The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III, has lamented the “very high level” of corruption in the country. saying Nigeria must unite to fight the scourge to be able to make headway.
The foremost traditional ruler made this known at a book launch in Abuja on Thursday.
He equally frowned on posthumous celebration of “innocent and honest” people in the society and described as wrong the propensity to honour deserving people after their demise.
He said, “We have so many issues coming up in our polity today and I will just pick one. Nigeria is a country where we don’t celebrate innocent and honest people until after their death. After they are gone, you will now name universities, airports and other things after them.
“The issue of N36m being swallowed by a snake is a sad reality for our country. Where is our moral value; where is our ethics? The reality is that we must wake up from our sleep. Let us not fail further. Things are bad. Corruption is at a very high level and it is left for us to fight it to a terminal end.
“We cannot just sit down and think that things are okay. Things are not okay. We have to find ways of getting things right in this country. We cannot continue with these negative things. Nowadays and like I said recently in Rivers State, we don’t have statesmen; we have men of state.”
The Sultan, who is the President-General of the Nigerian Council for Islamic Affairs, also called on the Federal Government to fish out killer herdsmen in the country, saying there activities were leading to stigmatisation of Fulani people in the country.
He added, “We don’t accept criminals in our midst. We must fish them (the killer herdsmen) out and deal with them. The worst word you can hear nowadays is the Fulani issue. There are millions of Fulani who don’t even know what a cow is. I am a Fulani and I am not a herder. I am a proud Fulani. But everyone believes that when you see a Fulani, he is a killer. It is not true. So, for anyone to label any particular ethnicity is wrong. Let’s give criminals their ideal name; not Christian criminals, not Fulani criminals, not Muslim criminals. If the government has failed, let them call us to come and help out.
“Uthman Dan Fodio founded the caliphate many years ago. He said conscience is an open wound, only truth can heal it. We must take a negative inner feeling away from us. We must not allow our biases to prevail over truth.”
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