The Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, has launched another attack on Governor Abdul’aziz Yari of Zamfara state, insisting that the governor failed his people by doing nothing to stop the spread of meningitis in the state.
Yari had last week blamed the outbreak of the disease on the too many sins committed by his people, provoking an outrage from Nigerians including the Emir who said the governor was ignorant.
Sanusi took to his official Instagram page again on Tuesday to rebuke the governor, describing his statement as preposterous and ludicrous.
The monarch said many Muslim countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia were competing with other developed western countries in lamenting that northern Muslim leaders in Nigeria were only using their own knowledge to impoverish their people.
“Muslim countries are holding their own in the modern world, proving that Islam is not a religion of underdevelopment. However, the likes of Zamfara state governor, Yari only strengthen this prejudice.
“Abdulaziz Yari quite ludicrously said the deadly meningitis, rampaging his state, is divine punishment for fornication. He didn’t say how this was revealed to him because Zamfara certainly doesn’t have the highest number of fornicators in the nation.
“His preposterous statement fails to take into account the fact that meningitis isn’t a sexually transmitted ailment.
“The truth about the matter is that despite being warned of an impending outbreak, his government took no steps to prepare. Now he blames God! We are stuck with political leaders who only pretend to be godly because sycophants always refer to people in high political office as a ‘God-sent’.
“Paradoxically, despite being ruled by all these ‘God-sents’, we have spectacularly failed to progress as a nation. It’s no secret that many of our political leaders are inept and not well-educated. Nigerians have learnt from experience not to expect much from them,” he said.
The former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria regretted that conservative leaders had twisted the minds of several northern youths such that almost all the artisans in Kano were from southern Nigeria while the Kano indigenes had turned to begging.
He continued: “I choose to fight for the progress of Nigerians and suggest solutions to their problems. It’s my duty to speak the truth about the ill-effects of conservative Muslims who are harming Islam rather than helping it.
I still believe that conservative Muslims are still stuck in the 13th Century and their claim that children need no other knowledge than Islamic studies flies in the face of reality. All the poverty, under-development and immense suffering in the North are a result of uneducated masses refusing to learn work or trade.
The majority of technicians in Kano are from the south while untrained indigenes beg. How does that make sense? Why is it that conservative Muslims, who claim to be against scientific progress, enter aeroplanes and fly to perform the Hajj in Mecca rather than using camels to cross the desert!
Unless northern political leaders like Governor Yari pay attention to me, there will never be a day when anywhere in the North will be like the modern Muslim cities of Kuala Lumpar, Istanbul, Jakarta, Lahore, Greater Cairo, Dacca, Karachi, Dubai, Riyadh or Faisalabad.”
