This piece was written by a former Aviation minister, Femi Fani-Kayode.
Mr. John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, President Barack Obama’s confidante and Mrs. Hilary Clinton’s successor in office, came to Nigeria the other day. The first meeting that he had was with the Sultan of Sokoto, who is the supreme leader of the Fulani Caliphate, the spiritual leader of all the Muslims of the north and the man who said, only last week, that “Christians commit wicked acts and crimes against humanity” and that “the wearing of the hijab is the right of every Muslim”.
The second was with the the 19 northern governors, 16 of whom are Muslims. The third was our Muslim-fanatic and sharia-loving President who has refused to call his kinsmen, the Fulani herdsmen and militants, to order or to arrest and prosecute even one of them for mass murder and genocide. On the very same day that all this was happening the Islamic Development Bank visited the President and opened their first office in Nigeria.
The government has also quietly put two separate pieces of legislation before the National Assembly for consideration which, if passed, would on the one hand legalise criminal sharia law and on the other give grazing land to the Fulani herdsmen in the Middle Belt and the south. The Christians of Nigeria should make of all this what they will.
I wonder whether they still “love and trust” the “liberal” Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama? I wonder if they still believe that Clinton and Obama love ALL Nigerians and not just those that they helped to get into power last year? Think hard and think deep Christian before it is too late and you are overwhelmed. Consider the religious war that took place in Lebanon years ago and that is taking place in Syria today. No-one wants a war because war is the ultimate evil yet the bitter truth must be told.
And that bitter truth is as follows: if the radical salafist and wahhabist Muslim fundamentalists of the core north, with their powerful friends in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and Obama’s America push us over the edge and such a war ever happens here, it will be 100 times worse than those two put together. Worse still it will go on from generation to generation.
Do those that wish to Islamise us and wipe out our faith think it would be worth all that? Are they prepared to pay such a terrible price by trying? The truth is that they are playing with fire. They are playing Russian roulette with a loaded gun and the single bullet that is in the barrel is about to go off in their faces.
The Bible says that knowledge is power. How many Nigerians know that Egypt and Turkey were once nations which were 100 per cent Christian until they were islamised through the back door?
It took hundreds of years but, slowly and surely and as a consequence of the total acquisition of political power by the Muslims in both of those countries coupled with the continous display of complacency, ignorance, weakness, indolence, fear and cowardice on the part of successive Church leaders and leading members of the Christian community, they were totally and completely islamised.
Today the Christians in both Egypt and Turkey constitute a pitiful and tiny minority: 10 per cent in Egypt and 0.4 per cent in Turkey. I hope that the new leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), as they prepare for their first meeting in Maiduguri, Borno state on the 26th of August, are taking note of all this. May God forbid that we should ever allow it to happen in Nigeria.
Yet one thing remains clear: the Christians of Nigeria are not like their counterparts that once constituted a majority in Turkey and Egypt. They are much more resilient and they are much stronger. They are also much more capable of defending themselves when pushed to the wall. Despite consistently turning the other cheek and constantly striving to keep the peace, they are not ignorant, weak, cowardly, complacent, fearful or indolent.
“John Kerry came for the Sultan of Sokoto’s birthday and not a state visit. He came to perfect the western seed of discord foisted on us by the ouster of President Goodluck Jonathan. He came to lay credence to the American support of an Islamic agenda in Nigeria. He came to endorse genocide being commited by some reprobate Muslims whose foot soldiers are Fulani herdsnen and their grand patron Buhari”.
To butress the point Mr. Aboki Galadima of the Christian Information Network, which is a powerful and fast-rising Christian platform on the social media, went further by writing the following to it’s members. He wrote:
“This is such a significant event that minority nationalities and Christians all over the country MUST digest and act.
1. John Kerry has just confirmed that spiritually, Nigeria is now an lslamic State.
2. His inspiring attacks on corruption, bad governance and all that stuff are thrilling but only a facade. He and the government of the United States of America are here to divert attention from the real thing.
3.They are pushing the absurd narrative that we should blame past governments, who they claim did not tackle poverty etc., for the rise of lslamic terrorism in the north and that the Sokoto Caliphate has always been the region which provides Nigeria with decent human resources for good governance.
Haba!! Please somebody advise me to halt for now. These diversions should be rejected and resisted. The legality of using lslam to kill and destroy in Nigeria must be challenged. This Network should keep this fight alive and on the front banner of national discourse”.
Both Mr. Okah and Mr. Galadima have spoken the minds of many in the Christian community. It would be most unwise for those that are now in power and their misguided friends and suporters to ignore them, attempt to silence them or to dismiss their concerns with the usual, insults, arrogance and contempt.
I say this because there can be little doubt that Mr. John Kerry spoke nothing but unadulterated garbage. Permit me to end this contribution with the following. Mr. Jude Chijoke Ndukwe, a writer, a public affairs analyst and one of the most courageous and formidable intellectuals of the new generation of Nigerian leaders captured the mood rather well when he wrote the following in a powerful contribution a few days ago. He wrote:
“A man named his dog ‘Buhari’, he was promptly arrested and prosecuted. 8 people are killed in Zamfara by Islamic fundamentalists, as usual no single arrest is made.
Unless leaders of the Hausa-Fulani core north change their ways and mentality about religion, education, girl-child and women’s rights etc, their region will remain Nigeria’s most impoverished, most illiterate, most diseased, most malnourished and most backward even if Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Vladimir Putin, Theresa May, John Kerry, Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton et al visit the Sultan on a daily basis”.
Mr. Ndukwe has spoken the gospel truth. Let he who has ears hear what the Spirit of the Lord is saying. Shalom.