THE above was the question asked by Britons and the rest of the world in the afternoon of May 22, 2013. Close to the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, Southeast London, two young men of British-Nigerian descent, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, had attacked a 25-year-old British Army soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby and killed him. Rigby was of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. It was a case of religious extremism. The soldier had been on off-duty and was walking along Wellington Street. His attackers mowed him down with a car, ran towards him and, like Jack the Ripper, stabbed him multiple times with knives and cleaver. A postmortem later revealed that Rigby died of ““multiple incised wounds”. The two Nigerians then dragged Rigby’s lifeless body to the main road and stood by, unperturbed until the arrival of the police. They proudly proclaimed to passersby that Rigby’s killing was to avenge the killing of Muslims by the British military.
The two young men’s Yoruba people back home were horrified because such religious intolerance and extremism do not represent them. The question the world asked as both were found guilty on December 19, 2013 and sentenced to life imprisonment was, what has God got to do with snuffing life out of God’s creation?
Nigerians asked that same question last week from Mrs. Oluremi Tinubu, Nigeria’s First Lady and the National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu. Their question is, what has God got to do with suborning Him to provide solutions to problems He gave man enough brain to dissect? While this piece was going to bed yesterday, a statement was issued by Mrs. Tinubu’s office by her spokesperson, Busola Kukoyi which denied that she is organising any nation prayer. It read in part: “Her Excellency, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, CON, is not organising a national prayer… a Christian and strong advocate of prayer and praying for Nigeria, (she) believes that prayer is an act that must be done willingly, conscientiously, and sincerely. She also believes that praying for Nigeria is the responsibility of every Nigerian, irrespective of religious belief, political affiliation, tribe, or language.”
That statement is very curious. It smacks of the usual about-turn of politically exposed persons when faced with a boomerang of their ill-thought-out decisions. It is either the First Lady’s office is suffering from extreme inefficiency or there is a huge pall of subterfuge surrounding this disclaimer. The initial statement claiming Mrs. Tinubu and Ribadu would be organizing a national prayer was widely published last Monday. It took the office one whole week to distance itself from it! So, I want to go ahead with this piece, believing that the rebuttal from Mrs. Tinubu does not mirror her well-known tendency to demystify and shroud critical national issues with a blanket of religion.
Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 election, provoked very critical issues surrounding this matter. Drilling down into religious practices in Nigeria and churches’ relations with the Nigerian state, Obi made mess of Tinubu and Ribadu’s fascination with the hubris of development, rather than its science. Tinubu and Ribadu are penciled for attendance of a national prayer session that will seek “the intervention of God” in Nigeria’s serial existential challenges in the social, economic, and security spheres.
Contrariwise, in a comment deploring the Nigerian state’s unholy interface in religion, Obi called for reforms to Nigeria’s religious and political culture. If one could squeeze sense out of his intervention, Obi simply counsels that the Nigerian state must de-couple the centuries-old alliance between it and the church (and by that very fact, Islam). “We live largely in a very unproductive society, that’s why the only thing that is attractive here is politics and church. We need to dismantle it and we’re gonna turn night vigil into night shifts so people can be productive,” he said.
For decades now, religion has received the back of the tongue of Africans. It is accused of complicity in the continent’s underdevelopment. Some even say that religion’s total capture of the mind of the African is akin to the owner of a farm plantation who, aiming to hinder productivity and ensure barrenness and stagnation, gives his alagbaro (labourer) palm trees-laden farm to cultivate (afún ni je mó fé á yó tíí fún ni l’óko ìdí òpe ro).
Obi’s madness at how lowly religion has sunk in Nigeria and Oluremi Tinubu/Ribadu’s decision to weaponize it in defence of the Tinubu government’s lackluster performance must be put in proper contexts. There is no doubting the fact that Nigeria has become a very fertile soil for religion. The 21st century has also marked the collapse of virtually all the values preached for centuries by both Islam and Christianity. COVID-19 and the perceived insensitivity of Western religion have equally upped the disdain for Western religions. Despite reliance on Western medicine for cure, Africans went back to their roots for salvage from the brutal claws of the virus. Nigerians believe that, though their forebears sacrificed all for religion, many of them dying in the process, when it was time for the religions to come to the rescue of the congregants, the greed and acquisitive tendencies of religious barons came to the fore.
Immediately the pandemic ceased its anger, churches and mosque attendance reduced. Rebellion against centuries-old orthodoxy of religion began to flourish. However, the hunger and poverty occasioned by bad leadership in Africa made Nigerians to scamper back to religion to save them. Hunger and lack are increasing church/Islam activities which include evangelistic outreaches, crusades, conferences, retreats, conventions, pilgrimages and night vigils. Religious fraudsters are more on the prowl. General Overseers are prospering from the naivety of congregants and are tweaking their baits of prosperity teachings. On the flip side, the lives of the worshippers are not getting better. There are also little corresponding spiritualities and moral growth noticeable in the lives of the people.
While churches and mosques, as well as their leaders, are going home with loots from naïve congregants, there is a spike in cases of immorality. Recently, the RCCG suspended its pastors for homosexuality. If it cares to dig in, it will find out that lesbianism, rape, incest, theft and armed robbery abound among its clergy and laity. This can be replicated in many other churches. Among those who profess Islamic faith, you will find rabid terrorism supporters. A case in point is a former minister who publicly confessed sympathy for Al-Qaeda. Nothing happened to him. How do you, in the name of religion, support bloodshed?
It may be apt to say that, the more western religion is upon our people’s heads, the more immoral and amoral they become. It must be said that, in all the ills above, Christianity seems to be the greatest culprit, far more than Islam. Miracles have become a fetish that Christian taskmasters use to hypnotize their captives. The more absent the leadership is in the lives of Nigerians, the stronger the religionists step in to offer hope. This hope is however most times fraudulent. They manipulate the people’s vulnerability and impatience for a turn-around in their pain. For a deteriorating healthcare, faith-healing entrepreneurs canvass vigils in church. This, most times, leads to deaths. You only need to listen to the narrative of how, in her last days, Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Dora Akunyili fell prey to these charlatans who capitalized on her religious vulnerability to make her abandon orthodox medical remedy for supposed faith healing.
Miracles in Nigeria have become synonymous with baits on a rat trap. So also the “sowing seed,” “tithes,” “first fruit” and “offering” shibboleths that have become objects of exploitation by religious Smart Alecs. One of the fora where they are marketed is vigil. Publicity is then given to the “showers of miracles” through early morning street preaching, radio, posters, televisions and newspapers. These have been on the upswing in the 21st century. The impression you get from all this is that miracle is functional and could be offered only by these church miracle marketers. When the young ones entered the fray, with the spate of joblessness and hopelessness in the country today, the hypocrisy behind miracles is further revealed. It has led to a rash of manipulated miracles and miracle-for-cash evangelism. In some situations, noticeable among Pentecostals, some pastors are apprehended patronizing native doctors. There, human parts sacrifice, in exchange for accuracy of prophecies and obtaining power to grow large following are advertised.
Apart from religionists, governments and politicians also exploit religion to their advantage. Aware that religion blinds the people’s ability to reason critically, they use affiliation with particular religions to recruit rabid supporters. This was what happened in the build-up to the 2023 elections. In that election, peering of religion membership in political party tickets became top issue of consideration by the electorate, rather than what the candidates were able to do for the people if elected.
In the last 18 months in Nigeria, hopelessness has pushed Nigerians more into unorthodox practices. Government daily manifests its incapacity to offer neither succor nor redemption to the people. Frustration and despondency grip the people despite federal spin doctors’ spirited attempts to cobble together tissues of what they call nascent hope. It is getting clearer that government’s absence from the lives of the people may be for far longer time to come. So, when Afolorunikan announced a national prayer that will feature the First Lady and Ribadu, what the people see is another plan to use religion to hoodwink them. Only a few days ago, the military apprised Nigerians of the coming together of another terrorist group in Kebbi and Sokoto states called the Lukarawas.
To the people, a national prayer to ward off hunger and insecurity is government’s back-door acceptance that it is helpless to bring hope in these regards. It is tantamount to accepting that everyone is for themselves and God is for us all. The NSA’s presence at a prayer session supplicating to God for the security of Nigeria is akin to him throwing his hands up in resignation. Biblical King Saul did same when he, at nocturne, crawled to consult the Witch of Endor. For Ribadu to ship responsibility back to God, same responsibility that people gave him because they thought he and his boss were capable of confronting them, and thus resigning to fate as this, the hopelessness of the people will hit a higher Fahrenheit.
Obi’s last week intervention on religion no doubt riled some regime backers and religion apostles. Speaking on a podcast, he argued that there is the need for Nigerians to shift focus from religion to productivity. “It’s attractive, politics and church, but it has to be dismantled. We are going to turn night vigil into night shift so that people can be productive.” Obi used the two symbols of “night vigil” and “night shifts” to express growing frustration and concerns with how church Basilicas worth billions of Naira are springing up to replace empty factories and warehouses in Nigeria, and the irony the Basilicas pose as where jobless people go to plead with God to give them jobs.
If you drill down into his submission however, it will seem to have brilliantly articulated the frustration of Nigerians with the alliance of politicians and religious barons. It also in a way responded to the idiotic call for prayers in Abuja to combat Nigerian government’s inability to find solutions to the people’s travails in its hands. Church and government have continually kept the people in the dark about their bondage using religion as the bait.
Apart from state funds that will be filtered into the bottomless pit of this rat race, with some Smart Alec smiling to the bank with Nigerian scarce resources, Mrs. Tinubu/Ribadu’s gimmick will seem to be, de-escalate mounting tensions against the man in Aso Rock and get the people into amorphous task of holding God responsible for their woes. The end of the prayer nonsense will be nothing. Madam Tinubu should get her husband to do more than encircling the perquisites of office and bear responsibility for the stasis across Nigeria.
The truth is, we may not like Obi’s bold articulation of the danger that Remi Tinubu and Ribadu’s gathering poses to Nigeria’s quest for mental emancipation from the chokehold of religion. Religious entrepreneurs and their Man Fridays may not like his call for “dismantling of churches” whose euphemism is, breaking of the walls of ignorance surrounding religion. The truth however is that we must rethink this unholy alliance if we must build a productive society. No society advances by gathering to pray against its problems. Its leaders tackle them by thinking out of the box.
Festus Adedayo is a renowned columnist with Nigerian Tribune