When humanists gather for Mubarak Bala’s Letter to the President

Recently, Ouida Books, Ikeja, hosted a gathering of humanists, which aimed at creating awareness on the need to release incarerated Mubarak Bala, who has been in prison owing to what is considered ‘blasphemous posts’ on Facebook.

Bala had earlier written a letter, titled, ‘A Prison Letter to a President’ to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for clemency shortly after Tinubu came into office.

Led by the venerated writer and Nobel Prize laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, the gathering also had in attendance, the veteran journalist, Kunle Ajibade, and a host of self-styled humanists, who frowns on the use of the name atheists, because it has been used to label them wrongly.

While narrating their different experiences with family members and society after they broke away from religion to practice humanity, they called on society to allow them practice without inhibitions what they believe in the way other religions are permitted to do the same.

Titled, ‘A Prison Letter to a President’, the introduction and poem in the 16-page letter was written by Prof. Soyinka.

In his letter to the president, Bala said people use religion to cover their evil, which led him to constant attack and criticism of religion.

For him, this is another way of enlightening and bringing a change in the system. These criticisms, he said, led to outrage and his eventual arrest in April 2020.

Born into a Muslim family from Kano State, Bala stated that his birth was the reason for his misfortune.

He said: “This is my 37th month unjustly imprisoned in Abuja, formerly in Kano. Mr President Sir, I am a prisoner of conscience, sought after only because I refused to follow the religion I was born into, especially coming from descendants of 1804 conquerors. Mine is only a sin, an unforgivable sin they try hard to give another name in a civil court, just so, I die, or be removed permanently from circulation and society, they do not want people like me to ever be heard or be seen as an alternative to the status quo.”

Ajibade, who also suffered incarceration in 1995 on spurious charges and ‘jailed for life,’ lent his voice on the matter.

He read an excerpt from the book, where Bala stated that in 2013, when he told his parent he left the religion in his university days, he was immediately put in psychiatric hospital by his father and uncle and was sedated and subjected to all sorts of drugs.

Speaking on the issue, Prof. Soyinka said for some reason, he thought Bala had been set free, he, however, added thousands of people like Bala go through this same treatment and he is disturbed.

According to Soyinka, “it all boils down to power, control, manipulation, domination and disruption.”

He said hypocrisy is the problem. Soyinka asked how it is possible that Bala is arrested for apostacy yet, in a Muslim country, Salman Rushdie was invited by the university to lecture and he was protected by the government because they wanted to hear what the man had against Islam.

Soyinka thinks the greatest scholars, and those in the secular society should say the little they know about the practice of Islam in other places and ask our colleaques here, “what is the matter with you, you don’t belong to the origin of this religion, why have you interpreted those convenient passages your own way.”

He said, there are charges in the letter, which demand investigation.