
In 1991, African Concord detailed a chilling face-off in Northern Nigeria. It was the year Mallam Yakubu Yahaya, a fiery cleric dubbed the "Ayatollah of Katsina," declared that nobody and nothing would stand in the way of his mission to install an Islamic revolution in the country. The tension reached a breaking point on March 28, 1991. Yahaya, commanding a staggering 20,000 loyal followers, headed to the office of the Daily Times. The offending material was a satirical cartoon in Fun Times magazine that the group alleged poked fun at Prophet Mohammed and Jesus Christ. The mob seized every copy, piled them in the street, and reduced them to ashes. Yahaya was a disciple of Ibrahim Zakzaky, a Zaria-based preacher who had already spent eight years in prison for his anti-government stance. Following the Daily Times incident, Governor Yahaya Madaki returned from a trip to Lagos to find a state on the brink. Despite his earlier threats of execution, he tempered his rhetoric in a subsequent interview, claiming he didn't consider the cleric a threat but rather a "nuisance." He insisted that while he respected freedom of demonstration, any threat to life would be met with the full force of the law. Read the full story from page 31: archivi.ng/editions/afric…
















