There is an ongoing conversation among very conscious Nigerians and it is centred on Prof. Ishaq Akintola, the executive director of the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), a body that presents itself, rightly, as canvassing the interest of Muslims in Nigeria, but whose leader may have inadvertently converted it to a special purpose vehicle for rabble-rousing and rent-seeking. This concern arose from the alarm raised by Akintola alleging plots to upstage the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar, a gentleman who many Nigerians extol as an ambassador of peace and a humane leader who brooks no hurt to any human, irrespective of religious affiliation.
In his alarm, which is now believed to be a grand hoax that bears no substance, Akintola stylishly sought to instigate a fight between the Sultanate Council and the government of Sokoto state. It would have been a fight in which no one can predict its consequences on the state’s peace and its implications on the relationship between the sultanate and operatives of the state government, especially the youthful Sokoto State governor, Aliyu Ahmed. Akintola’s failure to publish specific details of the alleged plot, which he had established, says a lot about the truth of his alarm. However, by wrongly interpreting the effort of the Sokoto State government to improve the administration of its territory by way of establishing and streamlining local chieftaincy matters, and also punishing errant local community heads, created a very wrong impression which troubled several high-ranking Nigerians and even led to the Vice President, Kashim Shettima, into a misanalysed and misguided intervention making him to commit an ‘unforced error’. The Vice President ought to have restrained himself.
In a response to Akintola, the Sokoto State government, speaking through the governor’s press secretary, Abubakar Bawa, clinically bounced Akintola like an uninvited guest to a dinner. In dismissing Akintola’s noisy and alarmist enterprise, Bawa classically listed the MURIC leader as among those he called “nefarious detractors and distracting enemies of progress” that had been struggling to seek relevance by orchestrating and peddling rumours about an imaginary fractured relationship between the Sultan and the Sokoto State government. This is why the Sokoto government stated: “This is not the first time stories such as this were fabricated to show that all is not well between the state government and the sultanate council. A few months back, we had a similar obnoxious story that the state government categorically condemned and denied. From the look of things, those nefarious detractors and distracting enemies of progress have not relented in their failed effort to smear the cordial relationship between the state government and the sultanate council.”
The state government further stated that “MURIC should have cared to find out if there was a query, warning or any threatening document served on the Sultan by the state government. We equally like to remind MURIC that promoting Islamic affairs is the second item on Governor Aliyu Ahmad’s nine-point ‘Smart Agenda’. Therefore, Islam means so much to the present administration… Therefore, for anyone to think that the present administration could engage in acts or actions that could jeopardize the development of Islam is not only unfair but unjustifiable.”
The import of the Sokoto government’s statement was that it softly told Akintola that he was a rabble-rouser without directly saying it. His rabble-rousing enterprise is similar to what lawyers describe as busybody, intruder, poke-nosing and meddlesome interloper. This presents the MURIC eternal leader as one who goes about manufacturing crises and creating an enterprise to rupture peaceful environments in the guise of protecting Muslim rights. For as the Sokoto government said, if indeed Akintola was deeply interested in the protection of Muslim rights as regards the relationship between the sultanate council and the state government, it ought to have first investigated its allegation. If it had done so, it would have discovered that “the relationship between the Ahmed Aliyu-led administration and the Sultanate Council, under the leadership of our most respected monarch, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, has been very cordial.”
The reality is that MURIC, with Akintola as leader and mouthpiece, has negatively served the interest of social cohesion and political development of Nigeria. His interventions in matters of public concern have always begged the question and left most Nigerians wondering the exact purpose his group serves. For instance, Akintola took to the press in October 2023 warning the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, against seeking expert assistance in tackling the problem of insecurity, which affected the territory in 2023. Wike had mooted the idea of engaging Israeli security experts for assistance. But, rather than express concern over the rising problem of insecurity in the nation’s capital and its implication for national stability and economic development, Akintola warned Wike against taking any such step.
Read him: “We like to warn that such collaboration with the state of Israel will exacerbate Nigeria’s security problem by escalating it from a local crisis to an international fracas engineered by MOSSAD with the likelihood of Nigeria becoming the centre of rivalry for global espionage outfits like the American CIA and the Russian SVR and FSB. We believe that Wike is now courting the Israelis because, like most Nigerian Christians, he holds the wrong notion that Israel is a Christian state, whereas the reverse is the case.”
By warning Wike against the plan and not suggesting alternatives, Akintola left many citizens wondering what purposes he served and if he was interested in the peace and security of Nigeria as he proclaimed to be.
Not done with that, Akintola went ahead to use the opportunity to make snide comments to denigrate Christians and expand the religious fault lines that have become an item of political trade in Nigeria. He said: “Just yesterday, Wednesday, September 4, Jews spit on Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem; Christians are under constant attacks in Israel.” One would ask, what was the connection between Wike’s desire to engage Israeli security experts to help him tackle insecurity in the FCT and Jews stoning Christians in Jerusalem? The only interest this line served was that it made Akintola happy that he found another opportunity to hit at Christians, his favourite activity as MURIC leader, which has seen him present Muslims as being constantly at war with Christians.
The reality, as it currently appears, is that Akintola is gradually taking MURIC out of rational importance and relevance. He seems to have successfully transformed the group into a rabid content creator for social media. Perhaps, it is time rational members of the group, especially those with positive mindsets, convoked a most urgent congress to re-engineer the group towards a more purposeful leadership and save it from an eclipse that looks certain with a little more time.