The President of the Anwar-ul Islam movement of Nigeria Alhaji Mubashiru Ojelade has blamed the incessant terrorist attacks to poor leadership and ill preachers of religion.
He said the relative peace and understanding enjoyed in the past has been lost to government’s failure to address salient social issues affecting the country.
“If you look at the situation in this country, up to the 70s and 80s, the incidences of religious strife were very rare. In the north, there was harmony between religions. I did my primary and secondary there and I witnessed that harmony to a large extent. Between that time and now, so many things have happened. The most striking one is that we have had very poor leadership.
Those who found their way to the corridors of power behave as if intelligence had lost in them in the way they ran the affairs of Nigeria. Because the leadership was bad, everything in the country was turning upside down. In such situation you are building up very angry, temperamental populace. Forget about book Haram, Nigerians these days are very temperamental. Book Haram is a consequence of irresponsible leadership, negligence of the leadership, poor economy and unemployment.
Ojelade who spoke at the 70th anniversary of the Anwar-ul Islam Model College, Agege explained that proliferation of churches and Islamic preachers mostly in the north are root causes of the religious crisis being faced in the country.
“In those days we had Catholics, Methodist, Anglican, Ansarudeen, Almadiyya, Anwarul- deen among others. These bodies did well for Nigeria. At that time we did not have problems because you couldn’t get up in the a catholic church and announce yourself a pastor not even in the old Almadiyya as imam. But today, the reverse is the case. On both sides of the divide, the denominations that are coming up today have to recheck themselves. The way the new generation of churches and new generations of brothers in the Islamic faith are handling religious issues, if it is not checked, this crisis were are experiencing might have no end.
Islam is universal. What is different is the way the practitioners of the religion execute it. The Muslims in the north tend to be more radical, aggressive likewise the Christians in the north. It is a product of their own environment. It boils down to those that are carrying the message. Preaching about religion must not be an up comer’s affair. It doesn’t make sense for any muslim cleric to kill or harass anybody because of religion when Allah did not ordain it. For what is happening today the clerics preaching particularly for the emerging denominations has a substantial part of the blame” . he bemoaned.
