In recent months, some loud protestations have been renting the air about alleged marginalisation of Muslims in Yorubaland and the need for the establishment of Sharia courts in the South-West.
When the recent bid got ignited, the Department of State Services in Oyo State quickly moved to douse the tension. Some Muslim leaders in Oyo town were vigorously announcing their intention to launch Sharia and flag off a Sharia Court to cater to marriage and civil matters in the ancient town. As the bid started creating discomfort within the Intelligence and political circles, the DSS waded in. Upon the intervention of the secret police, the group made a detour and agreed that establishment of courts are constitutional matters which can only be dealt with in line with constitutional provisions.
After that incident, you would think that the agitation about Sharia would take the back seat, so as to enable Nigerians in the South-West, like their peers across the country, focus on the pressing socio-economic challenges that confront everyone.
But that was not to be as proponents of Sharia in the South-West would rather go ahead to acquire higher-capacity megaphones, to distort the hearings of everyone and preach about Sharia implementation and what they called the Muslim marginalisation sermon. On Tuesday last week, a group of scholars under the aegis of Concerned Yoruba Muslim Scholars in Nigeria and the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria, organized a press briefing, during which they not only agitated for the establishment of Sharia in the South-West, but also accused the administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of meting out unfair treatment to Muslims in the South, especially, the South West. The group claimed that since President Tinubu was sworn-in on May 29, 2023, “Southern Muslims, especially South-West Muslims, despite being in majority in the region, have been faced with another dimension or worst form of marginalisation.”
I do not know what these scholars described as “another dimension or worst form of marginalisation,” but as a Nigerian from the South-West region, who has a good number of Muslims, Christians and Isese adherents in the family, I know that no Nigerian in that region has been barred from practicing his or her chosen religion. As scholars, I would expect them to come up with empirical data that speaks to the veracity of such a claim. But you won’t expect scholars to merely generalise on the issue of population, a matter that remained as blurry as the hamarttan weather and particularly unresolved in a country like Nigeria. Note that the country as we speak still relies on estimated population figures, following the disputes that trailed the last census exercise of 2006.
I do not know what the proponents have at the back of their minds such that they have been vehement on the allure of Sharia all this while, but I am sure they equally know that the sound bite on Muslim marginalisation is wrongly headed, especially if we are reminded that a Southern Muslim, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the chief executive of the country, Nigeria as presently constituted. A country that elected a Southern Muslim its president should not stand accused of marginalising the same Southern Muslims. Maybe we should add that the president equally ran on a Muslim-Muslim ticket to the presidency.
Whatever the position anyone may choose to push; this column will not join the sentimental religious argumentative. It will rather preach a calling by which religion is used to advance the good of the society and every inhabitant therein. The South-West has been known as the bastion of religious accommodation and tolerance, you would want to wonder why groups, with external and internal drivers are perpetually targeting the zone for their version of Sharia, which is blatantly at variance with what our elders call seria in Yorubaland. The seria of the Yoruba recognises equity and justice, it equally bodes well with the Omoluabi ethos of the Oduduwa children. It has no links whatsoever with the political Sharia introduced in parts of the North and which is being canvassed at this time.
When President Olusegun Obasanjo was confronted with the implementation of Sharia during his tenure, he was cautious and sounded philosophcal-‘if it’s not from God, it would fizzle out’, he had said.
Here what Obasanjo said about the political Sharia: “It was a real test for the leaders and the led in this country. The people said that I should have rolled out the tanks to crush it, but if I had done that, its effects would still be us today because Sharia was started on political ground by the young man in Zamfara State, claiming that some people were attacking him but that he wanted to be untouchable.
“But I had told him that if Sharia was not from God, it would fizzle out. He later cut a man’s hand for stealing, but after nine months, I asked him why he was no longer cutting thieves’ hands, and he replied that the cost of maintaining the one amputee was enormous.
“Before I left office, he (the Zamfara State governor) came to Aso Rock and embraced one beautiful lady before me. When I reminded him of Sharia, he told me, didn’t you say it would fizzle out?” Obasanjo made those comments in Uyo, Akwa-Ibom State, as reported by Nairaland on February 9, 2009.
It should come as a surprise that scholars, who should be leading the push for technological advancement of the country, would rather abandon all that science, arts and philosophy had taught them to lead the quest for the implementation of the Sani Yerima-type Sharia, whose legacies have been insurgency, religious intolerance, banditry, women subjugation and boy child exploitation in the name of Almajiri system and the like.
To justify the push for Sharia in the South-West, the scholars should be able to show us the good that is inherent in the political Sharia as witnessed in the North in the last two decades and compared that with what they see in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and even Kuwait, to mention just a few Islamic countries around. The North of Nigeria is the centre point of out-of-school children. Don’t mind the minister who was fruitlessly trying to distinguish between Almajiri children and out-of-school children. Of the 20 million estimated out-of-school children in Nigeria, how many are from the Northern states? Kano has 39 per cent of its children out of school, the highest national average. Rather than declare free and compulsory education, Kano is happily arranging mass weddings, where it would spend N2,5 billion. That should be one of the fastest ways to doubling the out- of- school population. I can also assure you that most of the children that roam the streets of Ibadan and parts of the South- West are of northern origin. They are either ferried across the states or children of beggars from the North who have made the South their abode years ago.
Rather than copy Sharia as dictated from Northern Nigeria, I expect the scholars in Ibadan to take a cue from Saudi Arabia, the centre of Islamic practice, which is modernising itself every passing day. Today, Saudi Arabia is regarded as a developed country and the largest economy in the Middle East and North African region. It has a GDP of over USD 1 trillion for its population that just hovers above 30 million people. Though Saudi Arabia is regarded as one of the world’s top oil producers and the country with the second largest oil reserves across the globe, it is diversifying its economy at a frenetic pace, with tourism, manufacturing, and technology being the key targets.
Unlike Nigeria, which has remained a mono economy since 1956, when it first pumped oil in Oloibiri, Bayelsa State, oil accounts for only 40 per cent of Saudi’s GDP, while it has amassed a Sovereign Wealth Fund that stands at $925 billion. Under the vision 2030 of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the country is pushing itself to the limits and has played host to global sporting events, apart from pushing its capacity in the world of football. Rather than keep its women indoors, Saudi also run a female football league alongside the thriving men football. Beside the determination to reduce reliance on oil, the country, a monarchy, has keyed to some landmark projects including the construction of the world’s largest solar plant, the building a futuristic USD 500 billion city in the desert, and the construction of the world’s tallest building in Jeddah, to spur tourism.
Of course, the story of Qatar, which hosted the 2022 World Cup is still fresh in memory. A country with a population of barely three million, with a GDP of $217 billion and a Sovereign Wealth Fund of $475 billion, making it the 10th largest in the world. Nigeria, which calls itself the giant of Africa, is looking up to Qatar to ensure progress in its downward-looking aviation sector. There is also the example of Kuwait, the country with an estimated population of 4.82 million out of which only 1.53 million are Kuwaiti citizens, while the remaining 3.29 million are foreign nationals. That country has a Sovereign Wealth Fund that ranks fifth in the world and stands at $1.029 trillion. Yes, these countries prohibit certain ways of life, but they provide exceptions under strict rules, they are a few examples of forward-looking countries that practice Sharia with clear conscience and conviction.
You would expect our scholars to pitch such examples, rather than the type of Sharia that keeps women out of the productive system and makes boys ready-made recruits for insurgents and bandits. In any case, what is there to adjudicate that the existing laws cannot cater to. Imagine the commotion that would be unleashed if the Isese people also start agitating the strict application of Sango, Ogun and the traditional judicial systems. Rather than seek avenues for religious dichotomy and segregation, forward-looking religious practices should be the focus.
(Published by the Sunday Tribune, February 16, 2025)
