By Abimbola Adelakun (Punch)
Ordinarily, one should ignore the director of Muslim Rights Congress, Prof Ishaq Akintola. His predilection for inciting controversy via religious conspiracy, mostly for its own sake, makes him a public nuisance. However, we have been Nigerians for long enough to know religious matters easily escalate. Besides, inflammatory words thrown around amidst a pandemic can gain traction among people holed up in their homes and seeking distractions to keep their minds active.
Just lately, the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, suggested that ingesting disinfectants or taking in sunlight could treat COVID-19. One would have imagined that no one would be stupid enough to believe such a ludicrous idea, but some people did, and to their detriment too. With Akintola too, who knows which simpleton mind will take this his latest oddity seriously?
On Tuesday, Akintola authored a press statement that was widely reported in the media. He stated, “More disturbing is the rumour that the National Centre for Disease Control in the state has locked up its offices and its officials are not responding to distress calls. The only testing centre in Kano which is situated at the Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital has also been allegedly locked up. So, where did the NCDC get its figure on Kano? Something is fishy here. We are surprised that testing centres are almost nonexistent in the North. Is this a deliberate attempt at debilitating Northern population with its attendant impact on Muslim majority population in the country?”
Whatever he meant to achieve with that last sentence, framed as a rhetorical question, should be taken seriously. We should not dismiss his words as the rant of a man whose mind has been addled by the prolonged lockdown.
By now, almost everybody knows that Akintola has a penchant for religious propaganda, but this latest assertion goes too far. As we have seen this season of COVID-19, people look to their leaders for the moral meaning of these moments even when -as it turned out- some of those people do not know more than anyone else. Yet, before one knows it, one fellow somewhere will take up Akintola’s chorus. If they combust Nigeria on account of his unfounded claims, will he take responsibility for what he said?
There is a pattern to Akintola’s public engagement. He sees every issue through the narrowed prism of anti-Muslim conspiracy. His paranoia is so extreme it embarrasses even his fellow Muslims who see the world beyond his white-and-black world of colour blindness. The fact that Akintola runs an organisation that no other person publicly identifies with is instructive in itself. Does he really speak for Muslims, or he is a lone wolf trolling the public?
This time, just what did he plan to achieve by making such wild and frivolous accusations? Why is he waving the victim card on behalf of the Kano State Government? We know Kano could be in bad shape already, and the paucity of available resources might make their case grow worse soon. On Monday, the governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, told the BBC that the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 had done poorly by the state in fighting the epidemic. While he complained of a shortage of test kits and overall inefficiency of those who should be managing the situation, he was probably unaware their situation is not different from what obtains in the South-East and South-South as well.
If the NCDC has not done enough for Kano, Akintola should at least give them the benefit of the doubt and not spew silly conspiracy theories. From various reports, the NCDC is doing its best within the circumstances of limited resources and the ever-mounting rate of infection. If test kits are available, why would the NCDC be so malicious to keep it from Kano? What would they achieve by watching Kano people die needlessly? Are there no non-Muslims in Kano? Was Akintola aware that on Sunday, the NCDC, Director-General, Chikwe Ihekweazu, announced on Twitter that they were looking for RNA extraction kit to expand their capability at testing? Should that not tell him that those people are in short supply of resources and might not be able to do much for either Kano or others at present? Even if the NCDC, for some curious reason, hates Kano, they still have a responsibility to quench the epidemic outbreak there otherwise the entire country will go down with them. The enemy we are fighting does not discriminate based on ethnicity and religion, it is an equal-opportunity affliction. On this, our fates are tied together regardless of faith or politics, and it is in the collective interest to stem the disease everywhere in the country. Otherwise, we will all perish.
Given that Akintola has been a consistent apologist for the Buhari regime, you suspect his irresponsible accusation could not have been meant for the Federal Government. Although his allegation did not directly state who was behind the supposed grand plot to kill Muslims, but in that paragraph, it was the NCDC he accused of being unresponsive to Kano’s situation.
My interpretation is that the aim of the charge was meant for the NCDC. But why accuse them of genocidal attacks against Muslims? Well, it could be because the NCDC leadership is composed mostly of southerners (and probably Christians). He knows the kind of controversies that sell in Nigeria, a country where people have long been fractured along the fault lines of religion and ethnicity. I hope he realises that by making frivolous accusations, he is setting people up for terrible mischief. That is also why we need to push back against that line of thinking. It must not catch on. If some other people begin to read a religious and ethnic agenda to the work of the NCDC management, we will deal with a fate worse than COVID-19.
Finally, Akintola also wrote that “Nigerian Muslims are currently enjoying a majority status in the area of demography. We must avoid anything capable of decimating our population.” Just what kind of human construes people’s lives as worth preserving only so they can maintain their hegemony over others? First, there is no objective truth in his claim that Muslims are the majority. It is one of those many Nigerian puzzles that cannot be solved because the truth could come at a high cost to the longstanding beneficiaries of this unverified claim. We do not even know it for a fact that Kano State is as densely populated as the figures they tout during elections (and also, when benefits need to be shared according to population rate). We could have had a credible census in the days of President Goodluck Jonathan to enlighten some of this historical ignorance, but some of these reactionary forces stood against it. So, we continue to work in the dark, and people like Akintola can spin tales of what is not.
Second, other than the bragging rights that the so-called “majority status” has brought for the likes of Akintola, what other useful purpose does it serve? Of what use is a “majority status” that feeds only the elite who get to gallop the streets of Kano in Rolls Royce while millions of benighted almajiri children look on, the spectacle of the grandeur so dazzling, that their begging bowls fall from their hands? Does he suppose that Muslims live a better life in Nigeria than their non-Muslim counterparts? Do they access better resources than others? What exactly are they currently “enjoying”? If Muslim lives are just imperilled by the poor management of resources, then what exactly is the point of their “majority status”? Third, a man who looks at a fate that might befall a poor city like Kano and still could not see beyond a loss of voting strength is the kind of person we should all fear. He did not see the humanity of Kano people, just their thumbs and what it can do on a ballot paper. If that kind of person were placed in the position to determine who should live or die, it is almost too certain the criteria he will use to gauge whose lives matter.