Nigeria should be made to work for all
In recent years, waves of sectarian sympathy have been sweeping across the country, reinforcing decades of hate and desperate fears. They are constant reminders of Nigeria’s problems as they paint in vivid images our religious and tribal loyalties. The latest was triggered by the 2020 Christmas day homily titled, ‘Ä Nation in Search of Vindication’ delivered by the Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah. Given the nature of our environment, the sermon became an open invitation to partisan religious frenzy, accompanied with hateful communiques that are laced with dangerous threats. The fear of violence was further heightened by the State Security Service (SSS) which warned of plot by some persons and groups to plunge the country into a religious violence.
Print Nigeria s President Muhammadu Buhari swears in ministers into his cabinet in Abuja, Nigeria on November 11, 2015. Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters
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Roman Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Matthew Kukah, in a Christmas message titled A Nation In Search Of Vindication, delivered a blistering critique of Nigeria s governance and political economy. The message was not a sermon, nor was it, apparently, delivered in a church setting. Rather it appears to be a message addressed to a wider audience than his fellow Catholics. In it he accused President Muhammadu Buhari of nepotism and making too many high-level appointments among his fellow northern Muslims. He said, “Every honest Nigerian knows that there is no way any non-Northern Muslim President could have done a fraction of what President Buhari has done by his nepotism and gotten away with
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By Owei Lakemfa
HUMANITY was given the earth as a sustainable security. Our entire lives depend on it. However, human beings constitute the greatest danger to earth. In realisation of this, strategic thinkers developed the idea of establishing forest reserves to stem the earth’s destruction and try to preserve life as we know it.
Forest reserves are state-protected areas where commercial activities of any kind are prohibited in order to preserve biodiversity and protect endangered species. They are special areas of conservation and research from which the general public is prohibited.
Mathew Hassan Kukah
On the eve of Christmas that has just come and gone, Matthew Hassan Kukah, Ph.D., the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto who is quite popular and more than well known to those who are glad to know men like him, at least, by reputation, held many of us under his sway. The critical Bishop aptly used the Christmas occasion to deliver his Christmas message which he contemplatively entitled “A nation in search of vindication.” It was a religious, moral, philosophical, political, psychological, historical, sociological, literary, in fact, an all-in-one message of aesthetic faith and taste of a connoisseur who numbers among the finest political and moral critics of our country. Everything Bishop Kukah said in his aforesaid Christmas message illuminated (and still illuminates) the homiletics for it. And his homily on his Christmas pulpit was one instance, one fair instance, of the pernicious effect of emotion his homily instigated or provoked in any guilty one or class of gui
Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah
Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, is not just a religious leader, he is also a social critic, and a moral crusader. Kukah is courageous, bold, fearless and outspoken. He is never given to semantics, nor to pretences. He tells truth to power, and says things as he sees them, without colouration, without painting of words, not minding whose ox is to be gored. Matthew Kukah is a stormy petrel, he is a Socratic gadfly.
For more than two decades, Kukah has been in the public space, pricking the conscience of Nigerians. In his sermons on the pulpits, in his several public lectures, his numerous interviews on radio and television, and articles on pages of newspapers and magazines, Matthew Kukah always bares his mind, attacking and criticizing the injustices in Nigerian society.