PFN disagrees that 50% Nigerians are muslims
By Sam EYOBOKA
Saturday, October 10, 2009
NATIONAL President of Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, PFN, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor yesterday faulted figures published by an American research forum which claimed that about 50 per cent of Nigerians are Muslims, challenging the group to tell the world the source of such statistics.


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Pastor Oritsejafor also commended the House of Representatives for summoning the Borno State governor, Alhaji Modu Sheriff and the Director-General of the NYSC, Brigadier-Gen. Yusuf Bomoi to explain their efforts at investigating the murder of a female youth corps member in the Borno State capital, Maiduguri by persons yet to be identified.

Reacting to the October 2009 report by Pew Forum which gave the number of Muslims living in Nigeria as over 78 million, representing five per cent of Islamic adherents in the world, Pastor Oritsejafor said the figures are not acceptable because they do not represent the reality on ground in the country. The report says there are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world.

According to him, the 2006 census exercise which put the population of Nigeria at 140 million deliberately avoided statistics on religion because then President Olusegun Obasanjo prevailed on the Christian community to hearken to the pleas of their Muslim counterparts to exclude the religious clause from the census data.

“So, if the Nigerian government cannot say specifically the number of Christians and Muslims in the country, how then did an American forum come up with such unsubstantiated figures of a particular religious group in the country?” he asked, stressing that despite “the nation’s imperfections, there are certain things we should not accept hook line and sinker.

“I can contest the figures because I am aware of what happened just before the last census when the Christians initially insisted that the religious clause should be included in the census data, so that leaders on both sides can plan well for their adherents,” he added “but the president bowed to pressure from Islamic leaders who insisted that the clause was not necessary.”

Oritsejafor therefore argued that if the recent census figures could not ascertain the number of Christians and Muslims in the country, “what then is the source of the figures Pew Forum is currently parading in its report titled ‘Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A report on the size and distribution of the world’s Muslim population?’”

Not wanting to say that the published figures could have been sponsored for reasons know only to the people behind it, Pastor Oritsejafor also queried some part of the report which says that one in every three Muslims in Sub_Sahara Africa live in Nigeria, saying that there is no basis for the conclusions because the recent Nigerian census had not said.

Also reacting to the recent murder of a member of the National Youth Service Corps, Miss Grace Ushang in Maiduguri, Borno State by persons yet to be identified, the cleric expressed gratitude that the House of Representatives has summoned the state governor over the matter.

According to him, oftentimes when these things happen in the North there is always a conspiracy of silence which has not helped the leadership of the two dominant religions who had been seeking ways of arresting religious uprising in that region.

“It is gratifying that politicians have now seen the need to intervene in incessant crisis in the North,” the PFN helmsman said, adding “hitherto, people have seen such crises as purely religious matters that should be addressed by religious leaders, but now one can heave a sigh of relief that politicians are appreciating the need to consider the political implications of such crises.”

He urged members of the House of Representatives to get to the very bottom of this particular incident because the NYSC is one of the few institutions that has held this nation as one indivisible country.

“Not too long ago a number of them were killed in a religious crisis in Jos and now this. We must bring to book the culprits before parents will begin withdraw their children from the scheme for security reasons,” Oritsejafor cautioned.

Miss Grace Ushang, a member of the Catholic Church was allegedly raped and murdered by yet unknown persons in Maiduguri on September 26, 2009.