Professor Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian researcher residing in the US, claimed on Saturday that Muslim politicians from the North "had stated similar or worse views than Peter Obi's iconic "religious war" comments during their campaigns.
According to POLITICS NIGERIA, Kperogi also warned that not many people "would come out smelling nice if their private communications are made public" in his weekly column.
The Labour Party candidate for president in the 2023 election, Obi, was on the phone with Bishop David Oyedepo of the Winners' Chapel when the conversation, now known as "Yes Daddy," was released.
Obi was heard in the audio clip pleading with Oyedepo to assist in getting his political message out to Christians in the South-west and some regions of the North-central.
The Labour Party candidate referred to the priest as "papa" several times while telling Oyedepo that the recently finished presidential election was a "holy war."
When it comes to using religion for political gain, Southern Nigerian Christians politicians, according to Kperogi, have a language disadvantage over their Hausaphone northern Muslim colleagues. The majority of Nigerians have access to the national language, English, in which they discuss their religious mobilization techniques, but Hausaphone northern leaders speak Hausa, which is not widely spoken in the South.
"During political campaigns, Muslim Northern leaders have expressed similar or worse attitudes than Obi, but linguistic limitations frequently prevent their verbal transgressions from being revealed. On the few occasions when they do (like when Buhari urged Muslims to support only Muslim politicians who support Sharia or when he warned that if the 2015 election was rigged, the dog and the baboon would be covered in blood), northern defenders muddy the waters by accusing southerners of mistranslation, literalness, incapacity to understand interlingual equivalence between Hausa and English, etc.
“And, frankly, how many people will come out smelling good if their private communications are made public? We all have what scholars call a duality of scripts. We sometimes say different things for public and private spaces.”
