A source accused the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Muslims, of ‘shabby treatment’.
Shakir Akorede / Wikimedia Commons
‘If the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council cannot work, we will pull out of it as we cannot see its relevance in the lives of our people,’ said one leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria.
The umbrella organisation representing Nigerian churches threatened to withdraw from a body established to improve relations between Christians and Muslims in protest at its failure to respond to attacks on Christians across the country.
The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) had demonstrated its inability to address rising insecurity and continuous violence.
The NIREC was set up in 2013 by the former President Goodluck Jonathan administration to mediate in ethno-religious conflicts between Christians and Muslims. The council, a voluntary body, has 50 members, shared equally between Muslim and Christian groups.
After an emergency meeting in the northern part of the country recently, CAN leaders raised concerns over the continuous killings of Christians, particularly church pastors, by militants normally identified as herders. On 4 August, a pastor of the Church of Christ in Nations was killed around 2 p.m. in a community in the Bokkos local government area of Plateau State by gunmen suspected to be herders.
“NIREC was established to promote harmony among both the Christians and the Muslims. The leadership of each faith is supposed to work on their followers to stop attacks. We don’t have problems talking to our own people and we are doing that. However, we are daily faced with continuous attacks and outright killings of our people by the other people from the other side,” one CAN leader told The Tablet.
“We have raised these concerns during our meetings severally, but these killings and attacks have not abated. Some communities have been completely obliterated. Go to Benue State and see what they have done to our people. Our people cannot go to their farms, talk less of going to their places of worship. If NIREC cannot work, we will pull out of it as we cannot see its relevance in the lives of our people.”
The CAN leaders also accused the leadership of the Nigeria Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), of intentionally avoiding having meetings with them to address the issue.
According to a source at the CAN Secretariat in Abuja, the 25 Christian members are contemplating pulling out of NIREC because of the conduct of the co-chair of the council, the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, the spiritual leader of Nigeria’s Muslims.
“We should pull out of it because we can no longer tolerate this shabby treatment in an organisation where 25 Christians and 25 Muslims are supposed to find a lasting solution to religious intolerance in the country,” the CAN source said.
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