Kogi State Governor’s Senior Special Assistant on Cybercrime, Promise Emmanuel, has appealed to Nigerians to show greater understanding towards people of different religious beliefs following a viral video involving Muslim worshippers praying on a road.
The video, which circulated online, showed a woman confronting Muslims who had gathered for Friday prayers along a roadway.
Reacting to the incident in a Facebook post, Emmanuel said religious differences should not become a source of hostility, urging both Christians and Muslims to accommodate practices that may occasionally inconvenience others.
He acknowledged that worshippers using the road for prayers could disrupt movement, but attributed the situation partly to the number of people who attend Friday prayers and the limited space available.
“You criticise Muslims for blocking the road on Fridays ONLY to pray. Yes, it is wrong but they do that because of the number of people who gather to pray on that particular day and for want of space,” he wrote.
Emmanuel said the same standard of tolerance should also apply to certain Christian evangelism activities.
He cited situations where Christians preach at people’s homes without being invited, engage passengers in buses or use loudspeakers to preach in public areas.
“But you as a Christian, you go to knock on people’s homes to preach to them uninvited. You stand in a bus that some people just want a few minutes of sleep and peace before alighting to preach. Some use very loud speakers in public places to preach. These are also wrong,” he said.
According to him, peaceful coexistence requires people to accept that others may have religious practices different from their own.
“That’s where TOLERANCE comes in. A little discomfort for each other to tolerate ourselves in living together because life was created in diversity.”
The aide also said Nigerians from the two major religious groups share common roots despite differences in their faiths.
“If you look at the Nigerian Christian and Muslim, they’re both the same people, believing in the superiority of their belief but guilty of the same crime, hatched from the same foundation. Indigenous folks who forget their humanity because of an imported foreign religion they both subscribed to,” he said.
The comments came amid online reactions to the video, in which prayer mats were seen covering part of the road as a group of Muslims observed Friday prayers.
The footage showed the woman appearing to challenge one of the worshippers before another person stepped in.