The Politicization of Religion in Northern Nigeria and Its Effects on the Nigeria Federalism
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
- To identify the immediate and remote causes of the politicization of religion in Northern Nigeria.
- To identify the implications of this development oil the Nigerians federalism.
- To examine to what extent this phenomenon has undermined national integration and unity in Nigeria.
- To proffer possible solution and make recommendation to government.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Rev. Fr. Mathew Ilassan Knkah, a Northern Christian from Kaduna State and former General Secretary of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria expressed rude chock on the politicization of religion in Northern Nigeria where yon have Christians and animists, although in the minority he said:
What worries me about this whole issue of Sharia in Northern Nigeria is that politicians now preach it instead of the council of ulamaa1.
He cautioned however that such politicians were playing with a under-box which he contended was tantamount to a dangerous game with grave consequences not only on the Northern part of the country but the entire nation.
Rev. F. R. Kukah argued further (hat. the issue of religions politics and the conflict it engender was not a battle between Christians and Muslims but a conflict generated by certain political figures to score their political goals.
In his book, Religious, Politics and Power in Northern Nigeria, the legacy of the Sokoto Jihad, religion as a factor in the Northern hegemony and the political implications of” the Sharia question among other lie contended that the issue of religion in Northern Nigerian is to maximize its age-long method of political intrigues and manipulation with a view to displacing (lie challenges within and without the North to interest.
He said:
In view of new political developments over which they had no control, the ruling class sought means to negotiate its way by using religion as a means of retaining its claims to being (lie legatees of” the Kaduna and defender of Islam and the North.
Reaching to the furor generated due to the introduction of the Sharia legal system from a positive prism, Sani Mustapha says that the essence was for the upliftment of humanity and also for the eradication of corruption, bigotry and independences.
However, Adeleye agues that the Jihad of Usman dan Fodio (195-1-1817), the Fulani scholar who founded the Sokoto caliphate has been the local point of the history of Islam in-Nigeria, but the undue emphasis on the centrality and dominance has a source of consternation among other Muslims, Christians and scholar in what made up the former northern Nigeria.
The Protagonists have argued that a monolithic view of Islam in the Northern states has been the reflection from the outsiders’ mirror of ignorance and secondly that the greatest threat to political, social and spiritual stability in the northern slates lies, not, with non-Muslims, but with the ideological contractions among the new elite within the area.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH DESIGN
The survey research design method will be used to carry out this study. It will help to obtain information about variables and it will afford the research the opportunity to obtain general assessment of options, attitude or feelings of respondents about a particular problem.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The method to be employed by the researcher will be helpful in extracting the necessary information for the study. Sources of information will consists of:
- Primary source of information which will consists of information gathered from questions answered by the respondents who were administered with questionnaire to give responses in relation to the research topic.
- The secondary source however will extract relevant information gathered in available diverse literature materials that are closely related to the topic of research. The relevant information will be extracted from speech papers, journals, magazines, textbooks, newspapers (the nation, the guardian, vanguard, and others), Tell, Newswatch and periodicals that effectively discuss related issues of religion politicization in Nigeria.
- Other source of information will be based on the researcher’s personal information accumulated over time through experience as a devoted Christian in Catholic Church.
QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN
The questionnaire is designed such that it consisted of structured questions. However the use of questionnaire is inevitable, because it gives the respondents the freedom of responding well to the questions, without the undue influence of anybody including the researcher. They fill or supply the answers by themselves and this made it possible for the simple random sampling method to work as respondents all have equal chanced of being selected.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
This chapter deals with the analysis of data collected from respondents and discussion of the findings. The purpose of analysis is confirm or invalidate the hypotheses that have been put forward. Questions put forward to the respondents were structured in such a way that would facilitate either confirmation or rejection of the hypothesis by the respondents.
One hundred questionnaires were distributed, but only ninety-two were eventually returned and were properly filled out by the respondents.
This Chapter is further sub-divided into two parts:
- Presentation of data gathered in frequency tables
- Hypothesis testing
This table shows the sex distribution of both male and female respondents. The number of male who responded to the questions on questionnaire is 60 (65%), and that of female respondents is 32 (35%).
This shows that more male are administered with questionnaires, showing that they are not deprived because of religious belief unlike their female counterparts.
This shows the age distribution of the respondents. The above data shows that most of the respondents are in 29 – 39 age-group with 50 respondents, representing 54% and those within age-group 18 – 28) is 33 respondents, representing 36% and those whose age is 40 years and above is 9 respondents, representing 10%.
CHAPTER FIVE
SUMMARY, RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS
SUMMARY
By way of summary, it may well be that political Sharia (Islam) is a serious business in Nigeria, which will mean that we have under-estimated its inner resilience and force. It is that the sophistication of the new Ulamas hide the reality; that the Sharia issue, largely driven by Saudi Arabia or Libyan petrodollars, is merely a show off; a job for the boys, a justification of sorts of the huge foreign funding or to forestall political mistakes of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections and the ‘power shift’ of May 29 1999. There is no doubt that the streaks of both positions are at work.
There is however very important formal and informal ties that bind orthodoxy and heterodoxy on the one hand and the two and the state on the other-ties that cut across class and resulting often in playing the politico-religious name on a more or less level ground. And the state knows that to do-enlightened self-interest and self-preservation, among other factors, noblesse oblige that is when the ground begins to slide its levelness and evenness. And, of course there are millions of Muslims in the South and millions of Christians in the North who are there and ready to help the state, however, otherwise irrelevant, in achieving this lofty objective.
However, Rev. Fr. Matthew Hassan Kukah argued that democracy as a project “will not be sustained by any grandiose supplicatory religiosity which continues to call on God to take control of our problems on our behalf’1. He wondered why political engineering, democracy in Nigeria has succeeded in giving Nigerians “the right to be irresponsible, lawless, vengeful, violent down right hostile towards constituted authority”2.
To all intent and purpose, the exhumation of the Sharia legal system at this period of the nation’s political history is found not to be on pursuit of religion. Rather, the current trend is seen as a deliberate attempt by a callous few to subvert the democratic process and by implication sabotage the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo because he is a Christian, a Southerner and an envisaged stooge, puppet, portage and surrogate who has also carried out superficial socio-political changes that cannot be coped with. It is strongly believed that if Sharia is unmasked the under belly will reveal that the issue is about power and control.
Even among the Moslem, it is the poor, voiceless, and powerless that would suffer the adverse consequences of Sharia, for in the North, there is an entrenched oppressive structure that puts the poor at the receiving end, a situation more difficult to dismantle even with Sharia and ipso facto, these people swing of inexorably in the pendulum of hopelessness, voiceless, despondency, disenchantment and disillusionment.
Yet another finding of this research project is that Sharia is an agent and instrument of discrimination, deprivation of women, gender inequality, segregation, human rights violation, confinement (of women in the purdah), denial of opportunity and alienation. This is as a result of the denial of women’s freedom of movement including getting circular jobs (purdah system), mobility and association. Non-Muslims in a Sharia society are treated as unequal and second-class citizens. ‘The right to modern or Western form of education is denied the teeming population as Arabic schools or makaranta become the order of the day. This will further accentuate the level of socio-economic disequilibrium between the North and the South.
From the analysis above, it is discovered that since the introduction of Sharia legal code, there has been a benign call for a Sovereign National Conference which is a euphemism for an improved federation. Other groups have called this restructured or True Federalism where people are allowed to develop at their own pace and in their own ways, resulting from the. discussion at a round-table conference the terms and modes that would determine the natural co-existence. This is a pointer to the fact that for Nigeria things have fallen apart, the centre cannot hold and the hand writing are lucid on the wall that the days of the Nigerian nation are numbered. The spectre of disintegration looms large.
It was discovered also that the morbid adoption of classical and unlimited Sharia by some northern states in Nigeria is obviously a journey on the road not only to social disorder and chaos, but also to socio-economic cum social stagnation and a descent to political suicide and abyss.
The political Sharia and its attendant violence is merely a political strategy, device or tactic employed in inter-class struggles of the various regional factions of the privileged class. For the Northern elite it is to extricate itself from the seeming political irrelevance it has relapsed to due to power shift from the North to the South, although some analysts on the other side agreed that it is a political tool but other analysts tend to see it from a different perspective. They see the clandestine activity by some political opportunist and anarchists to achieve what they could not otherwise have achieved’ through the ballot box, thereby subverting the nascent democratic process and consequently undermine the authority of the Federal Government.
A cursory look at the whole scenario reveals that the North is aggressively reacting out of the loss of political power. It would have been tantamount to advancing the course of the Southern elite if the Northern elites did not react in the manner it has done. This buttresses the assertion that “the prince who advances the course of another prince diminishes his own”3. Here is the efficacy of the frustration-aggression theory deployed in analyzing this work.
RECOMMENDATION
To ignore to implement the decision of the people is to hijack the love of the country, pillage her rights, deny the flag of freedom and fairness that should fly over the homes of all citizens, breed greed rather than patriotism, divide the nation rather than unit and be blind to the future and deaf to the past.
It is in line with the above assertion and after a critical critique of the Sharia phenomenon that the researcher makes the following recommendations. This is imperative, germane, efficacious and pivotal to the academic and intellectual utility of a scientific or empirical research. Although, these recommendations may either be imbibed or jettisoned. However the point has to be made that history will forgive the researcher for making recommendations, albeit, wrong that are jettisoned, but history will certainly pardon her for not embarking on such an endeavour. It is on the basis of the findings of this study that the following policy recommendations are made. After the 1914 Lugardian episode, the major and leading nationalists found no basis for the amalgamation but compromised on burning national issues and welcome independence, at least to banish and ostracize the British colonial masters. Little did they know that the opportunity to discuss the basis of Nigerian national unity will never come their way again. Thank goodness that the Sharia debate has underscored the need for a round table dialogue on the basis and future of our co-habitation. This makes the recommendation of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) compelling to the researcher. Of course, which is afraid of it when all sections of the country, the North (East and West), the Middle Belt (North Central), the South-East, the South West and the South-South have all called for it. Who then is afraid of the SNC? The truth is that the SNC will move Nigeria away from the brink and precipice that presently threatens her existence. There is need for a handshake across the Niger and Benue. Enough of the violent monologue and soliloquy in which Nigerians have ethnically, religiously and politically engaged in. The convocation of the SNC will give a platform for the ventilation of pent-up grievances, primordial and ancient anger and ill-will and the mutual mistrust and animosity that have ravaged the life fabric of Nigeria as a nation.
CONCLUSION
The Sharia question in plenitude and depth is fascinating and very controversial and has ipso factor held the entire nation spell-bound and agitated for over ten months now. The international community has itself joined the affray in righteous indignation, with America barring her citizens from having anything to do with the Northern part of the country.
It has been discovered that, in timing, the adoption of Sharia law by some Northern States is inauspicious, contemptuous of the feelings and sentiments of other Nigerians and disruptive of the nascent democratic experiment.
In scope, its application is barbaric, archaic, primitive and retrogressive and indeed horrendous. Politically, its adoption is self-immolator, reckless, self-serving, pertinently absurd and amounts to playing to the gallery by visionless religious fanatics.
Economically, the adopters of Sharia law will sooner than later discover that the aridity of the Northern hemisphere will only yield sorrow, misery, penury and rebellion by a deprived, repressed, pauperized, mesmerized and impoverished citizenry.
Legally and constitutionally, the adoption of Sharia is nothing but “herakin” and bare-faced contempt for the nation’s constitutional order and legal frameworks. However, its constitutional violations appear to be a child’s play when compared with the wanton loss of lives and destruction of property that greeted its adoption in some Northern States (e.g. Kaduna State) and the subsequent reprisals from some Southern States.
REFERENCE
- Ozekhome, Mike: The Sharia: A National Fishbone: A Critical Appraisal, A Lecture Delivered during LAWSA WEEK, University of Benin, Benin City. April 5, 2000
- Adigwe 1986 : Nigeria joins OLC: Implication for Nigeria. Onitsha, pl4.
- Bala Usman: The Manipulation of Religion in Nigerian. Kaduna, Vanguard Publisher 1987 p23.
- I, Balogim: Religions Understandings and Corporation in Nigeria. Ilorin, University Press 1978 p44.
- Ibrahim Sulaman: The Islamic State and the challenges of History: London, Mansel 1987 p30.
- loheanyi M. Enwerem: A Dangerous Awekening: The Politicization of Religion in Nigeria. IFRA, Ibadanl995 pl8.
