allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Ramadan - Ulama's Agenda for Social Change (Page 1 of 1)

Nine years ago, we were anxious to have a responsive civilian leader but our elites misguided us by recommending to us that we should vote for Chief Obasanjo and we did. After eight years of Obasanjo, we have nothing to show and the North is worse off. If our current leaders want to address the underdevelopment of the North, they should invest in four critical sectors.

They are education, health, security and poverty alleviation through job creation. On their part, the youth need re-orientation to shun drugs, laziness, develop the right work ethics, acquire education and contribute to national development. We also want our leaders to know that we are opposed to the proposed privatisation of the FRCN and NTA. It is a wrong step to sell off our media heritage."

From a mosque in Rigachikun on the outskirts of Kaduna, a preacher had this to say. "As we end this year's tafsir, I want to draw attention to the issues we must address urgently. The level of dishonesty among Muslims is very disturbing so much so that worshippers' shoes and handsets are stolen in mosques by other worshippers. Compare this with what happened to us in Mubi where we went on a preaching tour. One of the sheikhs lost his handset. After searching everywhere for it, we gave up. The following day as we were about to leave the town, a colleague of ours answered a call and announced happily that a lady just called to say she found this phone and requested him to tell the owner to collect it from her. She dialled the last number the sheikh called before he lost his phone.

When he asked her where she was, she gave ECWA Church Mubi as her address. The sheikh said the lady had been calling him since she found the phone but when he picked it the first time and heard a lady's voice he did not recognise, he cut off and refused to pick her call again. When she persisted the following day, he reasoned that there must be a good reason and responded. When they went to collect the phone, they offered her some money in appreciation but she flatly refused it. When they reached Kano, they prayed at Murtala Muhammed mosque and another colleague lost his phone.

The Imam of the mosque used his own phone to find out where it was. A Muslim answered him and said he picked the phone and he decided to keep it because he needed a handset. It is also sad that Muslim traders hike the prices of fruits and staple foodstuff at the beginning of Ramadan whereas adherents of other faiths organise discount events and sales during their own festival seasons. As for the elites, pursuit of power and riches has become their priority and they would go to any length to get these including human sacrifice. They join secret cults and indulge in heinous money-making rituals. As for the ulama, they have become so self-seeking and worldly that they cannot tell the leaders the truth and expose falsehood. They therefore watch these atrocities being committed without calling people to order."

The tafsir at Sultan Bello Mosque in Kaduna is a crowd-pulling event because of its historical position as the main mosque for the late Premier of Northern Nigeria, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. The tafsir therefore receives wide publicity from the media. The preacher had a long closing ceremony for this year's tafsir. He said: "As we are about to end our tafsir this year, we must thank God for guiding us this far and also reflect on the lessons learned during the period and how we can translate them into an agenda for improving our lives. We have observed that Muslims lack the capacity and unity required to design and implement a priority welfare programme for converts to Islam. Since we started this tafsir, we have had a continuous stream of non-Muslims who have come here to convert to Islam. We are planning a special orientation and education programme for them and appealed to the Muslim community to donate two buses, one for the men and another for the women, to convey them to and from the venue of the programme. Only one person, a Kaduna-based philanthropist, Alhaji Ahmadu Chanchangi, responded and saved the day by donating the two buses. From the audience were shouts of Allahu Akbar!!

We have used this period of Ramadan to discuss and reflect on the issues facing the ummah, one of which is widespread poverty. We commend the government's establishment of a Ministry of Niger Delta because intervention in that region is long overdue. We also wish to call on the government to also establish a ministry for poverty eradication and consider states with pervasive poverty as priority states for massive intervention. While this demand is urgent, I want us to realise that we are responsible for this pathetic situation in which we have found ourselves.

We have too many chronically lazy people who do not see dignity in labour. They want a life of ease and affluence which they do not want to work for. We have much resources in this country, arable land and plenty of rainfall, but rather than go and farm, people prefer to do menial tasks, beg or go around praise-singing at ceremonies just to get money. Yet there are poor people in other non-Muslim communities but they do not beg and prefer working to earn an income, no matter how small. That is the spirit of Islam!

On a trip to Abuja, I stopped by a roadside market and bought yams worth five thousand naira from a woman who told me that they grow the farms on their own in the farmlands along that road. If a woman is able to go and till the soil and grow yams, why should an able-bodied man go round begging people for money? We should stop encouraging indolence by giving money to those who do not deserve it. Let them go and farm. Those who should remain in the rural areas to farm now flock to the cities to become motorcycle riders, polluting our environment and creating traffic congestion. Government must provide infrastructure in the rural areas to check the rural-urban drift and also encourage establishment of industries there.

The North is suffering from the epidemic of collapsed industries. This must be addressed by resuscitating our closed industries and establishing new ones. There is need to also provide the human resources that will be required to run these industries. We have children of school age roaming the streets. Parents must send their children to school and government must invest massively in education so that primary and secondary education will be free for all. It is also necessary to tackle corruption, moral decadence and unethical behaviour.

Government should provide funds to Muslim and Christian schools and organisations to launch a national moral and ethical campaign. We do not want anyone to tell us that this amounts to funding religion because religious organisations are only going to help the government to do its work by launching that vital campaign without which we cannot make progress. We are against the privatisation of NTA and FRCN because they serve the people. Privatisation will compromise their services and the unifying role they play in national rebirth and development.

Lastly, the government should appreciate and reward those who served the country by paying pensioners their entitlements as and when due. Implementing these will require planning and we invited our former heads of state to attend a meeting here in the mosque to chart a way forward. None of them turned up. Generals Muhammadu Buhari and Abdulsalam Abubakar sent their apologies that they had very important commitments elsewhere, but General Ibrahim Babangida did not respond.

We need leaders we can rely on, plan together and strategise to ensure that we succeed in advancing the status of our people. They will not respond to our invitations now because it is not an election year and they do not need our votes. Nevertheless, we intend to work on ensuring that we initiate the emergence of committed and upright leaders to lead us. We must all be united, educate each other, remain law-abiding and shun violence so that when we demand and are able to implement change, it will be a sustainable one. Let us pray for all those who assisted us in making this tafsir a reality. In the spirit of Ramadan, I also want to announce to all present here and our listeners that I have forgiven all those who cast aspersions on me or offended me in any other way."

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