Zamfara governor attacks colleagues over Sharia

The governor of Nigeria’s first Islamic state, Ahmed Sani, has said that some Muslim states in northern Nigeria that have adopted the Sharia have done so out of political expediency, rather than religious conviction, local media reported. Sani told a Lagos daily newspaper, ‘Thisday’, that his government had declared Sharia in October 1999 “purely on religious grounds” while others “implemented it because they were pushed by some people”, AFP reported. He also accused his northern colleagues of using the Sharia as a political gimmick to seek re-election in 2003. “The media should dig up some of these people and expose them,” AFP reported him as saying.