Why I hate love

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

Love is a pleasant thing if you are in a nice relationship. It is painful if you are in bad. It is also interesting if you are watching from afar. You often wonder why so and so person you hold in high esteem are behaving in certain ways. Love is a funny thing. It drives people crazy.

Different people have different meaning for love. Whatever kind of meaning you give to it, one thing is certain. The destination. The aim you want to achieve. I am not the one to tell your destination or the aim you want to achieve but the destination is always there.

Whether you are a president, a governor or a top government’s official, great men are daily threatened by love and have their career destroyed.  Take Sani Abacha for example or a man who was badly in need of kiss and furiously grabbed public phone in his office and called his female secretary. Are you crazy, you want me to mention a name? You also want to have my career destroyed. I won’t.   

In achieving his aim and destination, that university professor was possessed by desire for something. Of all the places on earth he couldn’t find any rendezvous to make love with a girl other than to masquerade as a lady to get into the female hostel. Love pulled him down.  Another person was caught in outrageous scandal inviting his female student for special lessons in Organic Chemistry and in the end the whole business ended up in Organic Matter. The other man, overwhelmed with love, had no prior thought for venue and simply chose a public road believing it was a perfect place to make love.  And he was caught.

Granted, love is something beyond human control and all these pent-up emotions do not augur well. When you have something in mind and you suppress it, your soul will trouble you until you express it consciously or unconsciously. So I embrace love. I embrace love anytime a chance presents itself because emotions bottled up don’t yield good result. But I have a problem.  

Relationship is notorious in depriving people of their freedom and liberty. You need to watch your steps from dressing to walking to speech mannerism. A lot of pretensions to conform to the demand and culture of love community.

My problem is that I am a person who recognizes my individuality and struggles to defend it, at least in my mind. I don’t accept some attributes that people will throw at me to define my life, and love is notorious in doing that. I want to live authentic life and I will begin to behave defiantly the moment I learn that someone is trying to control how I behave. I want to be a full human being. Unpredictable. Inconsistent. Because I need absolute freedom, I sometimes struggle with the idea of the kind of battle my wife will have when I get married. I wish that the woman will be understanding.

So when I see a girl but could not summon the courage to approach her, I learnt to bear my anguish in silence. My eyes will coolly appreciate her until she realizes that there is something unusual.

My silence is not because of cowardice. It is because I am meticulous about my dignity and there are problems of dignity crisis here that may arise. What if I talk to her and she ignores me and it is in the full view of the public? It was enormous disgrace trailing after ‘Yar Gidan Hajiya with all the public eyes on me. I no longer have such moral courage now.

In our part it is men who mostly make the first move and strive to maintain the relationship while women always want to be in control. Most of the girls I meet are relatively below my age and I feel uncomfortable to have the whole of me and all my intelligence controlled by a girl the same age with my sister.

Women sometimes want to make men fool, unintelligent and unperceptive. For you to remain in love you have to sometimes be a deliberate fool and pretend that you don’t know anything.

To ni fa matsala ta ke nan! This is what I hate. I don’t have a big heart to tolerate everything. I don’t tolerate anything that will hurt my esteem. I don’t tolerate an open deception. I don’t accept a vivid lie. I don’t tolerate a move from someone trying to hide an open secret. I hate pretension even though it is human nature.

Mata ikon Allah! See this girl. We communicated on phone and agreed that I was coming to see her at night. You would pity me how I abandoned everything and covered miles to reach her place. I arrived there and picked my phone to tell her that I was right in front of her home. When she picked up the call she told me that she could not come out.

“But you knew I was coming.” I said to myself in staggering amazement.

I carried myself all the way to your place and this was my reward. I felt hurt. Yet I somehow managed one more time to tell her that I could wait if she would come out when she had finished what she was doing. She told me once again that she was caught up in a schedule she could not get out of.  

 “I am busy,” she said, “but we can meet tomorrow. Good night.” I was just listening, feeling a kind of acute low esteem.

“Thank you,” I muttered grudgingly. You are not allowed to complain. It will backfire against you.

I dan za’a so ni to a so ni but I hate pretension. If she does not love me why taking the pain to have good wishes for me and suggested that we should meet tomorrow.   What is very amusing is that it was the girl who came to me when we first met and initiated the conversation that eventually led to our relation. I didn’t need to hire a Harvard Symbologist professor to explain to me the message she had been sending.  I hate pretension and that’s the reason why I have parted with ‘Yar Gidan Hajiya. I am not picking on her, this thing is not the monopoly of Hausa girl, it is everywhere among Nigerian girls.

It is very easy for me to part way with pretentious girls. The reason why I don’t go deep into this love business as a whole and take it seriously is that I don’t see love at this stage of my life as something very important. It is waste of time. I am not ready for getting married. I am not believer in doing love without doing anything. Just meet, chat and leave without doing anything tangible. Where is love in this? Maybe I will be deeply involved when I am ready for getting married. By that time a new generation of beautiful girls was borne. Rush is bad business.

What is disturbing now is that the girl would narrate the whole story of what she did to me to her friends. I heard a low voice at the background when she told me she couldn’t come out. Those friends of hers who have been looking for a chance to establish an overture would come out the next day and feel that they have triumphed over me. They would be happy by what one of them did and they would giggle and have pity for me. They would say “Allah Sarki, of all his dignity, look at how he has been disgraced.”

Why women are doing this? They believe that they have something you want. I would say women are playing into the hand of negative stereotype for narrowing their understanding and definition of self into a severely limited view. I would also say that when they allow a man to strive for the love alone, they are, in their subconscious mind, submitting that men are stronger than women. Don’t eject me out I’m still a feminist. They said we should all be feminists.

Why am I saying this while I cannot say ehem somewhere? It is because I believe that whatever I say here would not be gossiped back to the girl I am talking about. Even if somebody carries a word to her or any other girl they think I have a relationship with, she cannot see herself in this story and the only explanation I can offer is what you have read here. So, let’s stop speaking in whisper and have a conversation on this.

(@abubakarsulai13)

Wait Father, Let This Girl Be Prepared

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

It is something we all witness in our remote and immediate relation or in other families in our society. It is disturbing and could affect one’s health if they fervently concern themselves with the disheartening situation at all times, seeing people who are actually involved, willfully abdicating their responsibility to arrest the problem considering the pathetic condition it brings on the weak and vulnerable members of our society.

If it is not my biological sister today, it would be a girl in the next door neighbor and perhaps your sibling, right inside your home, if you’re a resident of this community. It’s pervasive in our society women quitting school for marriage. Unfortunately, if the marriage is tied without due diligence and thorough investigation, the man might turn out later to be a wrong husband. For some circumstances, largely inadequate or lack of preparation - physical and psychological, the union would soon end in separation few months after the marriage. By that time the girl might have been conceived and is expecting a baby in no time. She would come back to live with her family; judgmental eyes and gossiping words would be going round, reaching men’ ears, hoping one of them would show interest in her. After another ill-advised move for second trial, because she is seen as burden to her family, another marriage would hastily be solemnized. She is divorced again. She is already bored with tedious family life, the heavy pressure coming from the society; she would become eager to be in her own home and be forced to accept a man, any man who asks her marriage.  Like the previous experiences, her man would send her out, the third marriage fails. She would try another husband, on and on it goes throughout her life.    

Effort to educate her parents about the consequence of sending her out this disgraceful way will always end in vain. Parents always never seem to understand the grave implication they cause, acting like they are getting rid of a burden, and or auctioning her out like a tomato seller offering vegetables at a low price when the closing hour begins drawing in and marketsgoers start dispersing.

One is always assailed by  a nagging and disturbing question on how society perceives marriage. A temporary life with her husband, having sex experience for a little while, show the society you’re once married and then get divorced few moons after to return to her parents.

“Let’s her go so that we won’t be the butt of joke and gossip subject of the society,” parents always think. 

The fear for the small talk that would follow won’t allow parents to let the girl be well-equipped and well-prepared so that she could face the challenges ahead – capable of handling nasty situations that might arise in the future from unforeseen circumstances. Divorce, God forbid, not because it will never happen the couple being educated. It is because we hate it. Like Death.

The source of my anger and frustration that’s damaging my health besides the daunting task of explaining to the parents the situation they’re putting in the girl, which as usual they seem never to understand, is not the divorce per se or the subjugation she has been receiving from the husbands.

You can feel the thud-thud of my heartbeat, thundering rapidly and having difficulty sleeping whenever I try to explain to a girl that her life has worth and meaning beyond marriage and she fails to understand. Life having worth outside marriage? I must be crazy, she would think. And then I realize she is already in condition of:

Losing her self-esteem, running from bed to bed to display her deepest secret to several men, the core seat of her feminity.

That her life is now neither here nor there, residing in limbo and dancing on the brink of destruction.     

I am not condemning marriage institution because marriage in itself is not a problem. But it’s actually gnawing up a caring heart the way some people are manipulating marriage as an effective tool of committing injustices against women.  Granted, some parents are well-meaning regarding their intent to choose the best for their daughter, working to prevent a gift coming to the family before her marriage. While they are at it, the good intention of raising their children to be morally sound, they often choose to ignore what boys are doing and seem to forget that the punishment is the same in the sight of Allah. The society believes males are not going to be seriously affected by their illegal sexual activities like females. The society feels that the harm will be graver on females and therefore should be saved before getting involved into activities that would bind them to bitter consequences. They might also be unconsciously working in the hand of some opportunistic elements who are lurking around silently and ready to take advantage of an aspiring, but helpless, young lady to disallow the continuity of her education immediately after the marriage.

I always struggle with the thought of how people understand the injunction spelt out in our religion that says “dalabal ilmu farithatun ala kullu Muslim wal Muslimati:  knowledge is as compulsory to women as onto men”. Considering this prescription, my thinking is that knowledge should come first before marriage.

It’s my opinion to assert that a mind filled with goal, intellectual drive and aspiration is not a space where sexual thoughts would dwell and thrive, unless you have a base mind. I can see that now you begin to ask what if she has a great sexual drive or is inherently bad? In such case, this isn’t exclusive to school girls alone. The society is poisoned and decided to be unjust against female right from the beginning since there are already  negative stereotypes and preconceived notions attached to college girls as prime suspect of premarital intercourse.

Some women are also not helping matter when they are in high institutions of learning to engage in behaviors that society believes deviate from the conventional norms.  Convinced they have their freedom, they tend to be ruthless in getting back at the society. Seeing this, the patriarchy is provoked to punctuate her excess. And what next? - she got married.

But anyway, marriage is not a problem even though I can understand that some people inclined to see it as such, a conclusion wrongly drawn. I can only see it as an impediment in cases where the girl is never to continue her studies on account of marriage. We should not overlook the financial and logistic difficulties that parents and husbands struggle with.

Education doesn’t coexist with oppression, injustices, disease and poverty. It is apt to say arming a girl with education is a weapon to protect her from wickedness and lack of it creates rooms for the girl to be easy prey in the hand of a wicked husband. However, some parents are stubborn and helplessly rigid in their stand, which sometimes brings about another unhelpful situation. If a lady desires to get married while doing her studies, her parents should have to listen to her in order to avoid falling into unnecessary trouble. Care must be taken by the parents to ensure the prospective candidate is a man that would respect the girls’ right to education to honor her wishes and aspirations.

If her husband wakes up to the other side of the bed after having a good night to allow her to continue her studies, it serves as an advantage to her as a college married woman. This will prevent bad guys from making amorous advances courtesy of her status and commands revered esteem and nice treatment from her male colleague sympathizers. She may realize that someone pities her and is doing her a favor. Better to remain independent, proud and dignified.

I observe that not all people in the society do view women education as a problem and possible threat to the men’ position as commander-in-chief in their little republic where she is always expected to serve as a ceremonial head. The society is very skeptical and suspicious of anything they suspect to be an agenda of imperial mission and even worst, introduced with haughty arrogance. Otherwise, the culture of allowing every single woman to peruse higher education would have gained massive acceptance, as it appears to be an old injunction in our religion.

I doubt if there are people who hold negative view on ‘this education’ other than the acquisition method and its frequent wrong application, in which case such negativities can be found in any other education system. People have realized too well, by everyday experiences, that the benefit of ‘this education’ outweighs its disadvantages, with opportunities or otherwise coming to individuals according to their educational status: ignorance vs knowledge, college diploma vs degree and high degree.

Why people choose to remain deliberate obtuse if you ask me is in order to frustrate imperialist attempt at downgrading them where other people from other shores believe that they are introducing civilization - with blatant air of arrogance - for the first time to a people who already have culture and civilization spanning centuries and ages. The society is very, very determined to reject anything presented to them this way and which  they consider to be a clandestine mission, set to gradually destabilize and erode their traditional values and belief system.

This is why it always feels awkward and uncomfortable to me to categorize a sort of knowledge and call it as only ‘formal’ or simply term it ‘Western’ education. What becomes of those great architects who built a grand kano moat and those who excelled in Ajami literacy and calligraphy, trade, governance and diplomacy thousand years before the coming of Whiteman and the accomplishments of those great artists and heritages are still cherished and practiced in our contemporary societies? The impression is that their achievements are not formal and therefore should not be given status of formal recognition. This line of thinking is denying vast bodies of knowledge from across cultures and civilizations around the world its origin and existence, and even when recognized it’s often with denigration. If we go on this subservient way, everything is surrendered to a certain people when epistemistically appropriated as possession of a particular culture.

With the smug feeling of weaning people from barbarism and backwardness, you may notice that you are denigrating a sort of established culture. They would rather hold their stand than make concession even when it appears they are wrong. People aren’t actually rejecting knowledge, but the overbearing manner of its introduction.        

So if forces in the argument would come, with genuine intention and not in lethal determination and antagonism, to sit down and pragmatically approach the issue, the situation would not have been such worst and the difficulty confounded. The society will be the winner anyway. But it always seems each force in both side of the argument is determined and never willing to reach agreement.

Everyone is welcome to their views. Common sense has broad applications and if an idea is often yielding a bad result, it won’t hurt if the allegiance to the rule would be reconsidered.

The prayer is for the parents to be a little patient for a relatively short time so that the girl would complete her studies before getting married. It just looks like delaying something that will necessarily come. With education, there is likelihood that she can meet a partner with similar accomplishments and goals to have a lasting marriage. Things are not always easy for a married woman - juggling household chores with school assignments or a woman in college who was once married – bearing a lot of stigma and burden struggling to continue her studies.  

PS

There are also parents who never bear close investigation. They do not accept corrections and are quick to shut down any discussion that challenges their views. They hold extreme views and would threaten to curse their kids to a point one feels like she is committing a sin correcting her parents even when they go wrong.

The impression is like parents are above the humanly nature of making mistakes. They are very authoritative, giving the impression they own the kids and should decide their future without having the firsthand experience of the kids’ reality and experiencing their mental universe.  Convinced that they know more than the kid, they dismiss anything she says outright since she is still a little babe in arms. They don’t accept that their own kid could grow up to be ahead of them in thought and ideas. But our society believes a child can be richer than their parents. Where do we go wrong?…

You cannot be hostile to CHANGE and succeed. You cannot avoid change because the only thing that is not changing is change. Up and coming generations have understood this thing of modernity and are no longer thinking in the binary way of their ancestors, where the result is either 1 or 0. Be prepared, accept the change and alter the currents of the age to suits your needs or you fade away. 

(@abubakarsulai13)

Fresh Dawn, Difficult Morning

By Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

Swearing in of President Buhari

Buhari came in during a tough time -  a situation that looks “like building Rome in one day without a Kobo.”  He is in position not many would love to be in their life, not even his sons and daughters if they are like the children of other greed politicians who enjoy living from the suffering of downtrodden.

The expectations are high despite the dwindling of oil price, armed struggle, massive theft of foreign reserve and mounting national debt. But such expectations could not be compromised because the masses whom Buhari climbed their shoulders to the post “have no water, no food, no road, no good education, no security, no light, no fuel and no nothing.” Said Pius Adesanmi, a key backer and campaigner at the intellectual core of Buharism. They are people left with only hope and trust in Buhari regime. 

He is expected to deliver those expectations. People believe in his integrity. He has had certain principles that prevent him, in his mind, from becoming like every other politicians. Numerous efforts had been made to drag him into the gutter to abandon his cause in exchange for lucrative offer. His dogma to remain with masses earned him the honorific epithet of “Mai Gaskiya” – the Hausa version of ‘trusted’ which distinguished  him as the  beacon of hope and champion of the underdogs.

He stood for the office for 12 years, fighting for the masses every election season since 2003. Frustrated, he publically shed tears in 2011 after election defeat to announce his intention to not vie for the office of the president anymore. After rigorous persuasion and lobbying, he reluctantly answered the call to contest again, which certainly if defeated yet again, would mark the end of his political career.

Buhari is not poor, he’s only a rich man with relative ascetism.  For what, and to whom is he doing all this? Buhari sees Nigeria as a family firm, an afflicting business  he could not watch continue suffer and felt duty-bound to rescue. He delved into the struggle for the young generation to wrench back hopes and save the nation’s throat from the vicious grip of the greedy leaders so that upon growing up the young men and women would not find their future entirely destroyed or mortgaged to the IMF. “Don’t collect any loan again,” the citizens cried, “it isn’t working here. It will only push us deeper and deeper into economic despair.

In Nigeria, the finance ministers and former and serving Central Bank Governors are people who read Economics mainly for private values, accepting exploitative conditionalities and doing all it takes to keep the economy going in line with the IMF directives. “I wish Buhari economic team would comprise of people who have idea about the terrible condition of our people,” working to benefit all and not entirely for the advancement of IMF policies which create anger and hardship on people who are already poor and rewarding those with awards as hero who help ensure the execution of the deals while our people are dying.    

There is one critical issue that needs to be addressed. Early in 2012 Nigerians took to the streets rioting in protest against government decision to end fuel subsidy. They insisted the price should remain cheap at the pump whether the subsidy existed or not. People are caught in dilemma, knowing the fuel subsidy is fraud, a business rife with tax evasion, patronage and corruption, which raised public suspicion if the subsidy has actually existed. It was elite fraud where friends of politicians are paid inflated figure for bringing little or nothing at all to report the kickback to the people high in government.  But believing they, and not the politicians, not the power structure, would be the biggest victims if the subsidy was to be eliminated, they fought for the subsidy to continue despite the fact they needed a competitive economy.   

But the notion that subsidy could not be good idea in creating healthy and competitive economy is nonsense from the ordinary citizens’ perspective  who couldn’t even have to listen to the economist’s bullshits that ignores the worsening state of people’s atrocious living condition.

“Then what’s the use of the state,” people asked, “henceforth, if healthcare, fuel, education, water and energy would not be provided at subsidized price.  Then the government ceases to be useful to ordinary citizens because these are the only ways the poor can benefits from the wealth of the motherland?”

We criticized Jonathan for his decision to end fuel subsidy, vociferous and outspoken, speaking scathingly anyhow in TV and public debates because we were not politicians and the politicians were in opposition, employing angry pens to write and draw repugnant caricature of the president and his cabinet, depicting a dog wearing a bowler hat for the president and a bitch with glass in her face describing the coordinating minister of economy.

And now there is a big question hanging perilously on the air:  what if Buhari administration seeks to end subsidy on petroleum resources - isn’t it hypocritical of us to defend the same policy we vehemently attacked as if we were fighting for our life?

Buhari does not believe fuel subsidy has even existed. If he is going to cancel the subsidy on petroleum resources in order to stop leakages to make the economy more vibrant, radical overhaul should be put in place to cleanse the sector of its corrupt practices. National refineries should be revived so that citizens can buy fuel at a cheap price for there is no way one will consume fuel from foreign refineries and expect the price to be low without government doling out subsidy.

What Jonathan administration would never do was starting the austerity measures from descending and not ascending order, a selfish move to oppress the poor by eliminating jobs and raising heavy tax on the ordinary citizens, slashing pensions and wages while the terrible reality revealing itself as severe hardship on the masses. It should start in descending order from the top leadership in order to avoid humanitarian crisis; cut the sinful executive allowances, cut corruption and the leakage in the economy, weed out the parasites in government to make an effective and sizable workforce so that with every cut, you help the state and those morons in office who blabbed their way through the universities as students so as to be optimally utilized on farmland since they find productivity a rocket science.

Jonathan and his cabinets were not the sort of men that Nigerians would trust since they could not exercise little restraint before descending upon the fuel subsidy trust fund. What they were selling to the masses was stark inhumanity - starving the poor, feeding the rich and having strong armed forces to keep down civil unrest. Under whatever regime, Nigerians can’t accept a deal where the coordinating minister of the economy would loot and then lied to Nigerians, loading it on the masses, emptying the foreign reserve to lead a life of luxury and buying big mansions in Zurich. All this as austerity measure?

Nigerians are ready to bear the brunt of cuts in government spending, with top officials setting examples. As the president identified the horrible condition in his speech, quoting from Julius Caesar, “the tide in the affairs of men is difficult” but not insurmountable that “we could not succumb to hopelessness and defeatism. We can fix our problems.”   

The new regime will concentrate its focus on the project of building new Nigeria. Only that we will continue working to document thieving politicians so that when their children grew up, they would read that their parents are thieves and dullards who only perfected the art of stealing and looting so that they would wish if they were born in another family. Those who’d run should run, the new regime is not going to chase after you. The past is the prologue.

Goodluck and Three Others, Sued...

One Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd, a resident of Kano has dragged President Goodluck Jonathan to court over a murder attempt.

While presenting the case, the prosecutor read a case with number FRN/CKN324QC at No 05 Magistrate Court Miller Road, Kano, in which the plaintiff complained that in the early hour of Wednesday morning, the 18th of February 2015, the Nigerian power authority had brought electricity so powerful that it caused sparks in his PC charger and destroyed it.

He further alleged that Goodluck Jonathan, being commander-in-chief of the federation and having everything under his control, had issued a directive to the power authorities to bring such dangerous light at the early morning in their covert plot to assassinate him.

Abubakar maintained that had it not been for God's love and intervention or that the incident happened at night, he would have been killed while asleep.

'' I'am accusing Goodluck Jonathan in connivance with power authority of hatching a plot to assassinate me. And I'm hoping that justice will prevail despite inadequate resourses.''

While speaking to the newsmen at the court premises, defending lawyer, barrister Femi-Fani Kayode denied that Jonathan has anything to do with the plot.

''Mr Jonathan did not make any attempt to kill him and has no knowledge about it,'' he said, a coded allusion to President Jonathan's ignorance.

''Power authority has the right to bring light at any hour they like,'' concluded Kayode.

But when asked if bringing light so dangerous is in line with the Power Authority Act, Human Rationality, barrister Kayode said that he is not the appropriate person to speak on that.

Abubakar reaffirmed his accusation, saying ''Nobody would do that other than Jonathan in connivance with his boys because he is the commander-in-chief. He commanded the NEPA to bring the dangerous light suddenly in the morning hoping that I was asleep, so that the fire would start and consume me and every single article I possessed,'' leaving him to start all over again from the scratch.

'' Who can do that to his brother if not an enemy? They just want to you to start from the scratch all over again despite the effort you have made for your future.'' Said Abubakar.

He also insisted that there has been several attempts by the President to kill him and had reported such movements to the various authorities but ignored to do anything.

''This is not the first time, there were many attacks previously including a letter....''

There has been cases of harassing journalists in the country. Years back, a journalist in Lagos was assassinated by a Prince of Devils through a bomb concealed in a letter. Although many believed that the death of the Lagos-based journalist was carried out under dictatorial regime, but there is only thin line between the past military regime and the present believed to be under democracy.

There is also this belief that the Prince of Devils has been a protégé to the incumbent and have been close allies for years.

Abubakar added that ''since the time I began writing about this regime, I started seeing suspicious movements by the President and his boys. The way they are eyeing me forced me to take life insurance policy.''

He further said that he wanted the court to thoroughly investigate Goodluck Jonathan, Minister for State Power, Director Energy Supply Agency and Chairman Board of Trustee Power Regulatory Commission and to do justice for him and called for the concerned citizens to also support his course.

According to section12, bracket (6) sub-section (a) and (b) of the CPC, such reckless criminal act is a treasonable offence and an attempt for murder and arson against the citizen of the state punishable for 19-year prison term with hard labour.

(@abubakarsulai13)

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Cheers in The Street, ahead of the Election Result

Dubbing my hand in journalism writing

people celebrating the victory on the newly built Kofar Nassarawa overhead brideg, Kano

Thousands of jubilant crowd broke to the streets in Kano immediately after the collation of the Saturday's election was adjourned, to celebrate the victory of the APC presidential candidate General Muhammadu Buhari.

aerial view of the Kano city full of cheerful crowd

Cheerful crowd mostly youths are seen in the streets making stunts and acrobats riding in three-wheeled machines, known locally as Adai-daita Sahu, chanting the slogan of the APC and waving brooms around the K/Nassarwa flyover, Gadan Kaya, and new Kabuga-Norhtwest Road.

accident scene amid celebration

Preliminary result released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has shown General Muhammadu Buhari leading against the incumbent Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

INEC Chairman Professor Attahiru Muhammad Jega has closed the collation of the remaining 17 states out of 36 with twelve of them from the north till tomorrow which will continue around 10:00am. APC presidential candidate has more chances of winning the poll if he is able to get votes from Lagos, the nation's commercial city where Mr. Buhari has a massive support, Borno the home of over 200 schoolgirls kidnapped last year by Boko Haram millitants which Mr. Jonathan denied until the outcry from local and international media had become an absolute hysteria.

The 2015 election is seen among Nigerians as a collective responsibility to deliver the country from the cruel grip of crooks and criminals that have been swindling the country for about 16 years, using religion and ethnic background to divide the voters. Indications have shown Nigerians have united against this tactic of division on religious line as a Christian candidate fielded by the opposition APC floored down his Muslim contender in a predominantly Muslim communities. The election, as Nigerians believed, is to salvage the country where they see it as a crippled car climbing up a hill while its peer have already set the pace of travelling to the moon. Voters believed to come out irrespective of religion and ethnic background to push the crippled car forward.

Earlier during the preliminary announcement, Mr Buhari had leapt ahead of Jonathan with the hugest votes from Kano, the nation's most populous state. There has been speculation that if Mr. Jonathan won the election, he would delete the state from Nigeria's map.

Femi-Fami Kayode and other prattling mouthloud fools such as his competitor Reuben Abati have been silenced by the looming victory angling to Mr. Buhari, after several moves, simplistic and crude accusations over age, academic certificate and postponement, in their plot to stop his candidacy, which the old Buhari scaled through with fascinating ease. Any attempt appeared to be a mover of Buhari's popularity among Nigerians.

As the counting was adjourned, Nigerians have expressed worries believing that they are ready to sacrifice their time to remain glued to their TV sets all through the night. Some of the residents also expressed fears that Naira might exchange hands tonight between officials in a deal to close the gap with Mr. Buhari's ten states ahead of Jonathan's nine. However, the poll might spill to the run-up if both of the candidates get the total votes of 25% from 2/3 of the 36 states including the nation's capital, Abuja.

The result count will continue tomorrow while the world is watching. Nigerians wait anxiously to know the future of their country, with the majority of voters dismissing Jonathan as corrupt, incompetent and clueless who often makes embarrassing gestures that throw the counry to disgrace among the international communities.

Regarding the economic boost which Mr. Jonathan's loyalist refer to as one of his achievements, many have the view that it is despite not because of the government where ministers wear a wristwatch that costs a million dollar, a spending that can cause a US government official to lose his post and public respect. However, other issues that reduce Mr Jonathan support are his massive theft of the nation's foreign reserve, crude oil manipulation, Sure-P scam, Pension Fund fraud, and lately Naira is weeping in the foreign exchange rate, losing its value to American dollar, among others.

Few days ahead of the presidential poll, foreign journalists were denied access to the country and the couple of them that had been there were detained or silenced by the state security operatives.

Several hashtags occupied a vast space on the social media wishing Mr. Buhari goodwill ahead of the official announcement that will declare him as a winner, asking Mr Buhari if elected, should not be there to spend taxpayers’ money for his kitchen paraphernalia. Youths from across Nigeria demanded Mr. Buhari to concentrate on critical issues notably calls to improve power and energy to be able to tackle the rate of unemployment in the country. Mr. Buhari, 72, is likely to fix some problems that bedevil the country ranging from unemployment, insecurity, corruption and power challenges which Mr. Jonathan's administration shows little concern to confront.

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(@abubakarsulai13)

A Sin Beyond Handshaking: The Inside Story Of Darikatul Tijjaniya

One day as a kid I approached my father to ask for financial aid on behalf of my friends to organize a Mualud event. He refused to offer any contribution. I felt bad and began suspecting my father out of childhood naivety on why would he refuse to offer his assistance in the service of Allah and His Prophet. I was always confused. Later I was to find out the truth why he has been frowning at anything he believed to be innovation in Islam.

Darika is a scourge in the flesh of our religion. Here are people who could tell you about their physical contact with God every day, specifically at any time they want to. Their position is elevated beyond ordinary realm where Inyass is competing with Muslims’ holiest icon, Prophet Muhammad (ASW).  Inyass’s position has superseded that of any prophets’, from Adam to the seal persona of the prophethood.

Inyass can bring back dead to life, heal all sort of ailment and if you are true believer, you can hypothetically travel through the air and visit the Holy Mosque or drop at any place you like around the world, courtesy of your strong conviction.  As a believer, you do not need to open a book to learn, the power of your belief in Sheik is capable of filling your breast with knowledge such as Physics, Theology and Arts, knowledge other people hurt their nerves to acquire. For your to earn a close intimacy with God, you only need to be a religious singer and not an intellectual pursuing knowledge about Islam and other disciplines.

My head has been swirling, wondering if these people have ever heard about the existence of science where a person is required to present empirical evidences to prove their claims. I find it hard to believe how one can learn knowledge without reading a book or someone teaching them hypothetically. Prophet Muhammad had not read nor written a book, but was reported to have acquired his knowledge through Angel Jibril and sometimes through revelation. One exception here is that revelation is the province of the Prophets (prophet in Islamic sense). We might need to ask if Inyass is also a prophet. But this question is rendered useless because Inyass has already  been elevated to the status of God. 

Their belief is built on the fringe of Platonic Theory of Form and the cave analogy. But Plato is somewhat using ideal reason to defend his belief to say that God is a Mysterious Power utterly transcendental and beyond human comprehension. For Hakika, it is beyond Platonic transcendentalism. Plato as a pagan left what he couldn’t understand as Mysterious Power when he reached the dark-alley and gave in. But Hakika goes to say that God is a reflection of everything we see in the physical world. Few days ago, my friend told me that he’s a God, I was a God and a dog that came to pass-by was also a God.

What the scientists and Platonic Theory of Form called Mysterious Power is what Hakika called Inyass, a God manifesting in human nature. Though they claim that it is not everyone that can acquire this knowledge except who bares their mind and allows it to be absorbed freely. I doubt a simple reading of Plato is enough for one to understand his ideals without being confused.   

For one to get to such mysterious knowledge, they say, one should undergo a mystical process, secluding themselves in the dark room reciting some gibberish incantations under the supervision of another Sufi who has already attained a superior status through similar process. The disciple will enter his indoctrination process with a long bead as a manual calculator. The believer will start his recitation, and the supervisor would subject the disciple in to severe starvations that would last the period of the seclusion, feeding him with pieces of date and little amount of water. After the disciple spends some days in the dark room, he would be tested whether he is fully transformed or not. The supervisor would pick up a piece of material or anything insight and shows it across the face of the disciple. If the disciple gets it correctly and calls the object by its name, then it is not the right time to release him for he is yet to be transformed and must continue on the process of seclusion, reciting, and starving until the disciple calls everything insight as God which the supervisor waves in his face, then the knowledge of Hakika is fully instilled in his mind. He sees everything as God, the dog, the shit, the urine and every filthy substance can fit the status of God. The belief is that you are not a true adherent unless you recite and recite and fervently and furiously chant till you are celled mad and crazy. A lot of people have gone insane through this madness.

After going through this transformation, a disciple has achieved a sainthood position not because he is above making error or committing sins but earning a privilege of committing all kinds of criminalities and immoralities. He is required to commit sins to make a balance between his righteous actions and his sins because if one does not commit sins, the vast reward he accumulated during his transformation process will overweigh his reward and therefore will invalidate it. Sins like stealing, sodomy, fornication, skipping and ignoring Salat and abusing the Prophet are nothing but neutralizing agents for counterbalancing.   

Believing in Iyass has relieved the believers from the burden of having to maintain faith in Allah. Inyass is an omnipresent guardian and omnipotent protector whose pictures are being posted above the door to prevent burglary in the houses of the believers, and also pasting his image on the vehicle is a genuine safeguarding against possible accident. Above all, believing in Hakika will salvage one in the Day of Judgment where the Sheik would emerge to outwit Allah to transport his followers to the Paradise in the big pocket of his gown. Inyass gives and takes away life to anybody he so wishes. He makes rich or poor anybody he wishes depending on the devotee’s faith and the whimsical desire of the Sheik. Inyass is a beginning without end. Inyass is a father of God and in turn is a God himself and anybody can become God if he follows the right channel.

But send an enquiry demanding for clarification and they would tell you it’s knowledge that comes to your mind through sheer faith and strong conviction and that which can be crippled by any slight doubt and contemplation. Set your mind free and the knowledge will gush forth through it and the mystery will fling open. A believer does not need to go to school or ask question about whatever the Sheik has said, this is considered as a wrong move capable of crippling the entire process which in turn can cause problems to the believers that will prevent the mystery from unveiling to crush the barrier that prevents one’s mind from seeing the reality. This belief of discouraging intellectuality and the ultimate requirement of blind acceptance have adverse consequences on the Darika.

The Salafiyya sect has rigorously encouraged teaching and learning and built their philosophy in pursuing knowledge that allows asking questions,  a total migration from the normative approach adopted by the Dariqa. The Salaf established schools that will accommodate the changing circumstances with religious orientation, laying their arrangement and system closely resembling the version of missionary schools. This arrangement brought about a radical change in which young men would grow up armed with Islamic ideals with a mixture of western education, thus allowing them to function in the secular  Nigerian society and have comparative advantage over their Dariqa counterparts. 

This is where I have serious disagreement with people who blame the Salaf scholars like Sheik Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, Ja’afar and their schools as the hatchery for breeding extremism in northern Nigeria, willfully ignoring the contribution of their teachings and thoughts that aided people integrate with modern Nigeria and the challenges of interacting with the wider world and its attendant circumstances while still maintain their religious identity. This will continue in Kano for long, since many people are gravitating from traditional mode of teaching Islam instituted by the Dariqa towards a progressive, open and broader perspective of practicing Islam.

With Sheik, you do need to waste your time worshipping God. You yourself will one day be a God when you aspire, defending on the level of your conviction. What else do your pursue in worshipping God or otherwise. When you find yourself in Hell it is because God has arranged it to be your destiny a long time before world was created, a period when all creations existed in vacuum. Even in Hell, your are still serving God and doing His bidding and therefore you will come to terms with blazing fire and  burning and will no longer feel the pain. Do you have any worry, for example, while staying in your mother’s womb?  In this situation, there is no clear difference between Heaven and Hell since they are seen as two different ways of reaching similar destination, serving the bid of one God. Those in Paradise will one day get bored and need some changes from their environment. After all it will pall on you to spend such infinitive time living in one and repetitive circumstance.

This Darika has a way of uniting humanity where life is viewed as a single entity. Whether you’re Christina, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, animist or even atheist, you are only serving God and wherever one happens to be in the hereafter is a divine position where human being is destined to serve His Creator. Everything is pre-determined by High Power and whatever you are doing is another worship, only that those with little mind that did not undergo certain spiritual process could not understand.

Human being is a helpless creature controlled by the power of Inyass and life is viewed to lose any meaning and therefore adherents will worship God without expectation of reward or fear for punishment. When you are in Hell you are still serving Inyass as a God and you are no less important than another person in Paradise. You are all serving the same Being and you won’t have any burden and feel the pain of the Hellfire. Such is your destiny. The mysterious power you call Allah as a Muslim, or the Holy Spirit as a Christian or Nature as a scientist, whatever you call it according to your belief is one thing ultimately melting in the unification of One Being in the form of Inyass. Life is the spillover from the concentric circle of one essence and origin, and this mysterious power is the soul of Inyass. 

When a believer is deeply absorbed into the communion, the barrier that stands in his way will crush and he would be possessed by divine power and have a direct contact with the reality. What a believer sees in the dark room is a version of Plato’s theory of cave where people are confined in one place with their vision away from the reality, seeing the images of truth reflecting as shadow.  After a believer spends a great amount of their life in darkness, their eyes will be dazzled by the rays of the reality when they are taken outside to the sun. Although Plato stopped here and did not mentioned what lies beyond this, Inyassiya would tell you that that reality is the spirit and soul of their Sheik. According to Faira, that power is Inyass which reverses in the form of life through the spirit of the Sheik upon reaching the last stage of the transcendentalism which the entire humanity shares his spirit in flesh and soul. Therefore everything is God. Thus inadvertently, everything that exists, animate or inanimate and whatever religion one is practicing, he is unconsciously practicing Hakika by breathing the life of Inyass.

Hakika ideology like Plato’s theory of Form, is a belief where life is conceived as an arranged hierarchy and order of things in attaining the supreme knowledge or Being or the reality. That says you cannot reach God without the intervention of some Sheiks, which we as purist Muslims strongly oppose.  The theory goes into contemplation of existence built closely but unconsciously on the epistemological and ontological metaphysics of Plato which investigates the mystery of how life came to being. This is the simple explanation they could not offer as a consequence of their being allergic to deep reasoning and thinking stemming from their discouragement of intellectual pursuit in the first place which leads them resorting to blah blah and insult and abuse when you question their belief. Darika Sheiks could not stand close investigation over their doctrines and are stubbornly incapable of allowing reasons to speak for them. Invite the Sheiks for public disputation and they would start sweating in pain and discomfort, disinfecting and decontaminating their belief to reduce the enormity of its sinfulness. You are assured the next morning to hear an audio has been released cursing and abusing anybody who opposes their Sheik and their doctrines.

Darika, you are advised to systematically document this belief and doctrine and therefore should separate it into a different entity and stop staking legitimate claim on Islam. Islam is an orderly religion with a vast body of knowledge and exegesis explaining every bit of matter from the works of great scholars of the first generation to their subsequent followers and those who followed in their footstep. Islam has every explanation to offer on every mystical point. That’s why we are recommended to recite some supplication whenever we feel our faith waiver over the metaphysics of God. Darika also has the right to their doctrine and do the same since they are sharing close  relationships with the  Abrahamic religions and freethinking, so that  once they separate it from Islam and assign a different name to it, it could be systematically studied in the departments of Comparative Religion in colleges and universities.

The truth is that, Dariqa is grand deception run by religious masterminds residing in a a world, shadow and complicated, which ordinary followers would not understand since they are forbidden to ask question and pursue knowledge for themselves. But many people have dug up and found what are the core values of the Darika. Ibn Taimiiya lived a long time before Inyass and has elaborately outlined the features of Sufis in his book Jawarihil Ubaidiyya. The Sufis are lazy people feeding public with ignorance and live cadging off from the donation offered by their followers. I grew up to hear the story of my neighbor telling us that people came to watch them and threw stones on them whenever they were praying and clasped their arms over their chest, believing that they have come with a strange religion during the early stage of Salafi movement in Kano. Now I’m proud of the fact that we had never formerly organized Maulud during our adolescence the way it has been receiving great fanfare in this generation. I witness struggles with the Darika adherents in the cemetery always trying to force people bury a dead in line with their doctrine, chanting abracadabra of the Salatil faith which they say is worthier six thousand times than the Holy Qur’an.  

Kano is a dangerously built society where such Sheiks live comfortably, threatening to harm anybody who dares to challenge their philosophy. They are dubious people who claims to be the true followers of the prophet but contradict the teaching of the Prophet in every possible way, from Salat to the  phony Maulud, secretly sneaking in the unIslamic doctrines of their Sheik. Those who would hurl assertion without substantiating it with a proof from Qur’an or Hadith other than a line of song from one singer or another. They are those who claim to be the bloodline  of the Prophet and continue to deceive people that they have the power of putting off fire through the will of their mind while still helplessly incapable of assisting to save shops going up in flames when there is a fire disaster breaking in Kwari or Sabon Gari Market.

What they have been hiding is gradually unearthed with years of educating people about the true Islam. It’s not anything new for a person who is acquainted with intellectualism and the spirit of knowledge to learn the true motive of the movement, in their belief to undermine the authenticity of Prophet Muhammad.  It has been written in the books of Ibarhim Inyass. 

Those who suddenly turn around to deny such doctrines are simply uninformed followers, guarded by their leaders, leaving them to bask in ignorance about the core values of their belief. Sharing the knowledge is selective among the followers and the few who accessed the knowledge are now oversharing it. If you condemn this blasphemy from your position as  a mere  follower believing this is not the true doctrine,  you’re actually deceived into the sect for this is actually the belief among the top leadership and the few who have the opportunity to be close to them. You either quit the sect or continue to stay, but you are advised to no longer have to hide your feeling. The top clerics who have been reading Inyass’s publications for long have known the doctrine and never disclaimed it before this time or distanced themselves from the Sheik.  If you choose to remain in Darika, you are still sharing beliefs with those abusing the Prophet. No such thing as non-practicing vegetarian. 

Buhari’s case should rest. Here we have people who claim true Islam but keeping a nubile girl as Sayyada, shaking hands and even going inside her for blessing. For Buhari’ case, what I simply can’t buy is the idea that shaking illegitimate female is not a sin like the way Darika has moralized it. I strongly believe it is a sin but I also believe that Buhari did not win his election on Muslim Party of Nigeria platform. Of course under secular democracy I have so many ways of advancing my religion. I believe in quality not quantity of thinking so as to be able to get the world power structure into my favour.  However, citing examples of the world Muslims leaders is not a reason to valid their action as legally acceptable in Islam.

(@abubakarsulai13)