By Our Reporter

Former Commissioner of Justice and Attorney general in Nasarawa state, Barrister Yusufu Shehu Usman has questioned the rationale behind Shutting down places of worships following outbreak of coronavirus Pandemic. He said: “since they said that the Coronavirus is not flying in the air but only acquired through contact with an infected person,
And since the authorities have prescribed keeping safe social distance as one of the ways of curbing it’s devastating effects on the society, there is any reasons to stopped people from worshipping God. Barrister Shehu further maintained that ” since we maintain this social distance in our other interactions and since the prescription does not say that we must not have any form of contact at all, but maintain a safe distance, I don’t see any reason why we can not achieve this objective in our mosques and churches”
“If we have stopped every form of physical contact and we are doing it In other interactions, we can enforce the same measures in our respective places of worship” He added
Barrister Shehu continued: “We can easily enforce the same safe distance rule and still discharge our religious obligation to our creator, worship is the sole purpose for which God has created us and we should not jettison it unless it’s absolutely necessary and beyond our control”
He noted that we can control the number of people who can enter a church or a mosque to worship even in thin congregations
We can also easily prescribe the distance the worshippers should keep between themselves and because it’s a religious issue, the worshippers would cooperate and obey as required.
He again reasoned: By shutting down the mosques and the churches and criminalising congregational worship altogether because of the virus (which it self is under the control of God), I think it’s not religiously justified.
“We have alternative ways of justifying congregation without offending the social contact rule as prescribed by the authorities
If we can maintain it in other mundane interactions, we can also do the same in our interactions with the our creator”