The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has alleged that Governor Ahmed Aliyu of Sokoto State is plotting to depose the Sultan of Sokoto Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III.
“Feelers in circulation indicate that the governor may descend on the Sultan of Sokoto any moment from now using any of the flimsy excuses used to dethrone the 15 traditional rulers whom he removed earlier,” MURIC executive director Ishaq Akintola said in a statement.
“MURIC advises the governor to look before he leaps. The Sultan’s stool is not only traditional. It is also religious. In the same vein, his jurisdiction goes beyond Sokoto. It covers the whole of Nigeria. He is the spiritual head of all Nigerian Muslims.”
Akintola warned that any governor that “tampers with the stool of the Sultan will have Nigerian Muslims to reckon with because the Sultan combines the office of the Sultan of Sokoto and that of the President General of the NSCIA.”
The MURIC boss said the alleged move by Aliyu could force Nigerian Muslims to take revolutionary measures.
He said having a traditional ruler as leader has been a condition Nigerian Muslims accepted a long time ago as a necessary weakness in the structure in which they have to live.
Akintola said Abubakar is not only the “Sultan of Sokoto but the Sultan of the Nigerian people” because “his performance and style of leadership have warmed him into the hearts of Nigerians.”
“Nigerian Muslims North and South of the country may be constrained to pick Islamic scholars only as President General of the NSCIA and overall leader of Nigerian Muslims,” Akintola said.
“It will be farewell to the leadership of traditional rulers over the NSCIA and an irreversible departure from Sokoto’s priviledged leadership position. But history will not be kind to Col. Yakubu Muazu and Ahmed Aliyu for ruining the chances of Sokoto.”
He urged Northern elites and Islamic scholars based in the North to lobby the Sokoto State House of Assembly and the governor to rescind the alleged plot to remove the Sultan.
