From Boston to Baga

Also published in Daily Trust

The widely reported applause received by the United States security agents for conducting a successful manhunt that led to the death of one of the suspects in Boston marathon bombing in a shootout with the police and capturing the other stirred the issue of comparison between the approach of Nigeria’s Joint Task Force (JTF) and that of the US security agents in similar circumstances. Predictably, many people mocked the JTF and criticized it especially in the aftermath of the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Baga town over the last weekend.

Re: The Qur’an on the resurrection of Jesus

Also published in Daily Trust

I am privileged today to host our erudite brother, Malam Ibraheem A. Waziri of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, to explain and clarify the misconceptions raised by Rev Father (Prof) Omonokhua Director of Mission and Dialogue of the Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria. Enjoy,

“Rev Father (Prof) Omonokhua has a very interesting article about Qur’an and the resurrection of Christ as published in Sunday Trust, of 14 April, 2013. Full of quotations from Qur’an and interpretations from different Muslim scholars through history, he tried to justify the Christian belief that Jesus actually died and got resurrected for the atonement of the sin of humankind.

Who grants amnesty to whom?

Also published in Daily Trust

In a country like Nigeria where so much blood has been and indeed being shed, and where the culture of systematically organized violence and counter violence prevails under the helpless watch of the security agents, many of whom are ironically involved in committing the same crimes, one wonders who is clean enough and indeed has moral right to grant amnesty to another. Under circumstances where ethno-religious groups are engaged in the vicious cycle of mutually destructive struggle against one another, perpetual quest for revenge against one another, inter-communal tension, mutual resentment, mistrust and general lack of confidence in the supposed constituted authorities, and where a victim in a given time and location is the perpetrator in another and vice-versa, it is obviously tricky to determine who grants amnesty to whom.

Is Nigeria a hopeless case?

Also published in Daily Trust

President Goodluck Jonathan 

Many local and international observers had cautioned successive Nigerian governments of the repercussions of their indifference towards the gradually but consistently deteriorating socio-economic conditions in the country and warned of serious unrests in the land and even existential threats. Unfortunately however, such warnings fell on deaf ears and went unheeded while the situation kept getting worse steadily but continuously.

Now that much of what had been warned against has come to pass and indeed takes more alarming dimensions in the form of escalating violence, growing public resentment and frustration, government’s helplessness and indeed brewing political turmoil, no right-thinking person doubts that unless this trend is reversed before it is too let, the situation will definitely burst. After all, such warnings were not issued on the bases of any painstaking research, because the leadership responsibilities neglected and the social obligations ignored over the decades were too fundamental to produce repercussions less than what the country is currently experiencing.