SUPREME Council for Sharia in Nigeria (SCSN) officials have expressed their opposition to the creation of the regional security outfit Amotekun in the southwest of the country saying the move was a subtle plot by Christians to dominate the geo-political zone
Over recent years, heavily-armed herdsmen have been running riot across Nigeria, engaging in kidnapping, armed robbery and banditry. To address the problem, the governors from across the southwest geo-political zone decided to launch a regional security outfit named Amotekun, which translates to leopard in the local Yoruba language.
Backing up their plans with an official launch in Ibadan, the six governors have supplied Operation Amotekun with vehicles and equipment. However, the development has been opposed by some critics who have described Amotekun as an ethnic militia but over the last week, the governors and the federal governors have met and decided to draw up a legal framework to govern the operation.
However, expressing its opposition to the development, the SCSN said Amotekun is part of a grand plot to Christianise southwest Nigeria. Speaking on Osogbo, the Osun State capital yesterday, Sheikh Abdurrasheed Hadiyatullah, the SCSN vice president, alleged that the affairs of the Christian-dominated outfit was designed and determined from the church at the expense of the Muslim majority in the region.
Sheikh Hadiyatullah said: “The Amotekun programme is viewed as a subtle method of the further Christianisation of the southwest by its promoters in their usual manner of having political and power dominance over the Muslims in the region. It is another elusive way of establishing a Christian-dominated state police force whose affairs would be designed and determined from the church at the expense of the Muslim majority in the region.
“Provision of effective safety for lives and property of the people at any point in time is a collective responsibility, one that is devoid of any iota of elements of religious, ethnic and primitive bigotry, a type of garment that Amotekun presently but unfortunately wears. Issues of security of the peoples ought not to be premised on the altar of politics and personal interests as doing such would amount to building an empire on mere propaganda and the figment of the imagination of the gullible.
“It stands to collapse shortly after its creation. Any form of the Christian agenda camouflaged as a security outfit, such as the Amotekun, where the Muslims population from the southwest and in the country at large is viewed as a target is an act of injustice, unfairness, inequality, barbarism, savagery and wickedness taken too far and therefore outright unacceptable and thereby condemned in its entirety.”
