...This religion of Islam, Allah has perfected it by Himself... - Capt Joji Captain Mohammed Joji, a former Managing Director of the defunct Nigerian Airways, is one of the Arewa Consultative Forum leaders. At his home in Kaduna, Joji expresses concerns over politicisation of security challenges suggesting ways out of the doldrums. Excerpts: HOW do you feel seeing the country the way it is? You see, the difference between a man and an animal is law and order. Without law and order, a man is worse than an animal. That is what is happening now because, those people who have put the country in the tumultuous situation that you rightly mentioned believe there is no law and order and that so, they can do whatever they like. That is the problem! But you see, there is reward and punishment. If there is no punishment for deviation, all these things you see would not have happened. Recently, Asari Dokubo said in an interview, that if the South didn’t win the presidential election in 2015, that this country would collapse. I think such statement is unfortunate. What does he know about war? I observed and witnessed the civil war myself in 1967 to 1970 and so, I never liked to see any other civil war again. I had seen it. It was terrible. I didn’t like it and I don’t want to ever see it happen again. Unfortunate utterances I saw and participated in it. I pray to Allah that we should never ever have to go through another version of civil war again in Nigeria. People like him should be held responsible for these unfortunate utterances. If these utterances have come from somebody like me, especially from the North, I would be behind bars the following day. Recently, one of the political parties was tagged an Islamic party, why do you think Islam has become a subject used to show the negative side of a group? It is unfortunate. If you are going to lose election, lose election but don’t overheat the polity. They knew that 75 percent of the land is Muslim. The population, if you look at the registered voters last elections, over 35 million registered in the North alone and only about 31 million registered in the entire South. Now that there is this alliance, let me say, between ACN, CPC and the ANPP, out of the 31 million registered in the entire South, about 17 million come from the South West alone. So, it means that three quarters of the registered voters are now for this alliance called the APC. And what they think they can do to discredit that alliance and portray the APC bad in the eyes of the Nigerian people is to say the party they want to vote for is an Islamic party. And unknown to them, they are only working based on what is going on currently in America whereby they link Islam to terrorism whereas, to them, it is a deliberate policy to misrepresent Islam. And this policy is one that will backfire on them eventually because you can never ever destroy the religion. This religion of Islam, Allah has perfected it by Himself and he knows who can remain a Christian and He knows who can remain a Muslim and who can remain a pagan till death. You can be a Muslim today, towards the end you die a Christian. Likewise you can be a Christian today, towards the end you change to Muslim and you die as Muslim. But why do you think that some people could go the extent of using religious dimension as a tool to fight political cause? Well, I have said it before that the CAN is creating religious problems in this country. Archbishop Cardinal Onaiyekan is a gentleman. Onaiyekan doesn’t look at you as whether as a Muslim or Christian. He looks at you as a human being and Nigerian. During his time as CAN President there was religious harmony. But the present CAN has been co-opted into politics. Leadership is very important but you have a lot of cronies and sycophants who work around the leadership, telling them, “You are the best. Nobody can be President.” Look what they are saying about Governors Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of Kano and Wamakko of Sokoto. I read the papers and somebody in the person of Labaran Maku said ‘Kwankwaso, Wamakko shameless” and I said, what? Are you saying that the nomads, the Fulanis are bad people? This kind of utterances heat up the polity and they should be checked! Under the present leadership of CAN, the first thing they did was to campaign against Islamic Banking. They don’t want to hear anything Islam. Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of Britain, I watched and read him making a statement that, “I would like to have the centre of Islamic banking established in the heart of London.” This is a Christian from the western world where probably only ten percent of their population believing in God, anyway. But the guy went up and said he wanted the centre of Islamic banking to be in the United Kingdom. Cameron, the current Prime Minister, is now going to borrow money from Islamic banking system and has adopted Islamic financing. He said it is the best place to go and borrow money. During the time of Obasanjo, what happened? He looked at our currency and saw that there is Arabic inscription on N10 note. They wrote ‘ten naira’ in English; and ‘naira goma’ in Arabic letters.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:59:39 +0000
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