Of Bishop Kukah And Northern Muslims: A Response

Faruq Hussain

Since Nigeria returned to its present democratic dispensation in 1999, one figure that has remained a notable voice to reckon with is Most Rev. Father Bishop Hassan Mathew Kukah. He has cautiously romanced with governments at the center and stood by the masses if and when necessary. But not a few were taken aback and thrown into utter bewilderment when, shortly after President Muhammadu Buhari was sworn into office in May this year, Bishop Kukah, flanked by other members of the National Peace Committee addressed newsmen at the presidential villa on the need for president Muhammadu Buhari to forget about probing past corrupt public officers and follow ‘due process’ in his fight against corruption - an apparent plea to shield former president Goodluck Jonathan’s government from probe.

If you were befuddled and stupefied by Kukah’s gobbledegook, then wait for another purulent bunk from the respected Bishop in Osun State not too long ago. While delivering a keynote address titled, ‘The Muslim Agenda for Nigeria: Challenges of Development and Good Governance’, the cleric had in his usual soapbox pontiff style regaled his audience and newsreaders with a very shallow, divisive, parochial and intolerant analysis of the Boko Haram menace, which if taken in its totality represents a microcosm of a larger ideological and philosophical challenge that must be quickly addressed by all concerned stakeholders if Nigeria is to be rescued from a cataclysmic precipe. Can we look at a number of these ill-conceived issues?

In a crass display of ignorance of the genesis of terrorism which is not limited to Boko Haram, Father Kukah attributed the senseless agitation of Boko Haram to the “promise made by northern leaders to ensure the total implementation of Sharia law”, forgetting that from time immemorial, terrorism in its real sense has never been about adherence to Islamic faith but a radioactive desire by blood-thirsty extremists to take control of territories and impose their demented belief on the larger populace, as evident in the hoisting of flags by Boko Haram during the last administration and the established hegemony of ISIS in the middle-east.

Bishop Kukah also asserts that “they (northern leaders) came to power on the basis of a democratic society but they turned around and declared Sharia to generate a false consciousness among the poor that they want a theocracy... northern leaders failed to explain to the poor masses that Sharia law and democracy could not co-exist.”

Bishop Kukah’s display of sheer ignorance reminds one of the Sharia Debate days when commentators, pretending to be knowledgeable and unbiased hauled all sorts of venom against the then Zamfara State government for seeking to broaden the scope of application of Shariah law in the state. Without being hypocritical, Bishop Kukah, whose diocese is domiciled in Sokoto should know better than most of his ilk that a broader application of Sharia law is a dream of most Muslim northerners because it represents a reflection of the Islamic faith they practise. One then wonders on which premise Bishop Kukah is basing his outlandish allegation that the application of Sharia law in the north only represents the ‘selfish aspirations of its leaders’. On the scandalous claim that democracy and Sharia law cannot co-exist, it is saddening that one will have to start educating Bishop Kukah on the freedom of people to choose which law is most suitable to them and the concomitant successes recorded in that regard in the same northern part of Nigeria is discernable even to the unlettered.

Not done with his cherry-picked and knee-jerk approach to serious national and even international issues, Bishop Kukah took on innocuous Muslims who have rightly renounced Boko Haram as terrorists masquerading as Islamic adherents and not in any way representing the larger Muslim community. According to Kukah, “…they (boko haram) are your own children. You must take responsibility for what has made them what they are today and to the rest of the society…they claim they have been inspired by the Qur’an and no other holy book. They say they want to build an Islamic state. So they are Muslims…” What could have been more unfortunately ludicrous and ridiculous from a respected Bishop at a time when he should be preaching religious cohesion and tolerance than such ill-informed and prejudicial balderdash? Is Bishop Kukah so recumbent and derelict in his duty as a Bishop that he failed to understand the revered practise that adherents of religious faiths should endeavour to study the Holy Books of other religions so as to have a more holistic and universal view of how religious tolerance cannot be dispensed with? Because if that were not to be the case, one would have expected Bishop Kukah to be in tune with Qur’anic verses which strongly condemn those who are intolerant of unbelievers in the message of the Holy Quran. Or need we remind the Bishop that divine revelations contained in Exodus 34:10-15; Numbers 31:15-18; Samuel 15:1-3 and Deuteronomy 20:1-16 (which he believes in) had better be left unattended to if we really are serious about sustaining a peaceful co-existence amongst Nigerians and the world in general?

Determined in his treasonable quest to resurrect painful memories and cause disaffection amongst the Nigerian people, Bishop Kukah in his stone-age retarded wisdom, noted that the “kidnapping of the chibok girls and the use of girls as sex slaves in the North were in line with the ideology that a girl, who is still adolescent, could be married off to an older man.” He further asks, “should we pretend that a society that allows the forced marriages of its young daughters could frown on the idea of a group kidnapping and forcing young girls into sexual slavery? ISLAM ( emphasis mine) should have an honest look at the mirror and have an internal discussion.” But for the allusion to the Chibok girls, Bishop Kukah’s opposition to Islamic early marriage can easily be generalized and dismissed as the ranting of a disgruntled and demented soul which has failed to accept the reality of everyone’s right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. But doing so will amount to treating the symptoms and leaving the disease unattended to because as noted earlier, every single point made by Bishop Kukah in his address represents a bigger picture of how he sees every northern Muslim: terrorists, kidnappers, violent paedophiles and all whatnot. That is the best way to describe his invented nexus and psychotic correlation between early marriage in Islam and kidnapping or sex slavery by mindless bigots.

The question of why Boko Haram is headquartered in the North and not in other zones of the country, as posed by Bishop Kukah and that “Boko Haram, its disciples and victims are localised to northern Nigerian, should be instructive”, is at best symptomatic of the level of dearth of knowledge and paucity of basic logical thinking exhibited by even those whom we look up to for navigating the course of rationalisation of ideas and thoughts in Nigeria, which on the long-run, the Buhari administration will have to thoroughly address in order to set this country back on the right thinking track.

Pray, if Bishop Kukah and his ilk are given a higher platform to preach and air their views on topical national issues, cornucopious damage would have been done before the nation realises it is been led by religious bigots whose ultimate goal is to see them drown in a terror-infested and bigot-driven abyss.

It will therefore not be out of place to conclude that there is hardly any difference between Bishop Kukah and Boko Haram extremists for they both see Islam as an avenue to achieve their inordinate objectives at the detriment of helpless and hapless Nigerians. In sum, I take solace in the words of the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II when he noted, more than a decade ago that but by far the greatest problem facing the country is prejudice and ignorance, and inordinate desire to cry wolf when where there is none. Of this Bishop Kukah is guilty.