IMN asks TEDx to exclude el-Rufa’i

Members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) have asked organisers of the TEDx event scheduled to hold this weekend in Abuja to exclude Kaduna State Governor Nasiru el-Rufa’i from the event.  

In a letter to the organisers, the IMN through the Free Zakzaky Campaign Committee chairman, Sheikh Abdulrahaman Yola, said allowing the governor to participate in the event will send the ‘wrong signals’ to TED fans in Nigeria and globally. 

The movement said, el-Rufai’s involvement “Definitely negates the spirit of TED’s mission of ideas worth spreading.”

It posited that TED speakers are supposed to be thinkers, doers and idea-generators and “el-Rufa’i, whose government confessed to brutal extrajudicial killing of 347 IMN members and secretly burying all in a mass grave, does not fit that frame. 

“The name and brand of the TEDx program will be indelibly soiled in blood,” the letter said.

IMN said the governor’s continued ‘persecution’ without remorse despite national and international outcry will not ‘bridge the gap,’ which is what the TEDx Maitama 2017 chose as its theme.