The Confused Christian South and The Moronic Muslim North: A Politico-Religious Rebuttal to Religious Rubes -By Ismail Bello El-Ibrany

The theologic, cartographic structure of Nigeria has it that the northern part of the country is dominated by Muslims, while the southern section of the country is predominantly Christian. Hence, the Christian South and the Muslim North. But there are subordinate theologic regions. Within the dominant Muslim North, there is the Christian North, while within the dominant Christian South, there is the Muslim South. By theologic region, I mean a region dominated by a particular religion.

In other words, the North is mainly Islamic, while the South is largely Christian. This theologic landscape has a historical basis. History records that the first Europeans to reach the coastal communities of what is now called Nigeria were the Portuguese. They came for commercial and evangelistic purports. They arrived at the Bini Empire in late 15th century. The 19th century saw vast and varied Christian missionaries trooping to southern Nigeria area to “make disciples of all nations.” The trans-Atlantic slave trade and the activities of missionaries were the major factors for the spread of Christianity in the coastal communities.

While the northern region, particularly in Kanem, the first Kanuri Empire, became Muslims because of their contacts with the North African Arab Muslim itinerant scholars and traders in 9th century. The tran-Saharan trade was one of the drivers for the permeating of Islam in northern Nigeria. In Kano, a historically pagan state, Islam became the official religion in 14th century during the reign of the first Muslim ruler by the name of Ali Yaji (or Yaji I) who ruled from 1349 to 1385. The 1804-8 Usman Dan Fodio-led Jihad entrenched Islam and made it the most powerful religion in the region. So why all the noise about religion in politics in Nigeria when the theological map is inverted most southern Christians would be Muslims and northern Muslims be Christians?

Nigeria has never been religiously divided in its entire political history like in the just concluded presidential election. The political polarization takes a dangerous detour by openly partisan religious rhetorics from both dominant faiths―Islam and Christianity.

The divisive religionization of 2023 presidential polls was ignited by the APC’s choice to fly same-faith ticket in a multi-religious polity like Nigeria. I strongly condemn any same-faith ticket in any political party because it goes against the heterogeneity of Nigeria.

Although there are some Muslims who voted for Peter Obi and there are some Christians who voted for Atiku, Tinubu, or any other Muslim candidate. But some Christian leaders portray the election to their nescient followers in the Christian South that it’s a contest between Obi, a Catholic Christian, and Muslim candidates. This was a precarious mixing of religion with politics in a religiously plural, volatile polity that could spark a religious civil war.

Because the Christian leaders created a dangerous binary in the minds of their stupid audience that Obi was divinely ordained to be president and, therefore, any person who attempted to prevent him from becoming a president should be seen as a devil. Obi, in a widely circulated video on social media, shamelessly appealed to Christians or the “Church” to “wake up” as if it’s only Christians who would vote for him. Voting for a Christian candidate wasn’t a “Crusade” nor voting a Muslim candidate a “Jihad”.

The election wasn’t about the numerical power of Christianity and Islam in Nigeria as many merchants of religious bigotry would want us believe, but it was about the power of the voice of the masses against the oppressive political establishment.

There are only two religions in Nigeria: religion of the poor and religion of the rich. The political class and the rich have no other religion than money and power, while the religion of the poor is poverty and misery. The rich from both Islam and Christianity belong to the religion of richness and power, while the poor Muslims, Christians, and secularists belong to religion of poverty and penury.

That explains why Muhammadu Sanusi II, the 14th Fulani Muslim ruler of Kano, in one of his articles titled “Religion, The Cabinet and a Political Economy of the ‘North’,” writes that Muslims electing a fellow Muslim doesn’t necessarily translate to progress in Muslim population and neither Christians voting a Christian means bringing development to Christian community.

“Our recent history has shown that Islam is not necessarily better-served by Muslim Leaders, unless they are good Muslims. The arrests, detention and extra –judicial executions of Muslim Brothers by Abacha’s government are well-known to us,” the former CBN governor wrote in the undated piece published in a blog named www.gamji.com. “The humiliation of the Sultanate and the removal of the Sultan based on false charges are known to us. The arrest and death in detention of prominent sons of Islam like Shehu‘ Yar Adua (President of Islam in Africa Organization) and Moshood Abiola (Baba Adinni of Yorubaland) are known to us. All of these crimes, in addition to wanton stealing, breach of trust, abuse of office, nepotism and gross violation of human rights were perpetrated by a Muslim Head of State working with Muslim Officers in charge of his security apparatus. Should Muslims forget so soon, and have a nostalgia for that period of darkness and collective despair?” Leadership can succeed with justice and fairness, according to Muhammadu Bello, a son of Usman Dan Fodio, even if the ruler is an infidel, but it can’t succeed with injustice and unfairness even if the ruler is a Muslim.

Politicians in Nigeria deploy the instrumentality of religion to get―and perpetuate themselves― in power. It is because the politicians intimately know that Nigerians are madly religious people that is why they exploit religion to acquire power. And they do so by bribing their puppets, religious ‘scholars’, from both Islam and Christianity. While some confused Christian clergies were busy campaigning for a candidate of their faith, particularly in the south, and in Christian-dominated areas in Nigeria, some stupid sheikhs too were busy calling for voting a Muslim candidate, especially Tinubu, on the pulpit. Church and mosque pulpits have been turned into political grounds. The current political crisis between the Cross and the Crescent can cause a catastrophic conflagration to this country that can turn it literally into ashes.

With APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket “winning” the presidential election, at this rate, I fear that soon Jama’atul Nasirul Islam (JNI), an umbrella body for Muslims in Nigeria, will become a political party for Muslims only and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) will also become a political party for Christians only. This is a combustible religious division. This means most Nigerians are religious rubes. Our allegiance should be, first, to our mother (Nigeria).

In Arewa, Sani Yahaya Jingir, the moronic Muslim head of a faction of Jos Izala, a Wahabi persuasion sect in Islam, openly said he would vote for Muslim-Muslim ticket, thus he would vote for Tinubu and Shettima. He said voting them was a service to Islam.

Nigeria is a deeply religiously polarized polity. Arewa, the most hypocritically religious region of the globe, succumbs to nothing when it comes to politics more than religion. Rhetorical appeals to religion is the surest way to get to political power in the phoney theologic region.

All one (or a politician) has to do is to win over the Muslim clerical circle of the region known as Ulama, a crop of corrupt crook clerical club. They will clamber their pulpits and brainwash their politically credulous, cognitively subnormal audience into voting for such grubby politician. The Ulama are the spiritual leaders and control the Ummah, a Muslim community. The Ulama are the shepherds, while the Umma are the sheep. So the sheep follow where the shepherd (s) herd (s) them. One of the 48 laws of power, according to Robert Greene, says: “Strike the Shepherd, and the Sheep Will Scatter” (42nd Law). They shamelessly did that in 2015 general election for the so-called “Mai Gaskiya,”the autocratic ruler of the poverty capital of the world.

Although it’s not all northern Islamic clerics that are corrupt; there are few exceptions. Exceptions, however, don’t invalidate the rule; they prove it.

This is the highest stupidity that some Nigeria’s religious leaders have committed by influencing some of their asinine followers to vote for the religious leaders’ candidates. Allowing a clergy to guide one on who and who not to vote is what Immanuel Kant, a great German thinker, called “intellectual immaturity” ― that is, allowing others to do your own thinking for you. In politics, I call it “political outsourcing.” Even if Obi had won the election, he wouldn’t use the Christian codex as a constitution. Tinubu too will not use the Muslim central text as Nigeria’s constitution. If Jingir really believes that his endorsement and election of Tinubu and Shettima was a service to Islam, then why should he not advise them to fully implement Sharia throughout Nigeria? That would be a great service to Islam and Muslims.

But Shettima, the APC Vice Presidential running mate, in the aftermath and backlash that greeted the Muslim-Muslim ticket last year, he said, he was not going to serve a particular religion, but he was going to serve Nigeria and Nigerians. But Jingir went ahead and voted for candidates who wouldn’t serve Islam or protect its interest just because they are Muslims.

That is why Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, the Archbishop of Sokoto Diocese, said that politicians exploit religion to acquire political power, but cannot use it to govern. “The lesson here is that politicians will use religion to mobilise for elections, but they cannot use it to govern,” the Bishop wrote in an April 4, 2021 Easter Message titled “Nigeria: Before Our Glory Departs,” published in Premium Times, an online newspaper. Seneca, a Stoic Roman philosopher, said, in part and in fact, “…religion is regarded by the rulers as useful.” Religion to politicians in Nigeria is a means to an end, which is power. It is a powerful weapon of manipulating the masses in political sphere. Religion, region, race, ethnic group, or money are not qualities of a good leader. Competence, good track records, justice and fairness, physical and mental health, vision, and knowledge and wisdom are the qualities.

Religious rubes from both Christianity and Islam should know that Nigeria is, constitutionally speaking, a secular state. Religion has no business in government and politics and vice versa. Nigeria practices political secularism. What is political secularism?

Phil Zuckerman, an American professor of sociology and secular studies, in an August 28, 2018 article titled “What Is Secularism?”, defines political secularism as “ideologies and policies which seek to keep civic life free from religious domination or preference. That is, keeping government out of the business of religion and religion out of the business of government,” the professor continued expounding on political secularism in the article published in a blog called www.psychologytoday.com. “But what is important here is that this form of secularism is not necessarily synonymous with atheism or even anti-religion. Rather, it has to do with what place or status religion ought to have in government and civil society.”

Sadly, an attack on religious bigotry in Nigeria is often mistaken for an attack on religion. Nope. This rebuttal is a fulmination against religious bigotry. It is a warning not to mix religion with politics in a multi-religious, plural polity.

So it’s raw religious irrationality for some religious clerics to foist a candidate of their choice just because he or she subscribes to the religion they profess. That’s not democracy; it’s called theocracy. The mere political opinion of a cleric isn’t a fiat. So it doesn’t carry any weight. Look, why is it some religious “scholars” deploy the instrumentality of religion to help put some corrupt politicians in corridors of power, but won’t criticize such politicians when they oppress the poor?

No mixing of politics with religion and no fusing of religion with politics. Period! Some confused Christians, from both the Christian North and the Christian South, who day dream of establishing their own version of theocracy of Christocracy should find another country, not Nigeria. Equally, some moronic Muslims who imagine carving out an Islamic state in Nigeria should know that they have no place in Nigeria. They should vacate to Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan where Islamic theocracy is in action. Seneca was truly right when he, as I earlier quoted him in this article, said: “…religion is regarded by rulers as useful.” Now, if rulers regard religion as useful, then one would ask what do common people and the wise people regard it?

Ismail Bello El-Ibrany wrote from Gombe