For the first time, the Catholic Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese and fiery critic, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, is caught on the other side of a crossfire.
The Cleric who is well known to speak truth to power even when it is discomforting, is singing a new song that doesn’t seem to resemble his “sonorous” voice of reason and disenchantment with oppression.
Against his known and familiar stance on Christian persecution, especially in Northern Nigeria, where he once declared that “killing Christians is the only crime not punished in Nigeria”
Bishop Kukah has recently done a detour by telling the international community not to re-designate Nigeria as “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC)over alleged violation of religious freedom.
The ebullient cleric who had once used the pulpit to lampoon the Buhari administration and particularly the Nasir El-Rufai government in Kaduna State, saying that “the road to burial grounds are now busier than the roads to the farmlands” as a result of the mass killings in Christian communities of Kajuru local government, says declaring Nigeria as a CPC nation will affect the ongoing inter-faith dialogue and worsen our fragile peace.
To Bishop Kukah, the killing is not about ” someone going around wielding machetes to kill me because I’m a Christian”. Because according to him, he lives in the very” womb of Islam” in Sokoto State where collaboration between Christians and Muslims is still possible. In other words, contrary to popular opinion, the killing is not targeted at Christians. This is what drew the public outrage against a refined critic and public commentator like the revered Bishop Hassan Mathew Kukah.
In a nation in dearth of social critics who represent the timid and silent voices of the helpless majority and the true conscience of the nation, the prevarication of Kukah and the seeming ambivalence of his extreme positions on the same matter when the expectation from his natural constituency is high, is disappointingly devastating.
What is cooking with Bishop Kukah? Who has bewitched him like the Galatians? Has he joined the fray of the establishment’s apologists and partisan mouthpiece? Who gave him the forbidden and lying fruit to eat in his vast garden of truth?
What has his so-called “interface dialogue” achieved especially in the north central where Christian villages have been totally erased, renamed and occupied by this “army of occupation” under the guise of “farmers and herders” crisis? Yet this is what Bishop Kukah prefers, than to call a spade its true name.
Why we might exercise caution on the West’s sudden interest in an age long trouble, as previous experiences has shown selfishness in such “interventions” by these western do-gooders across the Global South, we must learn to give Nigerian troubles their right appellations. It is the right direction to find a lasting solution.
