Kperogi’s pretentious piety

Therefore if this is the yardstick we have an edge. Our chairman is a Muslim, the Director-General of our campaign is a Muslim likewise me Namadina, Namadina Sambo is a Muslim. It is only our presidential candidate that is a Christian.“In APC, their Chairman is a Christian, their campaign director-general is a Christian and the […]

Therefore if this is the yardstick we have an edge. Our chairman is a Muslim, the Director-General of our campaign is a Muslim likewise me Namadina, Namadina Sambo is a Muslim. It is only our presidential candidate that is a Christian.
“In APC, their Chairman is a Christian, their campaign director-general is a Christian and the Vice President is a Pastor. Now let me ask you which between the parties has more Muslims? Nigeria belongs to both Christians and Muslims. During the First Republic, Tafawa Balewa, he worked with Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, During Shagari, he worked with Dr Alex Ekweme, Obasanjo with Atiku, Late Yar’adua (may his soul rest in peace) with Dr Goodluck Jonathan and Now Goodluck with Namadi.”
These were the exact words of Vice President Namadi Sambo reproduced here in response to the  deplorable diatribe contained in “Notes from Atlanta” by Farooq Kperogi, a columnist with Weekly Trust who started as a grammar journalist feeding on frivolous errors to promote Queen’ s English with the snobbery of a colonialist. In his slavish mentality, his native Nupe was not worth studying, not to mention the deplorable disadvantages of adopting foreign tongues as lingua franca. He can only impress his Atlanta teachers because here in Nigeria, his weekly column was an irrelevant distraction to most readers. It was no wonder that he has recently veered into political bootlicking, obviously with an eye to catching the attention of his local patrons in the APC.
That he is a misfit in any other activity outside parroting Queen’s English has been very obvious since he ventured into mercenary writing as his recent petty and total misrepresentation of the Vice President’s statement in Minna Niger State, confirmed.  Let me quote him in his typical hypocritical way of commenting on issues: “to be fair even the APC plays the religious card too, sometimes subtly and other times explicitly…” So if he could admit this flaw in the primordial politics of his APC patrons, what justified his jaundiced attack on Namadi Sambo, who was only responding to this unfair politicking by APC leaders?
 The vice-president was responding to these APC subtle campaigns being perpetrated in the name of religion to try to disabuse the minds of innocent people to such use of religious card by those that spread mischievous messages that APC is a Muslim Party while PDP is a
Christian one. The VP’s statement fully quoted above effectively exposes the petty political mischief and at the same time corrects such false misrepresentation for the benefit of discerning members of the public.
Similarly, the VP’s recitation of the first verse of the Glorious Qur’an was to further buttress the fact that the Muslims in PDP are well-versed practicing devotees, not nominal followers as the APC propagandists have been claiming. To cast aspersions on the validity of the recitation is to say the least very unfortunate, a good Muslim does not make fun of the pronouncement of a fellow Muslim in the course of performing his religious activities including reciting the Holy Book.
Bilal, a slave of African descent who converted to Islam and was the Mu’adhim (who performs the Azhan, call to prayers) could not pronounce a key aspect of the Azhan, which is “Ash-Ahadu” due to his ascent; instead he pronounced it as “Asahadu”. This provoked a lot of protests from Muslim faithful, which resulted in their calling for his removal. When the matter was reported to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), he told the faithful that Allah (SWT) has accepted the “Asahadu” as “Ash-Hadu” and that settled the matter. This is to demonstrate that our pronunciations and prayers may vary according to accent but remain acceptable to Almighty Allah and must therefore not subjected to man’s ridicule. This narration can be found in a book titled Bilal of Africa. Why then will a Muslim ridicule a fellow Muslim and even question his religious pedigree? If Farooq Kperogi’s Nupe-accented prayers are acceptable which northerner’s prayer is not acceptable and who is he to determine otherwise?
We must not lose the sight of the famous Hadith that says ‘actions are judged according to intentions.” We must appreciate the fact that the Vice President was merely trying to create a level playing field so that each political party can be elected based on its competences and not its efforts to hoodwink the electorate on the basis of religious emotions and or sentiments. Kperogi should have endeavoured to be updated on the current political trend in the country to appreciate the level of campaign of calumny by the opposition party. The whole scenario and comments of the vice president are twisted out of context to try to score cheap political points. Channels Television, the reference point of the writer and a well-known online medium based in the United States of America, are the mouthpiece of the APC and therefore one would not be surprised by their fallacious distortions and cheap propaganda.
The vice president needs our commendation, not condemnation, for his public enlightenment on the situation of events. However, in APC’s desperation to go on a wild goose chase, they have embarked on a fault-finding mission to disparage the credibility of our leaders based on fabricated faults which don’t even respect the sanctity of religion. People like Kperogi should therefore find a more credible means of livelihood that will not victimize innocent people and attract the wrath of Almighty Allah. Queen’s grammar is a far-fetched fancy as far as the academic or even public enlightenment relevance in Nigeria is concerned; but he might as well occupy his idle intellect with such irrelevance than trying to be more Islamic than the Imam with a Nupe background which is certainly not the world standard in Islamic pedigree. Besides, he has failed to defray the lopsided religious posture being paraded by the APC leadership to the detriment of its claim to being a party for all faiths.

Abdu wrote from Kundila Estate, Kano <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>;