Abdulwahid Moshhod

The Executive Director and Group Financial Officer, First Bank Nigeria Plc, Dr Kazeem Adesola Adetuntan yesterday lamented the high level of poverty among Nigerian Muslims, describing I as pathetic and unIslamic.

Delivering the18 Annual Ramadan Lecture of the Muslim Lawyers Association of Nigeria (MULAN) Oyo State chapter in Ibadan, the medical doctor and chartered accountant while noting that poverty was a global phenomenon, however said it was higher in the Muslim communities.

According to him, majority of the artisans are Muslims an indication that they have high disproportionate of poverty.

He identified four hindering the economic success and empowerment of the Muslim, warning that unless they were immediately by the Muslim community, Muslims might continue to languish in abject poverty.

The factors, he said were low level of literacy, high level of poverty, lack of monitoring and ignorance.

He explained that the biggest problem was that Muslims have never appreciate the importance of education, adding that to function effectively as an artisan there was the need for some level of education.

While noting that the highest number of out-of-school children were Muslims, he said that the era of trial b error has gone.

He disclosed that there was disproportionate drop in the number of Muslims students seeking admission into tertiary institutions across the country, adding that the Muslims were grossly underrepresented in the professions like the law, accountancy and engineering which ought to have impacted their economic capabilities.

Adeduntan who noted that the solution to the problem was embedded in the Holy Quran, said Muslims have only succeeded in building community of ignorance people both in Islamic and western education.

He disclosed that contribution of Zakat by Muslims was a challenge of inequality, but lamented that lack of brotherliness and congregation especially among the Muslim elite have damaged the fabrics of brotherliness that supposed to exist among the Muslims.

In his address, MULAN’s chairman, Alhaji Allamah Yeken Akintayo who noted that the Federal Government under the leadership of President Muhammadu Buhari had started its economic administrative journey on a bad note as the economy of the country was in shamble, said about 50 per cent of the states in the federation were owing workers’ salaries from three to seven months.

Describing it as pathetic and unIslam