This is one more reason why Nigeria will continue its downward slide into retrogression.
We have a sultan, supposedly the defacto leader of the north, more concerned with inscriptions on the naira than its actual market value. Of what use is arabic inscriptions if the naira is almost N200 to $1?
Until we move away from the semantics and begin to face the real issues, i'm afraid Nigeria will remain mired iin corruption and ineptitude!

Are these the kinds of "leaders" that have been entrusted with our future? these men are more worried about keeping islamic iinscriptions in the face of grinding poverty, poor infrastructure and a prostrate educational system.
How many notes actually get to the common man? Is the common man more interested in reading inscriptions on the naira than its purchasing power?

David!David!David!I am bseside myself with laughter!Go boy!You're the mannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

It is very sad.

And our leaders are not competent enough to come out, take the responsibility, apologize and make correction.

does the sultan guy even have a say in nigeria, he is jst a muslim leader, wat if the catholic bishop comes and start sayin why is there no latin inscription on the note,we are going to reject it.
by the way if he doesnt want to accept it ,he should pass it on to me

Big B1:

@McKren:

Before we start slapping and smacking this man (Sultan Sa'ad Abubakar) around, have you heard directly from him regarding this issue?

Fine he should come out and deny the statement.
We expect him to act his age in the interest of this country. This is why I like the likes of Ribadu or El-Rufai, or do you think El-Rufai was not part of the team that came to that decision

This is Nigeria not Saudi Arabia!

The notes should not and will not have Arabic inscriptions. I wish these types of Muslims in Nigeria would find real issues to be upset about.

I just hope they don't go mad and start carrying machetes and killing people as they also do when they have a tantrum.
Idiots

Abi oh.Hope it doesnt cause riot.

some of you are beginning to rain curses and abuses on hausas; it is wrong. We should stop being tribalistic. Is Adegbite hausa?? Why not come out and condemn both Adegbite and the Sultan?? Yorubas too should be cursed and abused and not only the hausas.

The word "Hausa" wasn't actually mentioned. Only the Sultan was actually targeted, and this certainly isn't against Islam, but the principles that should be accepted in Nigeria, considering the fact that Nigeria is not a Musilm or Arabic state and Nigerians are not Arabs.

Arabic shit!!!

They should all shut up because Nigeria is not an islamic republic.  But a federal Republic

LadyT:

This is Nigeria not Saudi Arabia!

The notes should not and will not have Arabic inscriptions. I wish these types of Muslims in Nigeria would find real issues to be upset about.

I just hope they don't go mad and start carrying machetes and killing people as they also do when they have a tantrum.
Idiots

let them try it ,what happened in onitsha would be a child's play

I'll fly to Naija myself, with my cutlass

They are useless human beings.Do we have arabians in Nigeria.Those two bitches should go to hell

What do they think of,i wonder why some pepole always want to change the status of this country(igbo,yoruba,hausa)?may be, i dont understand,

Why reject the naira if you can't reject it in reality? Offer the guys whinning N1 million bribe with the money and see if they don't grab it.

Just shows you the mindset of some people back home.

Those two Guys (Sultan and Awoniyi) are not serious with what they have said so far. They just said something so that their followers will believe they are deffending their intrest. I bet it the Sultan will grab the new currencies like gold when the F.G pays his salary at the end of the month.

@debosky

when your 'supreme council' and 'spiritual leader' aka the sultan rejects it then I think its safe to assume that is the position of muslims, or aren't those people your representatives and 'defenders' of your faith?

pure crap, people with nothing better to do than to waste money going around causing trouble.

When the nigerain govt and some 419 people from Nigeria do their shizzle would it be safe to assume that Nigerians are corrupt and scammers afterall those are our representatives or aren't they?

The likes of Adegite and the Sultan, are just fighting for relevance. Gone are the days when they use stuff like that to get public attention, when was the last time either had a say on any topic. I believe even the Muslim council should start looking at changing all the old folks to the TODAY Muslim, who is more tolerance, and does not believe that killing a non believer leads to heaven.

Lets differentiate religion from politics

dblock:

The word "Hausa" wasn't actually mentioned. Only the Sultan was actually targeted, and this certainly isn't against Islam, but the principles that should be accepted in Nigeria, considering the fact that Nigeria is not a Musilm or Arabic state and Nigerians are not Arabs.

it was mentioned. Go back and review some peoples post you will see that they are already putting all the blames on the hausas and forgetting to pass blames on Adegbite, a muslim but a yoruba man.

@strat the muslims jst ve to be tolerant becos nobody is looking at their faces

@zebra no one is really condemning the hausas ,they just think that the muslims protesting against the note must be in dreamland to think that every thing is about them,i mean this is nigeria not dubia or egypt.

And so after 40 years of adorning the Arabic inscription, our national currencies are now rid of it to the apparent satisfaction of those who have harboured an obsessive dislike of anything with a link to Islam or the North. Prominent among them must be our one and only Nobel Literature laureate, Wole Soyinka.



In his first press conference on October 16, 1998 after returning from self-exile during General Sani Abacha’s tenure, our Nobel laureate, obviously blinded by his hatred of Abacha and everything he thought the general represented, unleashed what was arguably his bitterest diatribe on the North and Islam, its predominant religion. The kernel of his long speech was that the North was the problem with Nigeria. Among it’s crimes were that the region had imposed Arabic and its coat-of-arms on the country’s currencies.



“Yes,” said Soyinka at that press conference,



“take a fifty Naira note and look closely at the design… A symbol that has been cunningly split into two tells a not so innocent story when the note is folded over in a way that makes the two edges meet. Then we see the two halves of symbol merge into one. That symbol is the coat-of-arms of Arewa House, the bastion of Northern identity.”



Soyinka went on to argue that this was a “diabolical orchestration of subliminal indoctrination…” Then in a rhetorical flourish he asked “Is it incidental that the other language on our national currency is Arabic?”



The amazing and surprising thing about the lecture, however, was not its hatred for the North and its predominant religion. Anyone who has read his obtuse The Man Died would not have been surprised or amazed by Soyinka’s vitriol. The surprising and amazing thing was that as a scholar, he could so easily mistake the Arabic alphabets on our currencies for the language itself. Equally surprising and amazing was the mental contortions he was prepared to take his listeners through to prove how the North surreptitiously inserted its coat-of-arms in our currencies.



Now that President Olusegun Obasanjo and his governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria have granted Soyinka’s eight-year wish, one would to justified to suspect both the country’s and its Central Bank’s leadership of all along harbouring the same prejudices against Islam and the North as our literary giant.



During a recent visit to the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, a visit which was clearly meant to anticipate and assuage Muslim and Northern hurt and anger over the removal of the Arabic alphabet, the CBN governor, Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, said this was done to promote Nigeria’s unity and culture!



“I will,” he said, according to Thisday of February 16,



“like to inform you that the removal of the Arabic inscription on the notes is not targeted at any group or religion, but rather, to promote our language and cultural heritage. As you can see, Naira is the symbol of our nationalism and our pride. It is pertinent for you to understand that Arabic is not one of our national languages and it was inscribed on the notes 40 years ago because the majority of people then can read it in the Northern part of the country at the detriment of their counterparts in the South…. So we want journalists to assist in enlightening the public on the new notes and reforms going on, especially removal of the Arabic letters in the currency which is done to promote national unity.”



Soludo was subsequently re-echoed by my good friends Drs. Obadiah Mailafia and Shamsudeen Usman, both of them deputy-governors of the CBN. First, Mailafia told journalists a couple of weeks ago in Jos that the Arabic inscription was removed because it had outlived its usefulness as those it was meant to serve have since become literate in Roman alphabets. Then his colleague, Usman, told the BBC Hausa Service on Thursday that those who felt that the inscription was removed because Arabic was the primary language of Islam were wrong since the wordings themselves were in Hausa and not all Nigerian Muslims were literate in Hausa. In other words the inscription was discriminatory even within the Muslim community.



President Obasanjo finally weighed in with an uncharacteristically subtle dig at those who would object to the removal of the inscription. “I personally admire the polymersubtrate material used for the notes and THE TRANSLATIONS WHICH MAKE THEM TRULY NIGERIAN,” he said during his formal launching of the notes on February 28, (Emphasis mine). The insinuation was obvious; Arabic, but presumably not English, is alien to Nigeria.



Most people will, I am sure, agree with the president that the looks of the new notes is something to be proud of. The quality of the material used in printing the notes, their smaller and more convenient size, the little map of Nigeria in the nation’s colours and the security features make them by far superior to the old notes.



The most innovative feature, however, was the translation of the values of the notes in the country’s three main local languages. This was an innovation no rational person will quarrel with. The most reasonable argument one could make against the Arabic inscription was that it discriminated against non-Hausa readers. As one, I.D. Kris, who reacted to my last article on the subject said in an email he sent to me on August 16, 2006, “If the inscription is written for Hausa readership, which is the one written for Yoruba, Ijaw, Igbo readership? How do you define selfishness?”



Reasonable as Kris was, I am sure he will agree with me that the discrimination argument can only go so far. Now that the currencies carry Nigeria’s other two major languages besides Hausa, all the other languages, especially the big minority ones like Ijaw, Tiv. Kanuri and Nupe, can complain of being discriminated against. But obviously the notes cannot carry all of Nigeria’s languages which number more than 500 according to some estimates.



The point is whatever decision one takes, one group or the other is bound to be discriminated against. The overriding consideration therefore should be what is practical within a tolerable degree of discrimination. I would have thought that including Igbo and Yoruba on the notes was a reasonable compromise between Nigerians who wanted the Arabic inscription retained and those who did not.



However, from virtually all the reasons that those who have spoken against the Arabic inscription have given, it is clear that their objections were based basically on blind prejudice against anything with even the remotest link to Islam.



Arabic of course has more than a tenuous link with Islam; it is the original language of Qur’an, its holy book. But today the language is no more synonymous with Islam than English, or for that matter, Latin, is synonymous with Christianity. I am a Muslim and I can read my Qur’an in Arabic but like the majority of Muslims in Nigeria and in the rest of the world, I do not speak the language. By the same token there are millions of Christian Arabs today who read their Bible in Arabic because they do not speak or understand English.



So even though Arabic is linked to Islam, it does not symbolize the religion like, say, the Crescent which is the equivalent of the Cross for Christianity.



I am surprised therefore that Soludo, the CBN governor who should know better as a scholar would peddle the prejudice that Arabic is alien to Nigerian culture. First, like Soyinka Soludo mistook the alphabet for the language itself. Second, if Soludo had any sense of history he would know that the Arabic alphabet arrived in Nigeria at least a century before the Latin alphabet in which English is written.



Those alphabets had defined the lives of millions of Nigerians long before the Whiteman came to our shores. And given the ubiquity of the almajirci system of Islamic education in the North, at least twice as many more people in the region understand the alphabet than those who are literate in Latin alphabet.



As a Muslim and as a journalist I felt Soludo insulted my intelligence when he told the Sultan of Sokoto that the Arabic inscription was removed in order to promote Nigeria’s culture and national unity. How, for heaven’s sake, does the presence of Arabic alphabets, which are no more symbolic of Islam than Latin alphabets are symbolic of Christianity, promote disunity? How, if one may also ask, is the Latin alphabet any more indigenous to Nigeria than its Arabic counterpart? Surely pandering to blind prejudice cannot be a sensible way to promote Nigeria’s culture and unity.



Unpalatable to some as it may be the truth is that the Arabic alphabet is, at least, as much part of Nigeria’s history and culture as the Latin alphabet. At any rate commonsense alone dictates that we should be promoting the language itself not trying to banish it. At least half of Nigeria’s population, which is Muslim, has a symbolic attachment to its alphabets just like our Christian brethrens have a symbolic attachment to the Latin alphabet. On the international scene, Nigeria is a key member of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) whose majority member-states are Arab. The language is also among the official languages of the African Union and the United Nations.



In any case the more multi-lingual in the world’s major languages the citizens of a country are in a world that has become a global village the better for that country. Today Arabic is one of the world’s most important languages. With 175,000,000 native speakers, according to a 2005 book, The Shite History of Nearly Everything, it is the sixth largest language in the world after Chinese with over a billion, English with around 350 million, Spanish with about 330 million, the Bengali with nearly 190 million and the Hindi/Urdu with 182 million. Why then a country would like to ignore a language of such global importance in the history, politics and economics of the world, not to mention its significance for at least half of its citizens, truly beggars belief.



Not too long ago the CBN mistakenly captioned the portrait of the famous Zuma Rock on our 100 Naira note as located in the Federal Capital Territory. The Niger State Government petitioned the federal authorities on this annexation of its landmark. It was corrected in subsequent printings of the note.



Unlike the annexation of Niger State’s Zuma Rock the removal of the Arabic was not in error. It was a decision clearly informed by prejudice. This is all the more reason why it should be corrected.

Unlike the annexation of Niger State’s Zuma Rock the removal of the Arabic was not in error. It was a decision clearly informed by prejudice. This is all the more reason why it should be corrected.

For Gods sake!

Can we have Italian writing on Nigerian notes?

These people really need to take a one way ticket straight to hell!

Lady T for the first time I actually agree with you though my ticket for them would be to Pakistan.
God bless Soludo.

@ Pakistan!

Its ok babyosisi Im sure we will fight later

and why should the Sultans opinion or the other clown's matter in a democratic soceity?
What does he have to do with Nigeria as a whole?
His seat is in Sokoto and we expect that whenever he unties that turban covering his mouth,he should be addressing his subjects and his subjects alone.

tianshie:

needegg,you need to take a chill pill,pardon the pun.
I did my youth sevice in Kebbi state and I can tell you that a very large majority of hausa children and their parents can read and write hausa well,I can count in hausa as well.
So you see,rabble rouser the hausa on the new notes serves its purpose and serves it well.You need to go in for anger management,you fail to see the wood for the trees.

As for calling Wole Soyinka's 'The man died' an obtuse book,all I can say is that though your faculties seem intact,you lack the competency to apply them in any consistent fashion,this qualifies you for frontal lobotomy.
Read the book again,this time possibly with your eyes open.

I think the guy merely copied and posted someother persons writing,you can get him for not saying so.
calm down dear

Are those the writings of Olu Onagoruwa?

needeeg:

And so after 40 years of adorning the Arabic inscription, our national currencies are now rid of it to the apparent satisfaction of those who have harboured an obsessive dislike of anything with a link to Islam or the North. Prominent among them must be our one and only Nobel Literature laureate, Wole Soyinka.



In his first press conference on October 16, 1998 after returning from self-exile during General Sani Abacha’s tenure, our Nobel laureate, obviously blinded by his hatred of Abacha and everything he thought the general represented, unleashed what was arguably his bitterest diatribe on the North and Islam, its predominant religion. The kernel of his long speech was that the North was the problem with Nigeria. Among it’s crimes were that the region had imposed Arabic and its coat-of-arms on the country’s currencies.



“Yes,” said Soyinka at that press conference,



“take a fifty Naira note and look closely at the design… A symbol that has been cunningly split into two tells a not so innocent story when the note is folded over in a way that makes the two edges meet. Then we see the two halves of symbol merge into one. That symbol is the coat-of-arms of Arewa House, the bastion of Northern identity.”



Soyinka went on to argue that this was a “diabolical orchestration of subliminal indoctrination…” Then in a rhetorical flourish he asked “Is it incidental that the other language on our national currency is Arabic?”



The amazing and surprising thing about the lecture, however, was not its hatred for the North and its predominant religion. Anyone who has read his obtuse The Man Died would not have been surprised or amazed by Soyinka’s vitriol. The surprising and amazing thing was that as a scholar, he could so easily mistake the Arabic alphabets on our currencies for the language itself. Equally surprising and amazing was the mental contortions he was prepared to take his listeners through to prove how the North surreptitiously inserted its coat-of-arms in our currencies.



Now that President Olusegun Obasanjo and his governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria have granted Soyinka’s eight-year wish, one would to justified to suspect both the country’s and its Central Bank’s leadership of all along harbouring the same prejudices against Islam and the North as our literary giant.



During a recent visit to the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, a visit which was clearly meant to anticipate and assuage Muslim and Northern hurt and anger over the removal of the Arabic alphabet, the CBN governor, Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, said this was done to promote Nigeria’s unity and culture!



“I will,” he said, according to Thisday of February 16,



“like to inform you that the removal of the Arabic inscription on the notes is not targeted at any group or religion, but rather, to promote our language and cultural heritage. As you can see, Naira is the symbol of our nationalism and our pride. It is pertinent for you to understand that Arabic is not one of our national languages and it was inscribed on the notes 40 years ago because the majority of people then can read it in the Northern part of the country at the detriment of their counterparts in the South…. So we want journalists to assist in enlightening the public on the new notes and reforms going on, especially removal of the Arabic letters in the currency which is done to promote national unity.”



Soludo was subsequently re-echoed by my good friends Drs. Obadiah Mailafia and Shamsudeen Usman, both of them deputy-governors of the CBN. First, Mailafia told journalists a couple of weeks ago in Jos that the Arabic inscription was removed because it had outlived its usefulness as those it was meant to serve have since become literate in Roman alphabets. Then his colleague, Usman, told the BBC Hausa Service on Thursday that those who felt that the inscription was removed because Arabic was the primary language of Islam were wrong since the wordings themselves were in Hausa and not all Nigerian Muslims were literate in Hausa. In other words the inscription was discriminatory even within the Muslim community.



President Obasanjo finally weighed in with an uncharacteristically subtle dig at those who would object to the removal of the inscription. “I personally admire the polymersubtrate material used for the notes and THE TRANSLATIONS WHICH MAKE THEM TRULY NIGERIAN,” he said during his formal launching of the notes on February 28, (Emphasis mine). The insinuation was obvious; Arabic, but presumably not English, is alien to Nigeria.



Most people will, I am sure, agree with the president that the looks of the new notes is something to be proud of. The quality of the material used in printing the notes, their smaller and more convenient size, the little map of Nigeria in the nation’s colours and the security features make them by far superior to the old notes.



The most innovative feature, however, was the translation of the values of the notes in the country’s three main local languages. This was an innovation no rational person will quarrel with. The most reasonable argument one could make against the Arabic inscription was that it discriminated against non-Hausa readers. As one, I.D. Kris, who reacted to my last article on the subject said in an email he sent to me on August 16, 2006, “If the inscription is written for Hausa readership, which is the one written for Yoruba, Ijaw, Igbo readership? How do you define selfishness?”



Reasonable as Kris was, I am sure he will agree with me that the discrimination argument can only go so far. Now that the currencies carry Nigeria’s other two major languages besides Hausa, all the other languages, especially the big minority ones like Ijaw, Tiv. Kanuri and Nupe, can complain of being discriminated against. But obviously the notes cannot carry all of Nigeria’s languages which number more than 500 according to some estimates.



The point is whatever decision one takes, one group or the other is bound to be discriminated against. The overriding consideration therefore should be what is practical within a tolerable degree of discrimination. I would have thought that including Igbo and Yoruba on the notes was a reasonable compromise between Nigerians who wanted the Arabic inscription retained and those who did not.



However, from virtually all the reasons that those who have spoken against the Arabic inscription have given, it is clear that their objections were based basically on blind prejudice against anything with even the remotest link to Islam.



Arabic of course has more than a tenuous link with Islam; it is the original language of Qur’an, its holy book. But today the language is no more synonymous with Islam than English, or for that matter, Latin, is synonymous with Christianity. I am a Muslim and I can read my Qur’an in Arabic but like the majority of Muslims in Nigeria and in the rest of the world, I do not speak the language. By the same token there are millions of Christian Arabs today who read their Bible in Arabic because they do not speak or understand English.



So even though Arabic is linked to Islam, it does not symbolize the religion like, say, the Crescent which is the equivalent of the Cross for Christianity.



I am surprised therefore that Soludo, the CBN governor who should know better as a scholar would peddle the prejudice that Arabic is alien to Nigerian culture. First, like Soyinka Soludo mistook the alphabet for the language itself. Second, if Soludo had any sense of history he would know that the Arabic alphabet arrived in Nigeria at least a century before the Latin alphabet in which English is written.



Those alphabets had defined the lives of millions of Nigerians long before the Whiteman came to our shores. And given the ubiquity of the almajirci system of Islamic education in the North, at least twice as many more people in the region understand the alphabet than those who are literate in Latin alphabet.



As a Muslim and as a journalist I felt Soludo insulted my intelligence when he told the Sultan of Sokoto that the Arabic inscription was removed in order to promote Nigeria’s culture and national unity. How, for heaven’s sake, does the presence of Arabic alphabets, which are no more symbolic of Islam than Latin alphabets are symbolic of Christianity, promote disunity? How, if one may also ask, is the Latin alphabet any more indigenous to Nigeria than its Arabic counterpart? Surely pandering to blind prejudice cannot be a sensible way to promote Nigeria’s culture and unity.



Unpalatable to some as it may be the truth is that the Arabic alphabet is, at least, as much part of Nigeria’s history and culture as the Latin alphabet. At any rate commonsense alone dictates that we should be promoting the language itself not trying to banish it. At least half of Nigeria’s population, which is Muslim, has a symbolic attachment to its alphabets just like our Christian brethrens have a symbolic attachment to the Latin alphabet. On the international scene, Nigeria is a key member of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) whose majority member-states are Arab. The language is also among the official languages of the African Union and the United Nations.



In any case the more multi-lingual in the world’s major languages the citizens of a country are in a world that has become a global village the better for that country. Today Arabic is one of the world’s most important languages. With 175,000,000 native speakers, according to a 2005 book, The Shite History of Nearly Everything, it is the sixth largest language in the world after Chinese with over a billion, English with around 350 million, Spanish with about 330 million, the Bengali with nearly 190 million and the Hindi/Urdu with 182 million. Why then a country would like to ignore a language of such global importance in the history, politics and economics of the world, not to mention its significance for at least half of its citizens, truly beggars belief.



Not too long ago the CBN mistakenly captioned the portrait of the famous Zuma Rock on our 100 Naira note as located in the Federal Capital Territory. The Niger State Government petitioned the federal authorities on this annexation of its landmark. It was corrected in subsequent printings of the note.



Unlike the annexation of Niger State’s Zuma Rock the removal of the Arabic was not in error. It was a decision clearly informed by prejudice. This is all the more reason why it should be corrected.

BIGGEST CRAP

[b]THE Muslim Students Society of Nigeria (MSS), Northern states chapter has called on the federal government to urgently re-inscribe the old Arabic inscription on the new naira notes.
A statement signed by the director, Publicity Committee of the association, Malam Yaqub Al-Rigassiyyu, and a copy of which was available to Weekend Triumph in Kaduna said the body noted that history bears testimony to the fact that Arabic inscription is a heritage of the Muslims and Hausa people and one of the ways through which they communicate among themselves, regardless of their ethinic and geographical backgrounds.
The statement stated that the federal government has to make a U- turn and review the policy for the sake of peaceful co- exitence in the country, noting that, the amalgamated Nigeria represents the religion of Islam, which has millions of fallowers in the country.
According to the statement, the society condemns in totality the removal of Arabic inscription on the new notes, calling on the Muslim ummah, Hausa people and well wishers to reject the new naira notes and protest gainst it until the Arabic inscription is re- inscribed.
The society however, called on religious and opinion leaders to also condemn the development which may cause chaos and social instability among Nigerians, adding that the Muslim Ummah stands firm against all injustices and will continue to struggle until justice prevails.
The sociey also condmned in an unequivocal term, what it called the barbaric act of the United States and its allies on Iraq and Afghanistan and its attempt to launch an attack on Iran . [/b]

http://www.triumphnewspapers.com/weekend/removal2422007.html

It's either we've run out of nama or these people have issues!!

Shouldn't they be more concerned of leprosy,riverblindness,polio,TB VVF and abject poverty in Northern Nigeria than what's written on the Naira.

shouldnt you be more concerned about what the FG says abegi