El-Rufai’s Jihad Against Hypocrisy, Indecency And Disorder

What is it in the person of Kaduna State governor, Nasir El-Rufai, or in his governmental policy that tends to allow Nigerian Christians and Muslims to always reach a temporary truce, to suspend their mutual suspicion and animosity, in order to jointly and severally ‘face him’? When the man was FCT minister, he decided that as one of measures to restore the Abuja Master Plan, some structures, including churches and mosques that were located in the wrong places, be pulled down.

 

This decision of his provoked the unholy wrath of both Christians and Muslims. Adherents of both religions in our country were united in their conviction that an Anti-Christ or an infidel was brought in by Obasanjo to that very sensitive position and he was using it to hinder the faithful from worshipping their God and something needed to be done, and urgently too, to bring him down like yesterday. And that thing was prayer, the potent power in prayers.

 

 

One Sunday, I went to a church in Abuja and the pastor called on the congregation to stand up and face the direction of Aso Rock and Area 11 office of the FCDA where the minister operated from, and pray against El-Rufai, calling on God to bring him down. Everyone in the congregation obeyed that holy order from the pulpit except yours most sincerely, Mr. Idang Alibi. My disobedience was too glaring to go unnoticed. An usher filled with holy anger approached me. I stood up and she shout-rebuked me in audible whisper wondering why I was the only one who did not obey the pastor’s order on everyone to rise up and pray against El-Rufai. They think they were fighting a holy war; God’s war for him.

I told her that I did not see any good reason why I should pray against someone whom I considered was doing a good job of trying to create order in a city that was being ghettoised and made hellish by indiscriminate erection of structures. I promptly resumed my sitting position until my fellow brethren were done with their not so small act of crusade against El-Rufai.

About that time too, some Muslim clerics in Abuja were urging their faithfuls in their mosques to also pray to God to, as a matter of urgent urgency, remove El-Rufai the ‘unbeliever’ from his exulted position. It does appear to me and many others that God did not answer the collective, self-righteous prayers of Abuja Christians and Muslims because the man not only finished his tenure as FCT minister, he did so by leaving a solid legacy as the most successful minister-servant the capital city has ever had to date. He also had no single health challenge of any kind as a result of the negative spiritual exercise against him from misguided ardents of both influential faiths. Today, some of those Christian and Muslim prayer warriors who were the most vociferous in their prayers against El-Rufai, are the most ardent in praising him for doing the right thing in making Abuja the good place that it is now.

Once again, El-Rufai has raised another hail of a storm by a Bill he has tabled before the state house of assembly to make into a law requiring both Christian and Muslim preachers to be licensed before they can preach and teach in his state. Christians see this proposed law as one targeted at them. The Muslims on their own part see it as a ploy by an agnostic leader to stand in the way of their divine obligation. Let us at this point pause and go back to my initial question: what is it in the El-Rufai persona that makes Christian and Muslim elite to temporarily sheathe their swords in order to face a ‘common’ enemy? The answer, as I see it, is to be found in one word namely COURAGE. El-Rufai has the courage to take certain steps that are necessary to solve certain problems which others complain about but lack the gumption to do anything about.

What we are seeing today as a combined fury of chrislams against El-Rufai is that he has dared to summon the courage to address the challenge of cant, hypocrisy, indecency, disorder and impunity which some of them exhibit in the name of serving God. According to one of my favourite Pastors, Paul Enenche, in the spirit of the age of these religious times, adherents of both Christianity and Islam in Nigeria instead of trying to advertise their spirituality, they rather want to advertise to the high heavens their carnality. The bet form of evangelism in the world is CONDUCT and not speech or other outward show of fervency or piousness.

They want to impress the world about their piousness, fervency and zeal for their ‘different’ God. In order to earn personal human glory, they are in an undeclared competition for the mind of the people. When adherents of one faith engage in one error, the followers of the other will want to exceed the error of the other to show that they are even more zealous in the service of God. Islam teaches that going on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina is one of the pillars of the faith. But it made it conditional: that if the faithful has the means to do so. This means that if you are unable to make it in your life time you will not be denied heaven on account of that.

But what is the practice now among our Muslim brethren? Going to Mecca has become a religious status symbol. Some Nigerian Muslims have made it a yearly ritual. And some are not content with the major hajj. They now charter flights to go on the lesser hajj! The present Minister of Education, Adamu Adamu, preached and preached and wailed in his former column in the Daily Trust on this issue, telling Muslims that they can still achieve their hoped for spiritual reward in Saudi Arabia by giving a fraction of the huge money they spend on that venture to Godly causes to ameliorate the poverty of some of their compatriots. But none has heeded his Godly counsel.

Christians seeing this jamboree by their Muslim friends are now trying to elevate pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a pillar of their own faith too when the Bible or Christian doctrine have said no such thing. In this modern day and age when there are many gadgets for calling worshippers to prayer noiselessly, the Muezzin still wakes up the whole neighbourhood for early morning prayers with loud loudspeakers. Not to be outdone by this show of zeal or overzealousness by the Muslim Muezzin, Christians too mount heavy loudspeakers to disturb the neighbourhood with noisy prayer and preaching sessions at odd hours. They have apparently forgotten Christ’s teaching that when you want to pray, you should do so in the quietness of your room where God who hears people even in secret will reward them publicly.

Muslims in Nigeria, a country of many beliefs, block streets and even major highways for their congregational prayers as if to say the worship of our God is so important that every other thing by everyone else who is non-Muslim should be given up for it; every other person’s right to the road should be denied him and any other secular pursuit by believers in other religions is an error. Let the driver stop and wait for us. Let the businessman ferrying goods to other parts of the town or country wait for us. Let the path of the ambulance man rushing a sick man to the hospital be blocked. They do not seem to realize that the man or woman who is carrying out other activities at the time of their prayer for the good of the people and humanity is also worshipping God in a way that God may even value more than their prayers. For ages, this arrogant belief and practice have persisted in spite of the fact that again, Adamu Adamu has been preaching that road is one of certain places where the religion says no believer should use for prayers or other religious purposes.

In order, it appears, not to be outdone by such act of impunity, some mega-church denominations on the Lagos-Ibadan Highway now block that road bringing severe hardship upon its users and huge economic loss to the nation and its people. These are some of the evils El-Rufai wants to curb with his proposed law.

I can already hear this query from some incredulous readers of this sermon: ‘’How dare you, Mr. Idang Alibi, a pastor, write like this in defense of a bad law originated by a Muslim who hates Christians? My humble answer is that I am merely pointing out the intendment behind, and not defending, El-Rufai’s law. The things some Christians and Muslims in Nigeria do in the name of God are simply not godly at all. And the tragedy is that no one seems to have the courage to call them to order. Except El-Rufai.

I will quote this Biblical passage to show what El-Rufai is trying to correct. ‘’Let everything be done decently and in order’’. Surely, God wants us his creators to worship Him. But since he is not an author of confusion, there is an acceptable way we must carry out his command.

Many of our Christian and Muslim faithful, including their leaders, do not seem to know that even in trying to worship God, believers must respect the rights and choices of others. Some of the clerics are never called by God. They called themselves and they have become preachers of hate, division and dissension.

 

By Idang Alibi

 

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