The death of the late Islamic cleric, Imam Abubakar Abdullahi, is a huge blow to Nigeria. Not because at age 92, his death is coming too early or that at that age, anyone would not know that death would come some day, but because his demise has denied the nation an elder statesman whose contribution, relevance and importance to our attainment of the nationhood we desire will be sorely missed.
Our problems are multifaceted and mainly caused by a generation of leaders who, for their political and personal benefits, have manipulated our fault lines and divided us along ethno-religious lines.
Sadly, our religious clerics and traditional rulers who should serve as moral compass and be of high moral rectitude themselves have been caught up in the corrosive and degenerative quandary because they have abandoned righteousness and are busy chasing the politicians for patronage and filthy lucre.
The resultant consequences are that our society is constantly on edge and ready to erupt into crisis at the slightest provocation.
This tendency to spew divisive rhetoric is more pronounced in the northern parts of the country. There is a deliberate weaponisation of ethnicity and religion in order to continue to subjugate and manipulate the masses for political reasons.
The millions of uneducated, impoverished, and wrongly indoctrinated populations are ever available for recruitment for crime, rigging of elections, and senseless religious wars and killings.
When politicians boast of delivering millions of votes from their region, they speak with so much confidence because they know that with a few naira notes and a few cups of rice they can secure the votes of their constituency.
However, some Nigerians still believe in the sanctity of human life, and they would stop at nothing to protect human life. It’s in this fast disappearing category of people who would not support the killing of fellow humans for political, ethnic, religious, or sectarian or any reason for that matter, that the late Imam Abdullahi belongs.
In 2018, the Imam saw many desperate, frightened Christian families running from armed bandits into his village in Plateau State, central Nigeria, and decided to risk his life to save them. He sheltered about 300 people in his home and mosque.
While some still argue now that it’s not only Christians that are being killed, this however, cannot repudiate the fact that Christians have been targeted for a long time and that it was much much later that Muslim communities and mosques became targets too. These are largely cases of common criminality.
In Plateau, Benue, and other states of the middle belt, the main targets are Christian communities for the purpose of expansionism by Islamic jihadists.
And so when Donald Trump says today that there is Christian genocide, it is not to begin to argue whether Muslims too get killed but for these avoidable bloodshed to be stopped immediately.
Imam Abdullahi risked his life to save Christians who were the targets of these murderers.
Today, he is no more and has found peace with his Maker, but his memory will forever evoke everything positive, and his children will also benefit from the goodwill his name will evoke globally.
Abubakar Abdullahi had been suffering from a heart condition and was being treated in hospital, where he died on January 15.
It’s gratifying to note that Imam Abdulllahi, who was born in January 1936, was honoured and celebrated while alive both locally and internationally. The world today speaks glowingly not because of his riches or because he wielded so much power while alive but because he allowed his humanity and his love for fellow men trump religious bigotry and ethnocentrism, which have plagued us.
In recognition of what he did, Abdullahi was given one of the highest national honours and an award for religious freedom by the US State Department.
In 2022, Abdullahi was given a national honour by then-President Muhammadu Buhari, who commended his bravery. That was three years after then-US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, gave him the International Religious Freedom Award.
According to a BBC report, he had said then that, “God created mankind differently, but he wants us to live together in peace and harmony, and not harm each other.”
The people he saved had come from a neighbouring village. They were fleeing when about 300 well-armed men – suspected cattle herders, who are mostly Muslims – started shooting sporadically and burning down their homes.
Some of those who managed to escape ran towards the mainly Muslim neighbourhood nearby, where the Imam lived.
The cleric immediately came to their aid.
“I first took the women to my personal house to hide them. Then I took the men to the mosque,” Abdullahi told BBC.
When the attackers heard that the villagers had fled towards the mosque, they demanded that the Imam bring out those he was hiding.
But he refused.
Along with some others in the Muslim community, he began to cry and wail, asking them to leave.
And to their amazement, the herders did leave – but then set two nearby churches on fire.
After hearing this chilling account of how lives are being wasted, especially in the middle belt, who then would argue that Christians have not been targeted for many years?
Who would argue that in the eight years of the Buhari administration armed herdsmen were killing freely and without consequences? Yet when these victims cried and called to be saved by the government then, they were reprimanded for not being good hosts and accused of ethnic profiling.
May God rest the soul of this good man, and may his life teach us the necessary lessons we need to learn that we are first humans before becoming Muslims and Christians.
We hope that beyond our usual penchant for penning beautiful epitaphs, we would document the life and times of this great man for present and future generations to venerate and honour. This is a genuine hero.
This is very important because all we celebrate today as heroes are men and women with questionable past and inexplicable resources. Men and women who steal our common patrimony and, rather than build the society and make it hospitable for all, use them to divide and rule us.
