In the last ten years a number of Christians have been phoning or sending me text messages to ask if members of the religion and Muslims worship the same God. This followed my disclosure that the Heavenly Father has been using 41 or 61 Muslim clerics in Ado – Ekiti, to fast and pray for 41 or 61 days, for those He has been sending me to since 1993 as His candidate to become the country’s president in His plan to make Nigeria a great nation.
I had raised the issue with the Supreme Being in 2008 and from His reply I had written a series in 2009 with the title: Judaists, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The overwhelming majority of the Christians who reacted disagreed with me.
Some of them even claimed that I must have come from a Muslim family and only converted to Christianity, hence my belief that members of the two faiths serve the same God. But they replied only once and did not abuse me or the Muslims.
The Christian I am writing about now brought up the issue in a text message he sent to me on January 16, this year. But since I told him that Christians and Muslims serve the same Lord he had sent to me four insulting or abusive messages, insisting that the members of the two religions worship different deities.
So nauseating has he been that last week Tuesday I had to send him a text message that it was time he stopped disturbing me, and that if he did not that I would publish whatever he sends to me thereafter. This was his reply: “Hmmm! U threatening or blackmailing me? Islam has got nothing to do with GOD ALMIGHTY. All Moslems are like dormant cancerous cells! Potential terrorists! Is this difficult to understand?”
Next week: The proofs that adherents to Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the same God.
Gasali’s ridiculous criticism of my column
Nurudeen Gasali of Ilorin, who the one-line information on him online described as a businessman and of the NUR – ALLAH ISLAMIC CENTRE, had in his text message published in this column five weeks ago, on February 27, wondered how I “crept into being a columnist of the Daily Sun, one of the foremost newspapers in Nigeria” because I am “too poor and clumsy in idea and reasoning.”
I am sure those who started reading my 11 – year – old PABULUM since last year, not to talk of those who had been doing so since inception on December 19, 2007 would be amused by Gasali’s foolish criticism. Because it is a fact known to all and sundry that my column is one of the most popular and that I am one of the highly informed and respected journalists in the country and one who is read by the nation’s Heads of State since PABULUM came on board.
It was an article I wrote in June 2009 on the second anniversary of the government of late President Umaru Yar’Adua that got him to reach out to the Niger Delta militants and come up with his amnesty programme. I had in that piece opined that as Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 19, 1955), the German-born theoretical physicist once said that someone cannot be doing the same thing or what others had been doing and expect a different result.
I therefore advised Yar’Adua to find a new approach to deal with the problems he inherited from President Olusegun Obasanjo, who relied on using force to suppress dissidents. Three or four months later, he came up with his amnesty programme.
In my column of September 14, 2011 I had written that Boko Haram terrorists were waxing stronger because President Goodluck Jonathan had presented himself to them as a weakling and that it was why they had extended their attacks to the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, bombing places which included the United Nations office. It was that article he reacted to on Sunday, September 25 when he said he was not a Pharaoh (King of Egypt), Nebuchadnezzar (King of Babylon, now Iraq) or an army general to start behaving ruthlessly. But he later changed gear and came up with a stronger approach to tackle the terrorists.
The Daily Sun is the fourth newspaper I am writing a column for in the 45 years that I have been doing so. And as was the case with two of the other three, it was at the invitation of either the editor or a senior management officer of the publishing company. It began in 1975 with the Times International, a weekly magazine published by the Daily Times of Nigeria. I was then acting Senior Current Affairs Officer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria since April 1978).
I was invited by the Director of Manpower Development of the Daily Times, late Dr. Omotoso Ogunniyi to join the company’s Times International magazine. We met by chance. But he had been listening to my news analysis on current affairs on Radio Nigeria for five years and when he heard that I was Sina Adedipe, he just said “you’re the type of person we need at Times International.”
He told me to see him in his office at Kakawa Street on Lagos Island two days later. When I did he sent me to the company’s Personnel Manager, late David Attah to discuss salary and day of resumption. Of course, the pay was better than what I was earning at the NBC.
But I had to change my plan when I went to discuss my intention to leave the NBC with the Head of the Current Affairs Unit, Mr. Victor Olufemi Adefela. He told me not to submit a letter of resignation as he would get me promoted to the position of Senior Current Affairs Officer soonest and with effect from when I started acting.
It was done within two months and my elevation and the salary for the new position were backdated three years. It was the first time such was done in the corporation and I doubt if it has happened again or will ever be. As icing on the cake, I was sponsored to undertake a year’s postgraduate diploma course in international relations at the University of Ife, Ile – Ife (Obafemi Awolowo University since 1987).
Although he was disappointed at my change of mind, Dr. Ogunniyi suggested I wrote on part – time basis for Times International to enhance my monthly income and facilitate my joining their company in case circumstances brought up such a situation one day. I accepted and wrote a column for the magazine for three years until 1978.
To be continued next Wednesday