Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam, my conditional ceasefire

Bishop Kukah’s attack on Islam, my conditional ceasefire
•Bishop Kukah

I am dedicating today’s column to readers’ comments on my last four articles on these pages, but largely to those – about 200 texts and over a dozen emails – generated by what Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, Trust’s Friday back page columnist, says is the “quarrel” between me and Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah over what I’ve said is his persistent attack against Islam and Muslims.
Hopefully, this should answer the plea of the last two respondents on these pages for a “cessation of hostilities,” as Chief Loretta Aniagolu, a leading business consultant and an Enugu- based politician, put it. I do have my doubts though that the hostilities will cease, if only because the Bishop decided to up the ante only last Saturday by his open letter to the late Sardauna, whose cold-blooded murder as Premier of Northern Nigeria 50 years ago, was commemorated last week in Kaduna, where he was killed.
In his open letter, published in Daily Trust of that day, the Bishop, as usual, attacked Muslims and made snide remarks about the great man himself not least by accusing him of laying the foundation of today’s sectarian divisions in the North by what he called the man’s “controversial conversion campaigns.”
In spite of the provocations in that letter, I have resolved to observe a unilateral, but conditional, ceasefire; conditional upon the bishop not indulging in any further egregious misrepresentation of me or my religion.