Kano legislators approve Sharia

Nigeria’s Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), is keeping a close watch on developments in the country following the approval of Islamic law in the northern state of Kano, a CLO spokesman told IRIN on Monday.

The Kano state asssembly has approved the introduction of the Sharia, but it still needs to have the governor’s approval before it can be applied, news organisations reported on Saturday. CLO Executive Director Abdul Oroh said his Lagos-based group was “carefully monitoring the implementation of Sharia in Nigeria and how it affects people, especially women”.

Two other states in the predominantly Muslim north, Zamfara and Niger, have already passed bills introducing Sharia. Another three, Sokoto, Kaduna, and Borno, have set up committees to consider its implementation, Samson Bako, Research and Publications Officer of the Constitutional Rights Project in Lagos told IRIN on Monday.

The law will come into force in Zamfara on 27 January, he added.

“We are sending a team to Zamfara to look into reports of women having been unfairly treated,” Oroh said. “The governor has said that the people have accepted Sharia but we want to talk to the people ourselves.” The team aims to talk to civil society representatives and other “necessary” groups.

Shortly after Sharia was approved in the north-western state of Zamfara in October, Governor Sani Ahmed proclaimed that women had to sit at the back of buses and men in front, while 11 buses were reportedly bought by the state for use by women only, sources said. Bako told IRIN that during a visit to Zamfara in October he saw women sitting apart from men at the back of buses but did not see any non-Muslim women using segregated transport.

The population of Kano is 90 percent Muslim, Oroh said, but as the most industrialised city in the north it has more non-indigenes, Lebanese, Europeans and long-term migrants from other parts of Nigeria, than other northern cities. “We are watching Kano very carefully,” Oroh said. “It has seen ethnic and religious crises in the past and if a system is introduced which violates human rights then I think there will be a problem.”

In July last year, fighting broke out between Muslim Hausas and Yorubas living in Kano following an earlier dispute between the two ethnic groups in the southern town of Shagamu which left scores of people dead.

Bako said the econmic implications of the introduction of Sharia in Kano were “very disastrous.” Non-Muslims running businesses such as hotels, bars and restaurants will move their families and businesses to other states, he said.