphate or Sultan to the detriment of his people.
The advocate of Sharia should be cognizant of the futility of dependence on a mortal man whose throne recently became very shaky. Furthermore, the man harbors unexplainable animosity against Christianity including his people who are adherent of the faith, remains insensitive and unperturbed by senseless killings of his people by those he voluntarily and foolishly worships. One would have expected that by his religious inclination, he would toe the path of honesty and transparency in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation such as ours, vis-à-vis his national assignment, but he is systematically eliminating Christians from the organization which is tantamount to religious cleansing. The advocates of Sharia in the South-West have by their actions constituted themselves into despicable saboteurs, renegades, and dissidents whose major preoccupation is to mortgage the destinies of our people for their religious aggrandizement. A good example is llorin, a once viable Yoruba-dominated metropolitan city that has been converted to an Emirate in which the Yoruba Obas, as recently demonstrated by one tattler from Osun State, have been made subservient and subordinated to the Emirate, corroborating an earlier proposition that Sharia implementations are a continuation of northern hegemony cloaked in religion. This is the reality that these bigoted professors and their collaborators in the South-West are pretending to be unaware of. If the Fulanis are willing to embrace religious tolerance and inclusivity, then Yoruba Muslims should be permitted to lead prayers in their mosques nationwide.
We must remind ourselves of the atrocities perpetrated by nomadic herdsmen and their ilk all over Nigeria. For so many years and up till this very moment, the Southern Kaduna Christians have been subjected to genocidal assault by these people. Similar atrocities are still being carried out against Benue and Plateau State indigenes with the sole aim of expropriating their land. Furthermore, the clueless Muhammadu Buhari regime was an anti-climax where bandits invaded the South-West, maiming, killing, raping,kidnapping, etc, in an unprecedented manner. In addition to that, for the first time in the history of the Yoruba, the bandits positioned themselves strategically in a Catholic church, disguised as worshippers and ruthlessly massacred men, women, and children with impunity. The perpetrators are still at large and these bigots who witnessed all these genocidal atrocities against their people expressed no iota of condemnation. Also in the North, an innocent Christian lady by the name of Deborah Samuel was burnt alive for daring to voice opposition to a WhatsApp platform that was turned into a religious platform, with the perpetrators engaging in wild celebration and jubilation afterward; while one of them went a little further by enthusiastically and with impunity displayed the atrocious instrument with which they carried out the deadly act on television. Despite this glaring and incontrovertible evidence, the perpetrators have neither been apprehended nor prosecuted. In all these, advocates of Sharia in the South-West remained silent in the face of injustice.
It is the same violent, destructive, and atrocious Sharia practice that our brothers are planning to export to Yorubaland, to enforce a form of Islam in which human lives are of zero, inconsequential, negligible value. They indeed deserve serious, rigorous, and highly meticulous medical examination.
- Okunomo (PhD) is Chairman, Christian Right Watch of Nigeria.
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