Osun Hijab Brouhaha: Why These Persecutions, Lies Against Me - Aregbesola cries Out

Premium Times - The Governor of Osun State, Rauf Aregbesola, on Monday said neither his government nor himself has ever ordered the use of Hijab by female Muslim students in public schools in the state.

Mr. Are‎gbesola stated this at the roundtable on Development Collaborative Framework for Education Development and Advancement organised by the Development and Advancement in Western Nigeria (DAWN) in Osogbo.

Mr. Aregbesola challenged those who accused him of ordering the use of Hijab by Muslims‎ to bring concrete prove to substantiate their claims.

The governor challenged those accusing him of plunging the state into religious crisis to present a video or voice recording, written speech evidencing where he commanded or ordered female Muslim students to wear hijab on their uniforms.

“If I permitted Hijab, would the Muslims have gone to court to challenge it? Is that not contradictory? the governor asked.

“Is it a crime that I am a Muslim, is it because I struggle to be a good Muslim that everything I do is being misunderstood? I think I don’t deserve all these lies against me.”

‎He said the programmes he introduced into the state’s education system were part of the resolutions that came out of the education summit organised by his administration shortly after coming into office.

The programmes has no religious undertones, the governor said.

Mr. Aregbesola said the resolution of the summit, headed by Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, never considered nor recommended the wearing of religious garments in schools.

The governor said when he came to office, one of the first tasks of his administration was to convene an education summit which was chaired by Prof Soyinka.

“There is nothing religious in any of our policies,” Mr. Aregbesola said. “The fact on ground contradicts our opposition’s claim.

“The choice of my deputy governor tells it all, I knew she is a pentecotalist of the highest order before I picked her.

“Everything we have done in the line of education is in line with the resolution of our education summit.

“Against all speculations, I have not ordered the use of Hijab, I challenge anybody with evidence to come out and show that I have made a proclamation on Hijab.”

The governor was responding to a controversy sparked by a court judgment approving the use of Hijab by female students in the state.

The Muslim Community of Osun State and the Muslim Students Society of Nigeria had sued the state government asking the court to clear Muslim Students to use hijab.

The court ruled in their favour.

Following the judgment, some Muslim students started wearing head covers to school, a development that irked the state’s chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

CAN then arranged some Christian students of the Baptist High School, Iwo, to wear choir robes and other church garments to school to protest the judgment and spite the state government.

Speaking on education in the South-West at the conference, the governor said the downward trend in education was worrisome due to the role of education in development.

The governor told participants that his administration was constructing 100 elementary, 50 middle and 20 high state-of-the-art schools in addition to rehabilitating existing ones.

He added that the schools in the state before his intervention would have attracted rebuke from animal rights activists if government had put pigs there.

On the Osun school feeding programme, tagged O-MEALS, the governor noted that the programme provided a template for national adoption and implementation of free meals in schools, adding that he was invited by the British Parliament twice to share Osun’s experience with the world.

He said his administration’s efforts and intervention in education was massive and that there had been qualitative and quantitative improvement in the performance of pupils and general education of youths.

He said, “Those who say we are declining are not being honest. The following data will put a lie to the unfounded allegation of our detractors that the performance of pupils has gone down under our watch. In 2007, the state government put forward 36,171 candidates for WAEC examination out of which 2,483 representing 6.86 per cent had credit pass in five subjects, including English and Mathematics.

“In 2008, it was 37,715 candidates with 3,813 pass, representing 10.11 per cent. In 2009 it was 39,676 candidates, with 5,545 pass, representing 13.98 per cent. In 2010 it was 43,216 candidates, with 6,777 pass, representing 15.68 per cent. This four years gave us an average of 15.68 per cent.

“However, our administration started sponsoring candidates for WAEC in 2011. That year, we fielded 53,293 candidates, had 11672 pass, representing 21.98 per cent. In 2012, we fielded 51,463 out of which 11,431 passed, representing 22.21 per cent. In 2013, we also fielded 47,013 candidates, recorded 9,301 pass, representing 19.78 per cent.

“In 2014, we sponsored 47,672 candidates, 9316 of them passed, representing 19.54 per cent. The average performance for our first four years was 20.88 per cent. Compared with the average performance (13.26 per cent) of the three years that preceded us, the percentage improvement in performance during our tenure is a huge 57.46 per cent.”

Osun Hijab Issue: Who Is Fighting For God? By Goke Butika

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,"---Martin Luther King jnr.

In my family, the first born of my mother, Tunde Butika, my elder brother is a good Christian of Four Square church, a Deacon for that matter. My immediate elder brother Lasun, is a Christian of Celestial extraction but his wife is Alhaja and I am Muslim raised by my maternal grand parents who were liberal Muslim but practised traditional religion, for grandpa consulted ifa oracle, and in some occasions, we had killed dogs for Ogun deity.

I chose to paint the picture of my family and its disposition to religions in order to set record for my experience as touching religion of an average Yoruba man's value and his disposition to religious belief. And I think the best way to test the potency of a drug is self experience.

It saddens my mind that among all challenges confronting our nation, adornment of religious robe is the take of our religionists in the State of Osun. Wearing of hijab has suddenly become a hot issue, when states could not meet obligations as simple as salaries of workers up to date; when poverty is becoming sprawling among the populace; when families are going hungry; when tenants could no longer pay their rents; when hospitals have become mere consulting clinics; when schools are no longer producing employable graduates; when masters degree holders are surviving on okadas and P.hD holders are begging to apply for Dangote truck driving; politicians are dancing on the graves of the poor masses, and masses are raining curses on the leaders.

As a stakeholder in Osun, I do not intend to pass blame as some commentators have fallen into the fallacies espoused by Martin Luther, but to think aloud on how we reached this low in the state. Therefore, it is imperative to reflect on the past by placing the fact, so as not to commit inductive leap like Segun Adeniyi of ThisDay newspaper who flaunted his sincere ignorance in  his column, where he heaps the blame on Governor Rauf Aregbesola.

In the first premise, all missionaries schools were taken over in 1975, and according to a man who witnessed the process, one Dr. Adegbulu, the then government compensated the missions both from Muslim and Christianity, and government has been funding and managing the schools since then. I learnt that the reason for the take over is to deactivate religious divides among the children. Yes, the names were retained as honorarium, nevertheless they are all government schools, because the government pays the teachers and constructing and reconstructing the structures.

If the fact stated above is not contestable, I think the issue of reclassification of schools by Aregbesola government exhumed the raging noise now. I know for a fact that in the course of building model schools that could contain more students; students from different schools were mixed together, and it is also a fact that the committee that implemented the reclassification was headed by the Deputy Governor Grace Titilaoye Tomori, a very good Christian leader.

Perhaps, in the course of merging schools, some Catholic schools that were liberal with head scarf (hijab) wearing pupils were merged with Baptist schools could not tolerate hijab, but green berets. But the timing of the merger was the gasoline that revved up the fire, for the opposition feared the popularity of the governor would dim their chance of snatching power from the governor; hence the politicking as the political gun of "Islamization" of the state was fired.

Knowing full well that religion is a very sensitive weapon designed to cage reason, the governorship candidate of the opposition party, a Christian used the islamization to wipe religious sentiment against Aregbesola, and obviously, some section of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) led by Ayo Oritsejafor amplified it to arm-twist Christian electorate for the former President Goodluck Jonathan who had a personal score to settle with Aregbesola, arising from his failure to capture the state in the 2011 presidential election. So, it is a statement of truth that media was heavily mobilized against the governor, to an extent of being related to boko haram in the North East.

Ironically, Aregbesola is being demonized by some section of Muslim, who picked a bone with him for declaring holiday for "ISESE FESTIVAL" for traditionalists to have a sense of belonging. As at last week, one controversial personality called "onikun kewu" went ahead to attacked the governor live on television, claiming that Allah was angry with the state, because Aregbesola allowed the traditionalists to celebrate their belief. He was only short of declaring fatwa on him.

I learnt that the government delegation met with concerned religious leaders in the state on the issue of dress code, and it was resolved to an extent, but some Muslim groups were unhappy about the resolution. So, they approached court of competent jurisdiction headed by a Christian Chief Judge for redress, and the case was decided in favor of them, tolerating hijab wearing in public schools, but this time CAN was unhappy with the judgment, and threatened to adorn church robes on Christian students, should  the governor abide by the law. The government was quiet and refused to be drawn into religious fray, Muslim students reportedly wore their hijab and about five Christian students wore church garments like choir robe, vestment and sultana to school in Baptist High school, Iwo. One school out of over three thousand schools in the state.

In line with the media conspiracy on ground, the news was amplified into crisis situation, when the people of Iwo did not even know that some actors were playing any script, all photographs I have seen have not shown more than five non-conformist in the School. The surprising aspect was that religious leaders were reported to have gone for monitoring of what would be the fate of their bait in School.

From my own take, the issue of adornment is too trivial to be celebrating when we have fundamental issues to address. No wonder, Karl Marx describes religion as an opium of the masses. What can hijab or choir robe do for a student with low morale? Can the religious affiliation make any student reach the top flight of his career? How come the Muslim and Christian groups are not condemning the ladies in nude which attracts rape? Can the fight over the religious adornment increase the financial capacity of the state to enhance workers' pay? How come the religious leaders are fighting themselves over the religious dress of elementary schools that would be of no issue when they proceed to high institutions of learning? How cone our religious leaders are  criminally quiet about the mind boggling looting of the nation? To me, everything about this matter is bad politics, and the sooner the actors in it abandon the script, the better for them.

As for me, God creates all things, and we should endeavor to uphold the dictate of humanity by not fighting over the knowledge of unknown which is religion, but learn to tolerate one another for peace to reign.

The same  Luther says- "we have learnt how to fly in the sky like bird, we have learnt how to swim in the sea like fishes, but we have not learnt the simple act of living together. It was religionists who killed Plato, the ancient Philosopher of Greek state when he asked people to reason instead of lying on God, but centuries later, he was declared the wisest man who ever lived.

Butika is an intercontinental journalist.