OPINION: South And Middle-Belt Must Unite Against Islamization Of Nigeria

By Raphael Adebayo

For the first time in the political history of the Fourth Republic, a Muslim-Muslim ticket was aggressively ramrodded down the throat of Nigerians under the absolute surveillance and backing of an ethnoreligious Military President.

In 2022, I published a book titled De-Nigerianization. Among my core arguments in the book, there are three that I wish to recall for the purposes of this article: (1) the envisaged multiethnic consociation in Nigeria will never happen because unequal power was always the prop on which the Nigerian contraption stands; (2) the horrific domination of the political class over the Nigerian populace must be understood in terms of the fragmented nature of the class itself, going back to the colonial days, which places the South and Middle-Belt at the mercy of the Core-North; and (3) Nigeria will be wholly Islamized if the people of the South and Middle-Belt do not unite to reject and resist the core-northern ethnoreligious hegemonic advance, as well as their turncoat accomplices in the Middle-Belt and Southern divide of the political class.

In the year that followed the publication of my book, Nigeria supposedly held a general election: The extent of decay on display during the electioneering and elections issued a compelling and sobering vindication of the arguments above. For the first time in the political history of the Fourth Republic, a Muslim-Muslim ticket was aggressively ramrodded down the throat of Nigerians under the absolute surveillance and backing of an ethnoreligious Military President. This happened at a time when reports by organizations such as Open Doors revealed that “89% of Christians martyred worldwide” are found in Nigeria. Hence, as much as I do not identify as an “Obidient” for reasons I will not unwrap here, I was in full support of the pushback that the leader of the movement galvanized and (not faultlessly) represented, in concert with leaders of various Christian groups and denominations, against the expansionist disdain of the core-northern fundamentalists and their self-absorbed EmiLoKan marionette dancing to the tunes of his overpriced illegitimacy.

Since the violent electoral coup in 2023, soporific concessions have been made where retributive justice was necessary. For instance, the creation of the Ministry of Livestock Development, which was designed to fantastically curb the jihadist pulse of Fulani herders and their terrorist allies against rural Southerners and Middlebeltans, has not in any way appeased the carnage in motion as there was another mass killing of Indigenous people in Gidan Ado community in Plateau State on the Eve of Christmas 2024. The worst and galling part is not that the people senselessly executed have unfortunately joined the long and ever-growing list of jihadist victims in the South and Middle-Belt; it is that there is neither any sign of coordinated response nor a heightened sense of necessity for such a response.

As against these imperatives, there is on display the crude splitting of Southerners and Middelbeltans into camps of extraordinary sophists, stomach-churning reductionists, ethnocentric chauvinists, cosmopolitans (those who choose to downplay or ridicule the interplay of ethnicity and religion as eternal forces of group consciousness and identity in Nigeria), and postmodernists (those who are loath to countenance the veridical danger of ethnoreligious advance in front of them). The former believe themselves to share an illusive global identity; the latter are everywhere in the world today, decentering and denying absolute necessities and objective truths, as most recently instantiated in Germany, which had received and ignored repeated warnings from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, regarding the Magdeburg extremist who rammed his car into a crowd of Christmas celebrants and sent several, including a toddler, to their graves too early.

Thus, it should come as no surprise to mindful observers that the fundamentalists and extremists are now looking to reinvade and capture the whole of the ancient Oyo Empire, the historic Yoruba territory which they’ve long desired since at least the early 19th century, through the operationalization of Sharia (Islamic law based on the Quran and strict injunctions from the Hadith of Muhammad). If Oyo, as we know it today, falls to these anachronistic champions of Islamism, islamizing the rest of the entire South and the Middle-Belt, which some would argue is already under the suzerainty of Wahhabis and Salafists, will merely be a matter of time and likely a cinch. In this vein, even the Lagos Experiment represented by the supposedly non-provocative “Jesus Christ Is Not God” banner at Lekki Central Mosque, must not be dismissed as unrelated to the advance of radical Islam in Southern Nigeria.

Islam, several scholars have argued, functions as both a religious creed and political ideology much more than the other known Abrahamic religions. Glenn Beck, the American media personality and author, published a book in 2015 titled IT ISABOUT ISLAM in which he distinguished between Islam as a religion, which many of us know and appreciate and even embrace, and Islamism, the political ideology which we must collectively condemn and resist. In the book, Beck presented a chilling chronicling of Islamism as a ruthless doctrinal movement that is rooted in fundamentalism and expansionism. Numerous precise Surahs (Chapters) of the Quran, as translated by Muhammad Taqi al-Hilali and Muhammad Muhsin Khan and approved by the government of Saudi Arabia, were reproduced by Beck.

From Quran Chapter 9, verse 29, which mandates Muslims to undertake “holy wars” against non-Muslims (Christians, polytheists, atheists, agnostics, animists, etc.) until they are physically, spiritually, and mentally subjugated, to Quran Chapter 47, verse 4, which not only specifies how non-Muslims must be gruesomely butchered but also assures jihadists of the holy rectitude of their blitzes. There is also Quran Chapter 4, verse 76, which instructs Muslim believers to wage war in the name of Allah and thereby disavow Satan, as well as Quran Chapter 33, verses 26 and 27, which prescribes the enslavement of non-Muslims and the forceful seizure of their land, wealth, and resources. For all this, they are assured of divine reward in Quran Chapter 2, verse 154; Quran Chapter 8, verse 60;Quran Chapter 22, verse 39; Quran Chapter 47,from verses 4 to 6, and so on.

The problem, as we are now seeing in the Southwest, is that the lines between Islam and Islamism are deliberately blurred by political turncoats, Islamist apologists, and overly sentimental religionists. Among them are those who openly and myopically support Islamism, even though we know them to have only ever been comfortable practicing Islam liberally or what Usman dan Fodio and the Sokoto Caliphate repudiated as “mixed Islam.” We must also note the silence of those who do not openly support Islamism but are not loath to live in a fully Islamized Nigeria: they are the ones who quietly romanticize the view that full or first-class citizenship privileges (whatever that would look like in Islamized Nigeria), as Beck argues, should be reserved for Muslims only, while non-Muslims trail their unholy march submissively. In the Core-North, we have seen what this ruthless fundamentalism means, from public amputations and stoning of young men and women to the flagellation of residents of that region with rods, cowhides, and whipping sticks for the slightest misdemeanor or daring to speak.

For harmless commentary, we saw how Deborah was stoned and burned to death in Sokoto in 2022. Less than a month later, a 30-year-old man named Ahmad Usman suffered a similar fate at the hands of incensed Islamists or mujahedeen in the very heart of Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. According to the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), at least 52,250 Christians in Nigeria have been wickedly executed by Islamist militants since 2009. Over 30,000 of those deaths occurred between 2015 and 2023 under Buhari’s fanatic watch. At least five million Christians were displaced during the period covered by the report, and hundreds of thousands were kidnapped and countless unaccounted for. If the evident threats of Islamization to the basic freedoms we all ought to cherish are not easily graspable, how these heinous practices in service of Islamism do not immediately frighten and revolt all of us is a question we must earnestly strive to answer.

Let me be clear: the threat of Islamization in Nigeria is not facing the Southwest alone. There should never be a time when Islamism becomes acceptable in the South and Middle-Belt. Those who proselytize this vicious political ideology do not only target non-Muslims; their mandate assures them of holy reward when they also strike against liberal or reformist Muslims, which is the category to which the majority of Muslims in the South and Middle-Belt belong. As a matter of fact, the Intersociety report also revealed that about 34,000 Muslims were slaughtered for not adhering to the version of Islam that is practiced and propagated by the Islamists in Nigeria.

When a curious gust of wind seizes the air, people often wonder what enigma would come with it. In this case, we need not be puzzled about what is in the air: we know it is murderous Islamism, and those who are eager to dismiss or fancy this menace a Southwestern problem should be watchful and not lose themselves to fiddling while our interconnected regions burn. The statement of Governor Makinde of Oyo State on this ethno-fundamentalist blight is commendable, but without total unity and harmonized action between the Middle-Belt and the entire South, Nigeria will be Islamized in our lifetime.

Adebayo is an author and activist