It seems religion has become a permanent badge on matters of national importance, and persons on national assignment. It looks like good means of reducing the national to the pockets of those who claim religiosity in a land of pagans. This Level is at its gravest trials again. Thanks to those who try to use religious platforms to make relevance and drive their selfish ambitions into a cog in the wheel of national progress.
Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Fantami – the Minister of Communication – had the F of his ancestral home name changed to P in order to erase his eastern origins even if it is just for national relevance. The Saudi trained Gombe son was educated in the extreme east, became a Muslim clergy garnished with western education to a PhD in Computer Science and preached to Muslims across the nation from the northeast for years.
He has been ahead of many of his colleague clergies: young, sharp, dogged and now humbled by a ripe rise to grace. Fate now makes him a national figure, a promising politician to the future, already on key assignment as Federal minister, determined to deliver on This Level’s terms in Baba Buhari’s presidency. Let me say that he both providence and hardwork combined to take the man up, after successfully serving as DG at the IT agency NITDA.
The man was jeered last week in Kano by boys of former Kano Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, who met IAIP by coincidence at the MAKIA on their way to school abroad, courtesy of the much advertised programme launch of the political godfather who lost grip of the State. The Minister just finished a launch of his Ministry’s remarkable new programme on Emergency or Distress Call System and was on his way to Abuja, enroute Kano.
The issue opened old wounds. A previous video from the archives went viral, showing the cleric refer to one northern politician who was said to have asked for the purpose God created mosquito and housefly, raising issues that such a statement can lead a Muslim to easy apostasy.
By the shallowest idea of Islam, that was unnecessary and uncalled for. The wrong in that may be a possible reason to reach someone or somewhere. If you lack reason, you can look for your lost camel in the pot of water. As usual, opinions of clerics’ struggle at interpretations differ.
One of them from Kano said RMK was not wrong to ask because there is purpose in everything God created. In the video he said such Muslim politicians should not be in positions of political leadership. There was nowhere in the video the Sheikh called the name but the said politician was confirmed as RMK.
It has been long since the losses in the last political biddings, the primaries and the elections, and that Kano encounter was a good chance to say Assalaamu Alaikum to a much sought member of a group at large for anyone bad. It was so a good chance for the redcaps to announce their presence, and their seeming force and political relevance even if that is only Kano. Afterall the opportunity beckoned there.
First, for patriots, the only concern is national – a national minister on national duty should be accorded all respect and must not be ridiculed by errands blinded and misguided by political sentiments of the defeatists. There is every reason we see that as a try to find reason to reach PMB since they have no reason that is more than selfish, shallow opposition to whatever that is good for Nigeria.
It was an attempt to dent Dr. Pantami’s clean intent to work in diligence and true heart, something that is lacking among 90 per cent of the President’s appointees, and which is now putting the young man into public ridicule. When the enemies of public good are so offended, they always use the people by the remote or the opium that religion is.
The good and doing good are crimes in themselves in a country where dogma overrules in every definition of the national, and religion and religious platforms and the figures claiming them are making mess of what is important to the national and to the common life Nigerians share. This why it has to be the Minister of Communications who represents the religion which sentiment they always use cheap.
First, Dr. Pantami is the first Muslim cleric to get to that limelight; the first youngest northerner or northeasterner (I don’t know the age difference with Adamawa’s Idi Hong, former minister of state, foreign affairs) to get to point of a senior Minister, not even of state. And he is one person who wants to make a difference in handling public office and dedicate his services to delivering on the promises. He wants to practice what he preaches and live it.
And practising and living the tenets of religio is the heinous crime you can make in the work place. Managers of organisations want windowdressing, lipservice and empty promises. This is reason why PMB’s government is not, and can never deliver much on its terms because managers in the ministries and MDAs have ganged to arrest good things and punish the honest and the sincere who push for them.
Doing the right thing is Dr. Pantami’s problem and it is what makes things difficult for President Buhari. The man’s sins are just too many. He went to launch a good programme from the President’s home state, at time when the press is crying that all projects are going to Daura for Buhari’s sake.
That programme he launched that day is expected to help security in Nigeria and to improve services. Under him, the National Communications Commission has blocked two million Sims. He is determined, loyal, honest, committed and a Baba’s favourite. And the moguls of the national business of attacks, kidnaps, theft, robbery and rustling will not happy. Neither will lost out politicians who find every reason to say the FGN has failed.
But let us also remember that the Sheikh is a politician now. He knows his appointment is huge trial to him, to Islam and to the rest of the clerics. There is a price to pay for every choice we make. He chose to go into it. He wants to serve, contribute for he has been part of the bench critics for long.
At the least, there is going to be good experience that may better the life of the man and many men. He knows what happened that day in Kano was expected. There will be more temptations and tribulations of varying sorts. They will stop at nothing. His only remedy is his good intentions and clean heart in serving.
What matters is how the man and all Nigerians react to them, or what we make out of them. It is wrong and we must stand against ours that a thick line of difference must draw between politics and religion.We need to know that an attack on a minister should not be seen as an attack on a sheikh, Islam or God.
No. It is politics and it affects the sheikh because he chose to make sacrifices and contribute to nation building, beyond preachments, and that carries its own price, which the man seems to live with but the busy bodies are all over us with it.
Opportunist clerics have stolen the show first day and are still on it. They try to make an issue out of the trivial. Others try to make business out of everything, to fuel the matter by appearing to help it. One of them from Kano warned RMK, pleaded patience with Dr. Pantami and restressed the importance of religion and to make their platforms relevant.
Even when they say the right thing, they lack the method. They lack basic speech or preachment diplomacy because they lack the art of public speaking and do not practise what they preach. No one appoints clerics into importance, relevance and fame. It is the commission of the abuse of the principles of the platforms they sit on to create mediocre to raise dogma, hypocrisy and hatred for public peace.
They do so by scrutinising the life and actions of politicians derailing their competence. And in everything they have a goal of selfactualisation against even the most important, even sacrosanct, in order to make relevance to political power at the same time they preach for the need to leave religion out of politics. They politicise the religion in order to achieve political hegemony for recognition by politicians to buy their followership.
Clerics are easy and cheap tools for negotiating any political deal and uselessing any good programme. Many are just unlearned or halfbaked, readymade agents of controversy ad destabilisation, who make relevance and appear useful tools for the bad boys of Nigeria. That is why the industry is fast becoming more lucrative than the other agents of missocialisation.
In most of their criticisms even in the claim to support Dr Phantami in the recent saga, you read envy, not just for political leaders but also for the Minister himself. It is envy that makes them deride all other clerics and see themselves as the only learned, since learning has become synonymous with the followership they command and the money they get from politicians.
It is why you reach easy conclusion that politicians who use them have started the actual payback. And just like one of the respondents in Kano said, those boys RMK is sponsoring will one day treat him same way. Yes. It is same for everyone who trails the wrong path. The gains are just short term. In the end, there is everything we will pay for what we do others and the people. We see persons pay. But we do not take the lessons.
Their goal is to shout, distract and embroil the Minister into fights so he does not achieve targets, because the man sounds like one of the few minsters who have set targets for themselves. God, please Help protect the man and all the serious, honest managers of ministries and MDAs from the evil of the secret cults groups in our work places and help him deliver.
And for Nigerians to help him achieve good, they need to open eyes wide to see and find ways to handle the hand hidden behind the problem that seems to jump into the screen of every public good. Good luck, Honourable Minister.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
