Apo Legislative Quarters Imam suspended over ‘anti-govt’ sermon

The mosque committee of Apo Legislative Quarters, Abuja, has suspended its Chief Imam, Sheikh Nuru Khalid, over a sermon he delivered on Friday, considered offensive to the government.

The Imam had criticised government’s inability to arrest the escalating insecurity and killings around the country.

But it was his latest sermon following the brutal terrorists’ attack on a Kaduna-bound train where no less than eight passengers were killed and many more others abducted, ostensibly for ransom, that landed him in trouble.

He reportedly called on the populace to device means of getting those in power to be alive to their responsibilities.

One of the ways, he suggested, was for the people to boycott the elections.

He said, “Nigerian masses should resort to only one term which is – protect our lives, we will come out to vote; let us be killed, we will not come out to vote, since it’s only elections that you people know,” he admonished the gathering populated by lawmakers and other politicians.

In a statement broadcast by BBC Hausa Service, the chairman of the mosque committee, former senator, Saidu Muhammed Dansadau, said the committee suspended the embattled imam over his sermon that it deemed “inciting public outrage”.

The statement, a letter directed to the Imam, read: “I am informing you that you have been suspended from leading prayers in the Apo Legislative Quarters Mosque from today being April 2nd, 2022 until further notice.

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“The decision was taken out of the inciting Friday sermon you delivered on April 1st, 2022; where you advised people not to vote come 2023 general elections unless politicians respond to some critical questions.

“You should have advised them to vote out those that transgress the Almighty and breach people’s social contract as well as the state.”

The committee said Sheikh Khalid’s sermon negated tenets of Islam. It consequently appointed Malam Mohammad who will deliver Ramadan Tafsir while Malam Abdullahi will be leading Friday prayers.

Dansadau was elected Senator for the Zamfara Central constituency of Zamfara State, Nigeria, at the start of the Nigerian Fourth Republic, in 1999, on the defunct All People’s Party (APP) platform. He was re-elected in April 2003, for another four years.

He left the Senate in May 2007, and in October 2008 announced that he was resigning from the ANPP and from partisan politics in general.

Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid, who had remained unrelenting in his criticism of the spate of insecurity in the land, is yet to react to his sack from the Apo Legislative Quarters Mosque.