As the saga surrounding his links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban movement deepens, transcriptions of audio recordings of some of the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy Isa Aliyu Pantami’s teachings, have flooded the Nigerian media space.
In one of the audio recordings obtained by the Heritage Times, Pantami declared that he was always a happy man whenever an “unbeliever” or “infidel” is killed.
“We are all happy whenever unbelievers are being killed. But the Sharia does not allow us to kill them without a reason.
“Our zeal (hamasa) should not take precedence over our obedience to the sacred law,” Pantami lectured.
The Minister who allegedly made the remarks while responding to audience questions about his views on Osama Bin Laden during a lecture about the Taliban in the audio teachings dating back to the early 2000s, took extreme positions in support of the activities of Al Qaeda and Taliban elements who were on a campaign to annihilate the West and conquer other parts of the world and spread Islam.
Eulogizing Bin Laden, the late Al Qaeda leader responsible for bringing down the World Trade Centre in an attack that claimed over 3,000 lives in 2001, Pantami said: “I still consider him as a better Muslim than myself”.
Pantami’s comments were translated by Professor Andrea Brigaglia, an African expert at Naples University in Italy. Nigerian scholar Musa Ibrahim of University of Florida in the United States contributed to the paper that explored the onset of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
The 48-year-old minister was widely known as a hate preacher across universities and other public institutions in northern parts of Nigeria before President Muhammadu Buhari introduced him into his cabinet, first as head of the Public Information Technology Department, National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, in 2016 and now communications minister.
His past comments have been revisited, following reports that he was placed under watch by the United States for purported ties to Boko Haram.
He has since moved to debunk the claim first published by Daily Independent, a Lagos-based daily.
Reacting on his Tweeter handle, Pantami claimed he has always preached against Boko Haram, and retweeted several handles that described him as a peaceful Islamic scholar, an attempt at image laundering that has now been punctured by Italian and African scholars.
Highlighting his travails in a northern University, a document sighted on Wikilleaks.org, further stated that the minister “who preached at the mosque, had been previously thrown out of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University and of a Gombe Mosque for preaching inflammatory rhetoric”.
