The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) yesterday accused the leadership of the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) of frustrating religious harmony in the country through the peddling of falsehood and propagating divisive opinions on national issues.
The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Abubakar Sa’ad III is the President of the NSCIA while Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, an ex-Vice Chancellor, University of Ilorin, is the Secretary-General of the group.
In what could be described as a major rift in the ranks of religious leaders in Nigeria, both men have also been accused of running the Nigerian Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) like a private enterprise, excluding other prominent leaders of the Islamic faith and holding some Christian religious leaders in contempt.
Director of National Issues, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Mr. Sunday Oibe, who made these allegations yesterday in a statement, disclosed that in recent weeks, Oloyede had been making public statements portraying Christians in Nigeria in bad light with respect to their participation in politics.
In the statement, Oloyede was quoted to have said that Christians were unduly dragged into dirty waters of politics for selfish reasons and that if not for the maturity of NSCIA, Muslims would have had a serious confrontation with their Christian counterparts over the last general elections. He was also said to have launched an attack on the 2014 National Conference which, according to Oloyede, was skewed in favour of Christians over Muslims in the ratio of 70:30.
In Oloyede’s opinion, nothing serious should come out of the National Conference because the decisions were taken based on errors of composition.
According to him, the composition of delegates was anti-North and anti-Islam. These remarks, Oibe said, were not only misleading, but provocative and designed to create the wrong perceptions about others. “We have decided to speak because perception can be made stronger than reality. We can no longer continue to keep quiet because we are in a society that is gullible and where people swallow lies hook, line and sinker. The continuous attempt by Oloyede to mislead the public should not be allowed to succeed this time around.
He has been giving an impression that every Christian leader in Nigeria, except his two friends, were dragged into the 2015 partisan politics. “But good enough, he contradicted himself by saying that Muslim leaders under NSCIA decided to gang up against ex-President Goodluck Jonathan.
He had claimed he is not a religious leader and this is just the problem the NIREC has been facing. NIREC cannot function because it is a conglomeration of religious leaders from one group and mix-grill of politicians and traditionalists on the other hand.
That is the reason for all the confusion in NIREC,” Oibe said. According to the CAN official, Oloyede and the Sultan have, over time ,refused to allow the true composition of NIREC to function because of some selfish interests.
He said that whereas the CAN comprises all Christians in Nigeria, it was difficult explaining the exclusion of respected Sheikh Dahiru Bauchi and astute Islamic preachers like Sheikh El-Zaki Zaki, an amiable President of Supreme Council for Islamic Preachers in Nigeria, Sheikh Mohammed Ahmed Ibn Nurain, from an umbrella body of religious leaders like NIREC. CAN appealed to Oloyede to honourably resign from being the National Coordinator of NIREC for the organisation to move forward.
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