Professors of Islamic and Arabic Studies, Lanre Badmus and Hamzat Abdulraheem have blamed religious leaders for not discouraging corrupt public holders by allegedly accepting gifts from them.

The duo told The Nation in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital at the sideline of a Ramadan lecture organized by Managing Partner of Abdulrauf Jimoh and Co, Alhaji Muideen Obanimomo.

Prof Badmus, who is the Dean of Post Graduate School, University of Ilorin (UNILORIN), said that "religious leaders have not helped matters. They know the source of corruption. If corrupt people are coming with gifts and our religious leaders can be courageous to reject them, this will minimize corruption among the leaders we have in the society. So we appeal to our religious leaders to demonstrate courage and call a spade by its name and not to parry with the leaders that are devastating the people under them."

He went on: "In Nigeria today, there is no doubt that we are facing the twin problems of corruption as well as poverty. Both problems have defied solution. The government has been trying the very best, but the more the government tries the more biting the two problems are. All over the place people are complaining of one thing or the other.

"he only thing we can do is to try to mobilize ourselves and look at the Islamic provisions on how to eliminate poverty; on how to curb corruption. Every human has corruption tendency in him. But in the spirit of Ramadan, we are being taught to have self-control over our urge, our inordinate ambition and over our desire to appropriate or misappropriate what is supposed to be in our care for public good.

"What is causing the rising wave corruption is lack of patriotism and lack of God's consciousness on the part of the Nigerian people. Forget about the differences in religions; that is Christianity and Islam. There is no religion that encourages corruption and injustice, but we perpetrate the two in Nigeria.

"We are more godly when we are inside the churches and mosques, but when get to the public glare we tend to keep God away from our lives. And we seem to have the feeling, although wrongly, that we are independent and that we can do and undo; as if God is not watching every one of us. As we are not going to die; people are amassing wealth when they die that is the end of it."

Prof Abdulraheem who teaches at the Kwara state University (KWASU) said that "I cannot say that they have played serious role; though they preach but some of them don't really follow what that they say. What is expected from religious leaders is for them to have the courage to tell the truth to whoever is involved in any type of corruption.