TheCable

Shehu Sani, former senator representing Kaduna central, says mass illiteracy and ignorance is worsening the COVID-19 crisis in Kano state.

Since it recorded its index COVID-19 case in April, Kano has been hit by a wave of strange deaths.

The state recorded the highest number of cases on Thursday and Friday, bringing the total figure to 311 cases.

In a statement on Saturday, Sani accused the political and religious leaders in the state of fuelling the health crisis by undermining medical realities.

“The situation in Kano is an avoidable creeping tragedy. In times of health emergencies, religious leaders in Kano have a history of promoting dangerous myths, hazardous superstitions and fictional narratives,” the former senator said.

“The political leadership in Kano is tragically bending towards the lunacy of the mythical, anti science religious clerics thereby setting the mass of the populace in the harms way.

“From Polio to Coronavirus, the north and particularly Kano has historically become a breeding ground and a harbinger of infectious and contagious diseases as a direct result of the misrepresentation of religion to undermine medical realities or the concoction and dissemination of bogus conspiracy theories and conjectures.

“Mass illiteracy and ignorance in Kano fertilizes, catalyzes and aggravates the COVID-19 situation in the state.

“The most efficient and effective way of inciting the mass of the people in Kano or most parts of the North against any idea, policy, substance or matter or against any science, technology, food or drug, is to induct or recruit religious leaders to rebuke or denounce it as a conspiratorial plot to reduce the number of Muslims, and it will be wholeheartedly believed by a gullible mass.”

Sani said the almajiri kids forcefully returned to their villages because of the pandemic may come back as bandits or insurgents.

“Interstate Almajiri exchange program will not solve the Almajiri problems in the North. The strategy of forceful ‘deportation’ of the Almajiri to their villages or their states of origins amounts to hiding our dirty laundry instead of cleaning them,” he said.

“The Almajiri you refused to educate and integrate but choose to forcefully take out to the villages, will return as bandits or insurgents.

“Northern Politicians and elites toxic strategy of exploitation of religion to rise to power or preserve it has continuously undermined the region socio economic development.”