#NoiseOfRevolt with Jonah Ayodele Obajeun: Allahu Akbar II
The killing of Nigeria’s soul did not begin with the Otuoke son’s imbecilic leadership or his abridgments of the rights of Nigerians on the streets. It did not begin with the imperial presidency of the Otta farmer or his embarrassingly archaic policies. Nor did it begin with the docile insular of Katsina or his pale approach to statesmanship. It began long before in the cauldron where Nigerian leaders plot their country’s decay.
The cauldron is the Nigerian mind, hollow but shallow to contain the truth. This is the season of kleptocracy, the season of anomy where Allahu Akbar reigns supreme. With the pitch of Allahu Akbar synchronised with the sound of bombs, then we can now sadly sit back and shed elegic tears to bid farewell to the truth. Unfortunately, we have walked barefooted with history. We have since grown stunted. Islam has suffered for the sin it has not committed.
I read with poetic mind, the reviews that trailed my past post entitled, ‘Allahu Akbar’. Mixed reactions they were. So I took my time to juggle between abstractions and realities, between sense and nonsense, between falsehood and openness, between opportunities and disappointments. I got them in equal proportions. I have since come to terms with the fact that we waste time debating the authenticity of the truth. A reviewer metaphorically called me an anti Christ who has come with deception. He said of my vignette of being a product of end time, warning Christians not to fall into my pranks. I was even challenged to a debate, the challenger wants to question the originality of the truth in my article.
There is a compulsive and compelling prodigality about Nigeria which is beyond mere hyperbolic fiscal analysis. It is a culture of wastages on an Olympian scale. We hear or see the truth and waste it away in the thrash-can. We waste precious time, we waste our resources. We waste our talents and prodigious human endowments. We waste our tomorrow at the altar of our wasted yesterday. We waste the future of our children at the shrine of our today’s purposelessness.
We waste ourselves with savage resolve. We waste the gifted nation even as we waste the destiny of the black race. Terrorists take a cue and complete the carnage for us. Then they sing the music of ‘Allahu Akbar’ to compliment our season of anomy and turn God to a blood sucker. Judgment awaits them and Allah will not be merciful to them! Let them be told, for dragging the name of Allah in the mud, Islam has forsaken them!
Take a look around Jos and you behold a landscape foaming with blood, killing field with expired bodies piled high. Rather than acting, we get busy questioning the truth. The heavens and the atmosphere are crackling and blazing forth as we plunge ourselves into our funeral rites, racing fast to join the comity of the departed nations by 2015. But can we survive the dateline of the America’s prediction?
We have survived those who used ‘Allahu Akbar’ wrongly in the past. We have survived a terrible civil war. We have survived bloody and potentially dismembering coups. We have survived several communal uprisings. We have survived many religious insurrections. We have survived Niger Delta insurgency. We have even survived a serial life presidency. Like a cat with nine lives, we have survived them all. But the Boko Haram people are trying to pull the plug out of our life support machine.
If we must prevent these un-islamic believers from pulling out the plug, then we must first seek to stop wasting time questioning the truth, for truth will be truth and will always be. Boko Haram is purely un-Islamic, I repeat. I will share with you what my very good friend, Abdulkabeer Ishola, shared with me about Prophet Mohammed’s charter (SAW), son of Abdullah. Here is the translated version of the prophet’s charter, serving as covenant to those who adopt Christianity:
“Verily, I and all the servants of God, as well as the helpers of Islam hereby make promise to defend Christains because they are my citizens and by God. I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them (concerning the way they worship). Neither are their judges be removed from their jobs, nor their monks from their monasteries. No one should destroy a house of their religion or damage it or loot it. Whoever violates this has breached God’s charter and disobeyed His Apostle. Verily, Christians are my allies and have my secure charter against all they hate. No one should force them to fight for a cause in which they have no believe or compel them to migrate against their wish. Neither is the sacredness of their covenant to be violated nor their churches to be disrespected. And if any damage should happen to their churches, they must not be prevented from repairing them. No Muslim should disobey this covenant till the last day.”
Let all of those who are hiding behind the Boko Haram mayhem, opportunistically or otherwise, recognize this charter. You cannot use pseudo religious rebellion against the ‘infidel’ state. So this is the message I am preaching as a Christian. And as a follower of Christ too, I have taken action and I am still on it.
While I talk or write, I also act. When the communal uprising started in Jos in 2008, I founded Tolerance Academy (www.tolerance-academy.org) thereafter. With this Academy, I have started mentoring a mass movement of young people who are currently straightening the bends in our understanding. My movement is moving with panache, crushing all barriers of insurgency in the mindset of younger Nigerians.
Yes, I am not focusing on you because I know you already have your mind made up. I am focusing on your kids, your younger siblings, your younger relatives. I am catching them young in their schools through their teachers. I am reformatting their minds, they must see reasons in our unity. I made it mobile, so I am moving around Nigeria. When I am in your area, your kids will let you know at home. This is the part I know how to play best in the Nigeria Project. If your best part is to keep questioning the truth, then ‘Goodluck’ to you.
Before we are finally reduced to the status of a willing cast in a Travelling Theatre of torrid absurdities, or a National Theatre of screaming and forgetting, I will keep my voice loud and I will struggle not to end up in political Golgotha. Yet, as I have discovered, paradise cannot be surrounded by hell. Unfortunately, Nigerians have opted for internal self-exile, the self-deportation to the autonomous zone of self-consumption. However, if I am chanced again, I will come back as a Nigerian.
Jonah Ayodele Obajeun. Blogs @www.obajeun.com. Catch him on twitter via @Obajeun
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“One of the hardest decisions you? will ever face in life is choosing whether to walk away or try harder because a second chance is worthless if you didn’t learn from your mistake the first time. The problem with us as a Nation is we are always pointing at one leader, ethinic group, religion or section as responsible for our woos. I really appreciate your level of reasoning and effort in ensuring that you reorient the mindset of the leaders of tomorrow. I advised that this should not be politised. Hope to meet you one on one.
No comment.Well said n done
This is well said, I have always known that the truth is not the lie, come to think of it who would you trust to keep something for you or watch over your property between a muslim and a christain in time past. anybody can be violent in a failed state, it is not about whether you are a muslim ar a christain. where were we when even in Government funded school the doctrine was to inductrinate the distabilazation or Nigeria, I school in Ekpoma and I still cant phantom the the need for the lesson I recieved from one of my lecturer thus; 1914 is an unholy marriage, discus. in answer we were expected to lay all sort of curse on our country and why the marraige wont work. those who laid more curses had “A” those of who were too patriotic to find curses had “F”
ON BOKO HARAM I slightly disagree with the writer, is they any other know way to express yourself or present an arguement in Nigeria other than violence other than Violence if you go to court your suit will definately be struck out, but when you employ violence they will call you to listen to you, nd moreover why do have such level of illiteracy in the fisrt place