Abstract
Religious intolerance and mob violence are increasing in Nigeria, as
This is just the latest extra-judicial killing in northern Nigeria - the gruesome murder of Usman Buda in Sokoto in June 2023.
Cases like this are on the rise. They come from within communities, spearheaded sometimes by those closest to the victims, fuelled by Islamic religious extremists with the tacit support of the government, which fails to bring the assailants to book. Those extremists might have been delighted by the delisting of Nigeria as a country of particular concern by the USA in 2021, after only being put on the list a year earlier due to violations of religious freedoms and violent attacks. The delisting was followed by a spike in killings.
During the Covid pandemic in 2020, two cases from the city of Kano caught everyone napping. In August, a Sharia court sentenced a minor, Omar Farouq Bashir, to 10 years’ imprisonment for blasphemy. On the same day, the Islamic judge sentenced Yahaya Sharif-Aminu to death by hanging for the same charge. Neither had legal representation.
Bashir had just moved to Kano with his brother-in-law in search of greener pastures. While working as a dishwasher in a restaurant, his phone fell out of his pocket and another worker picked it up, refused to return it and taunted Bashir.
Bashir lost his temper and probably uttered a swear word. The other man, eager to teach the new boy from the village a lesson, reported him to Hisbah, the Islamic police, a few days later. They whisked him away to detention and then he was sent to the Sharia court.
Amina Ahmed, the wife of Mubarak Bala, at her home in Abuja, Nigeria on 11 March 2021; less than a year after her husband’s arrest
CREDIT: Kola Sulaimon / AFP
Sharif-Aminu’s situation was more complicated. He is the son of an Islamic cleric and a gospel singer from the Tijaniyya Sufi Muslim order.
He was accused of praising his Tijaniyya Prophet above the Prophet Muhammad in a Whatsapp recording, which was quickly shared around various groups. A few days later, when Hisbah went to arrest Sharif-Aminu, a mob gathered in front of his family home and pelted it with stones. They also looted the property, injuring his family.
Both Bashir and Sharif-Aminu were charged under a section of Sharia law which criminalises insulting a Prophet of God. The penalty is death by hanging.
The Islamic clerics in Kano State had issued a fatwa restraining any Muslim lawyers from coming to their defence, and both the state-sponsored Legal Aid Council and other lawyers refused to defend them in fear of reprisal attacks.
After the lockdown restrictions eased, the judge pronounced his sentences on both of them and they had 30 days to appeal. It was at this stage that I, under the interventionist vehicle the Foundation for Religious Freedom, went in surreptitiously to file an appeal.
It was whilst filing Sharif-Aminu’s appeal on 3 September 2020 that we found out about Bashir’s travesty of justice as well. I returned to file our second appeal, this time for Bashir. The atmosphere was so politically charged that even the bailiffs were apprehensive about serving the court papers on the government for fear of being reprimanded. I had to use a courier.
Now we had two appeals to prepare for. One was to snatch Sharif-Aminu from the hangman’s noose.
I gave the scoop to a dependable ally at Sahara Reporters before releasing it to the international press. Before I could bat an eyelid my phone was blowing up with calls for interviews from CNN, the BBC, Reuters and AFP. The UN Human Rights Office in Geneva also wanted to talk.
After a delay caused by the End SARS protests which rocked our nation, eventually the appeals were heard in November. In January 2021, the Appellate Division of the Kano State High Court quashed Bashir’s conviction and set him free. The court agreed with us that he was a minor and he had no business in an adult court, especially without legal representation.
In both cases, we argued that the constitution prohibited the state government or the federal government from adopting the practice of Sharia law. We argued that Nigeria was a signatory to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We also drew the attention of the court to sections of the constitution which guaranteed religious freedom and freedom of expression.
Sharif-Aminu’s was a more explosive case. The court overturned his death penalty but, curiously, sent his case to the Sharia court again for a retrial. We appealed to the second highest court in Nigeria - the Court of Appeal.
On 12 May 2022, after a series of delays, the court was not able to sit due to an emergency.
We learnt that Deborah Samuel Yakubu had been lynched by a mob made up of her teacher-training college classmates in Sokoto. The pictures that came out on social media were horrific.
Yakubu, a Christian, had complained that a class Whatsapp group for coursework had been hijacked for the spread of Islamic verses. An argument ensued and she was alleged to have blasphemed. Yakubu was waylaid on her way to class and hit with sticks and stones by her classmates and others nearby. The security staff claimed to be overwhelmed by the mob and left her to her fate. Someone brought out petrol and another lit the match. Her body was set on fire.
Presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar tweeted in condemnation of Yakubu’s murder - but the backlash from northern users of Twitter, who threatened not to vote for him, made him delete the tweet.
In Yakubu’s case, 34 lawyers turned up to defend her suspected murderers. The police charged only two people from the mob that killed her, and not with murder but with public disturbance. Eventually, the matter was struck out of court due to a lack of diligent prosecution.
Rhoda Jatau, a mother of five, tried to draw attention to the murder by forwarding the video on Whatsapp. In May 2022, she was arrested for inciting the public - the same offence that those suspected of murdering Yakubu had been charged with. Yakubu’s killers got off the hook and a woman is in prison for raising awareness.
Ethnic and religious violence is not new to Nigeria. The roots lie in the amalgamation of more than 250 ethnic tribes by the British colonial government, which produced two huge territories - essentially two artificial countries. The northern one was largely Muslim, agrarian, poor and less-educated than its more religiously diverse and tolerant southern neighbour. This singular action created a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual mixture. It was also the root of the heightened tension we have seen in recent times in Nigeria.
It was inconceivable to the colonial government to have extreme punishments under Islamic law such as stoning people to death for adultery, expressing a different religious opinion or converting from Islam. Thus, the British put an end to it. This was largely the case until the colonial government granted Nigeria independence in 1960.
It created an uneasy alliance of a north with remnants of Fulani jihadists, a Hausa population that struggled to come to terms with its own identity and a rebellious and proud Kanem-Bornu Empire; all shades of believers and non-believers in the middle-belt; and a southern Nigeria with all forms of religious belief or no belief at all - a Molotov cocktail waiting to be ignited. Therein lies the root of the uneasy alchemy known as Nigeria, and with it the futile search for religious tolerance and freedom.
If Sharia law in Nigeria was not new, what then could be responsible for the spike in religious intolerance we have witnessed in the last two decades? In 1999, democracy was restored in Nigeria after a harrowing military incursion. For the first time since Nigeria’s independence (apart from brief spells in 1966 and 1976), Nigeria was not being led by a northerner. In retaliation, a governor in the northern Zamfara state, Ahmad Sani Yerima, returned the criminal aspects of Sharia law previously done away with by the colonial government. Eleven northern states followed in quick succession.
A group of women in Maiduguri, Borno State, Nigeria
CREDIT: Friedrich Stark / Alamy
This was an affront to the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which recognises Sharia law only to the extent of Islamic personal law, guiding things such as marriage, inheritance and succession.
Every few years, news filtered in from northern Nigeria about someone who had been accused of speaking against Islam or the Prophet. They were usually hacked or stoned to death or, if they were lucky, they were arrested and charged before the Sharia courts.
Usually, there would be an international outcry, NGOs would get involved and the charges would be dropped. Alternatively, the alleged offender would plead guilty and ask for mercy before being let off the hook for time served in detention.
Mubarak Bala perhaps knew this. The humanist was arrested for blasphemy and had been held for two years when he suddenly decided to plead guilty on the morning of his arraignment. He had not seen his baby son since his arrest, and he reasoned that if he pleaded guilty he would get off quickly. He was in for a shock. The judge sentenced him to 24 years’ imprisonment, which his legal team has appealed.
As Bala and Jatau remain behind bars, so too does our client Sharif-Aminu. After we filed that first (successful) appeal for Bashir and learnt about Sharif-Aminu’s case, we vowed not to leave either man behind.