AS SHARI’A COURTS BERTH IN LAGOS

The Lagos State Chief Judge, Honourable Justice Kazeem Alogba, has converted the Ijaiye/Ifako Customary Court into a Shari'a Court in Lagos.

The move is coming on the heels of an earlier amendment of the Lagos State Customary Law pursuant to which the Chief Judge under the amended Law is empowered to create Shari'a Courts.

It is also observed that there’s under the current CJ a habitual appointment of Muslims to the Lagos State Bench such that the Lagos state Bench may be observed as now being dominated by judges of a certain faith. Or is my bias affecting my vision?

It doesn't matter, some would say. You’re being needlessly paranoid, others might intone. But this is because they either never studied Jurisprudence or their study of the discipline finds no relevance in their analytical tools kit to be able to decipher the implication of what’s happening.

But the implication is stark regardless, and this is not just because non-Muslims are typically smug or at best merely reactionary to Muslim political assertiveness, but because Islam is ontologically structured for conquest.

In other words, given the natural tendency for conquest by the Islamic faith, one Shari’a Court in Lagos only foreshadows the eventual mainstreaming of the Shari’a system not only in all of Lagos, but Yoruba land as a whole, and ultimately the entire South.

Some have responded by arguing for the establishment of Ecclesiastical Courts in Lagos as a counterbalancing measure. And I ask: what does that mean? That sounds impracticable to me. Hence the Shari’a locomotive is coasting home, programmed, as it were, like a robot to ambush, and nothing can be done to stop it, save and unless we get politically creative, smart, wilful and push with blood and iron for the restructuring of Nigeria.

If we can’t save Yorubaland, Let us at least save the South East, the South South and the Middle Belt. We must unite!