By Olayinka Olaiya
“The message is that if we let Bola Ahmed Tinubu fall, along with his running mate Kashim Shettima, then it is not they who have fallen, it is like Islam itself that has fallen.” – Dikko Umar Radda, Katsina State APC gubernatorial candidate’s message to the people of Funtua Zone through his representative October 2022
The statement captured on camera is one of various blackmails Nigeria’s uncreative and unaccountable politicians use to force voters to their side.
It is becoming more evident that keeping children out of school and other policies hurting education in Nigeria are deliberate. There are elites, especially in the North, who are deliberate in their plans to make sure the poor masses remain ignorant and unable to think for themselves. The region where great leaders at independence pursued a program of fast education of the people to be able to compete favourably with the south and the rest of the world has been turned back from the visions of leaders like Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna who searched for and handpicked future leaders; Aminu Kano, a teacher who tried to revive enlightenment among the masses; or founding fathers like Sultan Muhammad Bello, a great writer and author. They prefer to empower their youth with wheelbarrows, canoes, shoe cobbler toolboxes, and even weapons, but never education, both secular and Islamic.
But the education issue can wait for now as we look at another heinous application of the brainwashing policy during the time it was designed for: election season.
When the campaigns for elections come around in Nigeria, be prepared for junk thinking, the most stale and absurd reasons to support candidates, and the corresponding, preprogramed herd mentality. It is the time to be let down by those you expected to be of the highest intellect, a time to become one of the few unreasonable idiots that’s swimming against the tides, and, of course, a time to avoid arguing because you will only look more stupid trying to use logic, reasoning, facts, or common sense. It is yes time. Drink from the blood river, catch the virus and join the herd.
Our politicians overuse anything that divides us during elections. They target those things at every level and make sure they distance themselves from matters that affect every one of us. This is more important if these candidates are from political parties or groups that have held power before and failed the people or are still failing the people. They know what to tell their next victim whom they were at the point of slaughtering to make him/her choose to be slaughtered by them rather than be rescued by the opposition.
Statements like ‘it is better to suffer on your own than get freedom from someone of a different tongue or religion will offer you’ are common, as if Nigerian politics were derived from or guided by the rules of any religion at all.
Stop selling your tribal person cheap by supporting another. Nobody will value you like your tribal man. You can see them too supporting only their own. These are common arguments for candidates by friends and relatives. One has no option but to agree in appearance and let the counselling session end. It’s never going to end reasonably or logically after all.
Leading candidates for the coming 2023 elections have been using religion, region, and ethnicity to further their ambitions, and there have been blaming, accusations, and counteraccusations across the divides.
Of the top three candidates so far, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP has had the least cases of using divisive tactics in his campaigns, although he has been dragged a few times into religious rages, including after the murder of a Christian student in Sokoto, to which he responded in a hasty and confused manner, mixing his real intentions with the restrictions of his ambitions. The Labour Party’s Peter Obi has been accused of patronizing churches too much, as if he expects the churches to drive him to success. The biggest of the three and the candidate of the ruling APC is rolling in too many scandals of ethnic and religious blackmail. His actions and reactions have affected other candidates at different levels of the campaigns, federal, state, and local as well as across parties.
Bola Ahmed Tinubu is also the subject of this matter. Right from the beginning and against all cautions, he chose a Muslim running mate. He himself being a Muslim. This decision, in a country where citizens perceive justice, fairness, and equity from the government, shouldn’t be an issue. But this is Nigeria. Here the most important thing is ‘who you know. That is your social network. It is never your competence, experience, or qualifications. The latter can also be procured simply through your network. Nepotism, cronyism, and sycophancy pervade all our social sphere so much that even state executives have to use their connections to get their states’ rights from the central and federal government. Same for businesses. It is a culture and the custom that you have to know somebody, bribe them, or lick their asses to prove your loyalty before you get what’s due to you, even if it is for their benefits too.
Therefore, under this kind of system, who gets what is important, and who man’s what position is even more important, hence the struggles for posts and turns.
The Muslim-Muslim ticket is done. The next move is to blackmail Muslims into voting massively for the ticket. The Islamic public must see that only this ticket is double sure to favour Muslims, as all other teams of presidential candidates and their running mates are mixtures of Christians and Muslims, irrespective of which religion the presidential candidate is and which religion his deputy professes. This is just too low.
In the past, Nigerians have supported candidacies of same religion running mates in the past. They overwhelmingly supported Moshood Kashimawo Abiola and Baba Gana Kingibe’s tickets. While the tickets of Nuhu Ribadu and Fola Adeola weren’t opposed, it is noteworthy that Mr Tinubu was the major sponsor of the second ticket under the ACN. It is safer to stop highlighting the religion of the candidates and focus on good manifestos and how the aspirants can take Nigeria out of our many problems and into peace, stability, and prosperity.
Katsina State, where the statement was made, belongs in the most likely region to hear such statements. The immediate past governor of the neighbouring Zamfara State blamed the outbreak of meningitis in the state on citizens’ sins, especially fornication, in a show of holier than thou, ignoring the fact that the corruption of his class leads to poverty, which in turn leads some people to fornication. Both Zamfara and Katsina are also the most affected by banditry, terror attacks, and kidnappings recently exposed to have been exacerbated by ethnic divides in documentaries made by the BBC and Daily Trust. Another very important issue to which authorities rashly reacted rather than responded. After threats and sanctions on the media houses, there have been no plans to resolve the issues raised. Although the great majority of citizens in the area are Muslims, it is still a terrible choice of tactics to use to get support for candidates. It shows how politicians have been mismanaging differences among the people. If all citizens were Muslims, there may still be sectarian differences and there are going to be supporters of some other Muslim candidates. Using the line means supporters of Atiku Abubakar PDP, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso NNPP, Hamza Al-Mustapha AA, Kola Abiola PRP, Malik Ado Ibrahim YPP, Yusuf Mamman Dantalle APM, all Muslim presidential candidates, are not only infidels but enemies of Islam since the fact that they want Islam to fall automatically designates them as hypocrites.
The 2023 election campaigns have inexorably reached places of worship, including mosques, prompting some religious leaders and organizations to issue strict warnings to their followers and members, respectively, to keep partisan politics out of their names, organizations, societies, and so on.
It is unfortunate if Muslim leaders, in particular, can forget the pain Muslims are still passing through so easily for whatever reasons or gains. Some leaders actively campaigned for Muhammadu Buhari’s candidacy in 2014, blackmailing opposing or cautionary voices and issuing nonreligious rules under the cover of the religion, condemning the outgoing Goodluck Jonathan administration, who was not a Muslim on one hand and promoting Muhammadu Buhari even as a divinely ordained choice. Four years later, some of them have been disappointed as unemployment, poverty, insecurity, and other issues escalated under their anointed candidate who now seems helpless but insisted he is in charge, most successful and turned to accuse citizens of ingratitude. Some Ulamas repented for preaching that a particular human was destined to bring solutions rather than trusting in Allah, but some changed faces and told the people not to blame the government for their cries. They claimed it is un-Islamic to complain about leaders, it is a sin to criticize the leader, and Islam prohibits protests of any kind. Every option they could exploit to suppress the people was deployed. They forgot how they not only blamed, criticized, and supported protests against the previous government; the #OccupyNigeria protests, the biggest ever seen in Nigeria, brought the country to a standstill, but went as far as cursing the leaders in congregation prayers.
In a country where Islam is widely misunderstood, it is the responsibility of all Muslims to separate the religion from dirty politics and promote the teachings, particularly on community and neighbours, while recognizing role models who demonstrate true Muslim characteristics in their lives and work.
If all Nigerian Muslims fail, only 4% of world Muslims have failed, but in what?
To correct the statement in the discussion, we could have said that if Tinubu and Shettima’s ticket fails, then Nigerian Muslims have failed, but that too is null. Aspiring to a position and failing does not make the aspirant a failure; it is getting the position but failing in the role that is a true failure, and that is what Muslims should fear. Islam can’t be sacrificed for the selfish ambitions of a few.
Coincidentally, the use of the word “fall” seems to be popular in the APC circle. Tinubu himself said Muhammadu Buhari fell (lu’le) three times while seeking election to Aso Rock Villa before he, Tinubu, supported Buhari to finally get the seat in a speech that immediately went viral and got ingrained into the Nigerian Yoruba vocabulary. Then here comes a warning to fellow Muslims not to allow Tinubu himself suffer his (first) ilu’le.
