Governors set up committee on Sharia

Governors from 19 northern Nigerian states decided on Monday to create a committee of Muslims and Christians to discuss introducing aspects of Sharia law into the existing penal code,
according to news reports.

The decision was taken in a consultative meeting of northern governors in Kano, Nigeria's second largest commercial city.

Demands to apply the penal aspects of Sharia has led to other ethnic groups clamouring for their own "rights": Yorubas in the west have been calling for a national sovereign conference, Igbos in the southeast want a confederation, and governors in the South-South states that make up the Niger Delta say Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, needs to practice true federalism.

The army general who led the war to keep Nigeria one, Yakubu Gowon, has warned that confederation would lead to the disintegration of the country.

While not explicitly suspending the implementation of Islamic Sharia laws, analysts told IRIN on Tuesday, the governors' action had slowed down the rising tempo of the crisis on the issue.

"If the tide was not halted, the nation was going to disintegrate," Omolabe Adunbi, the human rights education project officer of the Civil Liberties Organisation in Lagos, told IRIN.

He said fear that the military might regain political power and that President Olusegun Obasanjo - like Mikhail Gorbachev of the former Soviet Union - might preside over disintegration, possibly explained the governors' decision on Monday.

A statement read by the chairman of Monday's consultative meeting in Kano, Attahiru Bafarawa, said: "We uphold the federal structure of Nigeria and condemn the call for a sovereign national conference in its entirety and we reaffirm our total support to the federal government under the
leadership of President Olusegun Obasanjo."

The Civil Liberties Organisation, Adunbi said, felt that past and present federal, state and local government interference in religious matters had led to the present crisis. Recently, he said, Vice-President Abubakar Atiku, led the Nigerian group of pilgrims to the Hajj, in Mecca.

Christians in government also, he added, often lead similar delegations to pilgrimages in Rome and Jerusalem.

"The CLO feels the state must stay clear of religion; that religion must remain a personal thing," he said.