The Default Role of Nigerian Religious Leaders As Providers Of Emotional Clutches To The Suffering Nigerian Masses

By Abuchi Obiora

Though they claim that their primary role is to represent God on the earth and lead people to Heaven, the major and primary role of Nigerian religious leaders is the provision of emotional clutches to millions of the suffering masses of Nigeria who see religions as the only available hope to cling on to while they wait for the next moment that they are not sure will ever come.

The other role which Nigerian religious leaders play in the country, their next and secondary role in the country, as they present their unending interpretations of the Holy Scriptures from their different perspective (some of which perspectives may be biased and selfish), is the exploitation of the emotional helplessness of the suffering Nigerian masses who have been dazed and brainwashed by them to believe that they cannot have a direct access to God unless they go through the Churches or Mosques where these religious leaders operate in the manner of emperors whose teachings and opinions (which may not be reflected in their lifestyles) cannot be questioned.

In the process of playing these two roles, the first by default and the second, a veritable means to sustain the first, Nigerian religious leaders, through constant and consistent enhancement of their social assets, networks and connections with the government, private and public sectors and even in the international arena, become demi-gods whose opinions and actions cannot be questioned.

The result of this awe-inspiring social clout hung on their personalities (which to me, is a deliberate and novel strategy for wealth creation using the name of God) is a massive build-up and expansion of their financial networths which are known to run into billions of Naira and millions of dollars in Nigeria and overseas respectively If you are still in disbelief of the forward summary of today‟s discourse, just wait and read on for a few more minutes to get details.

There is an aphorism that history repeats itself. This is exactly what is presently happening in Nigeria where the minds of the deprived, depraved, helpless and hapless Nigerian suffering masses are being conquered and colonized a second time for pecuniary reasons by religious leaders in the same way the British colonialists conquered the minds of Africans with religion in order to colonize the continent and covet the resources of the continent.

This discourse is not in any way to discredit the valuable contributions to humanity of the avatars upon whose teachings and exemplary lives on the earth were the religions founded but to articulate the damaging influence of leaders of organized religions to the priceless works of the divinely-inspired avatars.

For us to know the extent to which Nigerian religious leaders are misusing religions to mislead people and keep them permanently docile to challenge the oppressive system hoisted on them by the government wherefore the religious leaders and the government have become secret allies in the sustenance of the sufferings of Nigerian masses, we must provide answers to the following seven questions.

The questions are:

1. What is God?
2. What is religion?
3. Is religion synonymous with God?
4. Is religion the only avenue from which to worship God?
5. What are the other ways through which God may be worshipped?
6. How did the religions start?
7. How did man worship God before religions started?

I have provided comprehensive answers to these seven most important questions which every human being need to ask and have answers to before they sheepishly entrust their lives to people who may not even have answers to the questions in one of my books “The Flaming Sword” written with my pseudonym, Rabbi Abram A. ben-Uriel.
Snippets of the answers to these questions also feature in my Channel on the social media. The channel is called “The Master‟s Chamber: Life Discourse Online with Abuchi Obiora.”

For the purpose of this work, we shall gloss through the answers to the questions in a way that will enable us understand the subject-matter of this discourse.

So, what is God? The origin of what is called God can be traced to the quest by human beings of different cultures in different locations of the world to seek explanation for the mysteries of life which were beyond their comprehension and interpretation. They began to represent this supernatural, incomprehensible power in different things…
some in animals, and others in stones, carved woods, or other sundry things. This supernatural being commonly identified and worshipped in different ways by different people is what has been known to be God. As a matter of fact, nobody including those people who claim sole ownership of God actually knows what God is, no matter what they tell you.

The natural fallout of this different representations of God by different cultures and traditions signaled the advent of the religions. Religions, therefore are different perspectives of the God concept and for this reason, religion cannot be synonymous with God.

For the above reason too, religion is more representative of culture and traditions of different people than they actually represent God. Forget the lies people who have made businesses out of the religions are peddling everywhere. For the reason also of the fact that different people of different cultures see God from different perspectives as may be determined by their different world views and value systems, religions cannot be the only avenues from which to worship God. To believe that will be, at best naive and at worst, stupid.

Of course different people may decide to worship God in different ways, depending again on their cultures and some of these ways through which to worship God may not include religions.

As a matter of fact, there is nothing wrong in worshipping God directly without belief in the doctrines of any religion because God manifests to us specially in forms relative to the conjecture of our hearts and the limits of our understanding and reason.

God means different things to different people. Though a universal concept, our individual understanding of God is not universal. They are particularly relative to everyone of us. Forget again what those businessmen and women in the Churches and Mosques want you to believe.

The sum total of the above means that religions, different religions of different denominations started as a consequence of people‟s different perspectives and understandings of God. For this reason, no religion can be better than another one in so far as they all believe in the existence of God.

To say that one religion is better than another one is like saying that because I am black, the white man is not a human being. The important thing that may determine the usefulness of a religion is that the religion should reflect all those qualities that are ascribed to God.

Though the ape resembles human beings, they are not human beings both in character and conduct. This is how religions should be demarcated one from the other. This is why some religions may be said to be bad because they do not reflect what is known to be the character of God. This means that, though some religions claim to worship God, they actually worship the devil, a concept that has been ascribed the negative qualities human beings recognize to be the opposite of the qualities of God.

To cap up the answer to our seven questions, human beings started worshipping God from their closets before the advent of the religions because they believed that God is ever present everywhere. The best way therefore to worship God is to worship God from anywhere including outside religions but most especially in private closets, seclusion and in total acceptance of the omnificent, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient qualities of God.

To buttress the fact that some people have made businesses out of the religions, recently, a well-beloved Christian religious leader who is championing the revival of Christianity in Nigeria to be as of old for which reason he has been castigated and tacitly avoided by the hierarchy of the organized body of Pentecostal Christians in Nigeria, the PFN, informed Nigerians that the World Council of Churches published a document which revealed that the leaders of the most populous and wealthiest Churches in the world do not appear in the list of ten wealthiest leaders of Churches around the world where leaders of five of Nigerian mega Churches whose churches are not seen in the list of ten most populous and wealthiest Churches in the world made the list.

We will not mention the names of these super rich religious leaders, General overseas and General Superintendents, etc, of these Churches because Nigerians already know them. That‟s a good record, some people may say, but don‟t forget to add the phrase „the Nigerian abnormal way….‟

My opinion about this ungodly record is that something is wrong with Nigerian Churches and their leaders. This is not what Jesus Christ taught Christians. Jesus Christ had no money to keep and compete with both Emperor Augustus Caesar who was in office at the time Jesus Christ was born and the young Emperor Tiberius Caesar who ruled Rome between 14 and 37 AD, who ordered Pontius Pilate, one of the governors of the provinces of Rome to find Jesus Christ guilty and crucify Jesus Christ, in order to shove up his declining public reputation as a result of his notoriety.

In spite of this exemplary record of Jesus Christ, it is unfortunate that Nigerian Church leaders effectively compete with presidents in wealth and financial resources, acquiring real estate, mansions and private jets (airplanes).

There is no way anyone can justify the huge wealth of Nigerian Church leaders with whatever teachings in the Bible without being dubious so my understanding is that because these Nigerian leaders of Churches have not lived by the example of Jesus Christ who fed people every day after ministration, they are all fake!. If you doubt the choice of
my word, look up the meaning of the word “fake‟ in your dictionary. This is moreso against the backdrop that the flock the Nigerian Church leaders are supposed to shepherd and feed in the manner Lord Jesus did, are all wallowing in poverty and penury. This, therefore, exposes their major assignments in Nigeria as providers of emotional clutches to Nigerians, a condition that renders Nigerians so docile and helpless for the oppressive governments to ride roughshod on them.

In a statement which formed part of his analysis that the role of religions in modern societies is basically a metaphysical balm for the real and grave sufferings of the people in the universe, Karl Max, (May 5th 1818 – March 14th 1883) born in Trier, Prussia (now Germany), a philosopher and economist who is best known for his ideas about Communism and Socialism which focused on class struggles, alienation and the role of capitalism in shaping society, wrote in the introduction to one of his works titled “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel‟s Philosophy of Right” (which he started in 1843 but was published posthumously….after him) that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

By that observation, Karl Max underscored the fact that religion serves as a form of comfort or escape for people suffering under oppressive and repressive conditions, distracting them from the harsh realities of their situation.
Max argued and believed that religions can be used as a tool by the political elites to maintain control and suppress reactionary impulses among the people he identified in the context of his society as proletarians, which in the Nigerian context, are the masses.

There would have been no further thing to add to this intellectual thought that have become a valid social theory which has repeated itself time without number in the third world countries with emphasis now on Nigeria than the fact that those Sheiks and Imams, those General Overseers and General Superintendents and other Pastors of those mega Churches across Nigeria, have been found to be complicit by default, in the desolation of Nigerian masses, using their trade to teach and preach pyrrhic redemption days to endlessly postpone the accountability time, the doomsday, for the oppressive political elites and the ruling class.

Let me briefly talk about extreme emotional distress of the people wherefore emotional clutches provided by religions are needed by them to swim the dangerous tides of the skewed and warped socio-political and economic landscape.

I will also want to talk about emotional crutch, the inevitable condition that the Nigerian masses have been pushed to wherefore the need for emotional clutches arose. These two English words, clutch and crutch, explain the helplessness of Nigerian masses in the hands of the political elites and their accomplices by default, the religious leaders.

A crutch is any device used to assist physical mobility but in this discourse, we are dealing with emotional and psychological immobility where the concept also applies.

An emotional or psychological crutch is something or somebody who provides subtle, intangible emotional or psychological support for another person suffering from emotional or psychological immobility, to temporarily keep the person going.

An emotional or psychological crutch can also be provided by other coping mechanisms hidden in people‟s behavior or habits (as in the consistent visits to the Mosques or Churches) which provide temporary comfort, relief, or escape from emotional pain, stress, or anxiety in the manner that hard drugs, alcohol and nicotine do. No wonder Karl Max referred to religion, which though he didn’t use the word “crutch‟ as the opium of the people.

A clutch on the other hand is any mechanism, the automated, auto piloted mechanism which has been set into motion to form a system, or a process, an endless system of habit (as also in the consistent visits to the Mosque or Church) which powers the conditions already established by a crutch.

An example of a physical clutch in a mechanical device can be seen in a vehicles clutch without which the vehicle stays stationary, while another example of a clutch on the emotional or psychological side can be taken from a forced performance in sports done under pressure of a certain inducement, monetary, et al.

An emotional or psychological clutch therefore implies a sense of critical importance and high pressure or smooth performance in unwholesome conditions that have already been established through the general experience of the emotional and psychological crutches.

This is the unfortunate, unending and an unbreakable vicious cycle that the Nigerian masses have found themselves in the hands of their religious leaders as a consequence of the ineptitude and dishonestly of their political elites and the ruling class and not until the first chain is broken, the second chain will continue to remain intact.

As we get close to ending this discourse, let me talk about two examples of what happened in Nigeria to unmask the unholy alliance of the Nigerian religious leaders with the Nigerian political elites and the ruling class. Many stories went around the Federal Capital Territory Abuja about the many favours regarded as having been granted from the diver mercy seat of God to advance the construction of a mega Church auditorium which is presently one of the biggest Church auditoria in the world, by one of the biggest and richest Churches in Nigeria whose name I
will not like to mention here because we already know the Church I am talking about. The story went around that trailer-loads of building materials including cement and iron rods were delivered at the building site from people who did not even appear in the site, but sent their errand boys.

Is anybody still in doubt about the people who delivered those building materials? Of course the people who understand that the edifice will further enslave Nigerian masses who they already hold in bondage, people who also understand that the edifice will further advance their plans in enslaving Nigerian masses.

In the second story, things got to an absurd dimension when a well-known General Overseer of a Nigerian mega Church announced from the pulpit that but for the prayers of the members of his Church, the spiraling exchange rate of Nigeria Naira to the US dollar which was already at N1,500 per dollar would have gotten to N2,500 per dollar. I am still so shocked till date about that statement to have any comments to make about it.

There is an existing record that Nigerians are the happiest people on the earth. Why is this
so?

The reason is that Nigerians have been dehumanized so much that most of us here will fail the sanity tests if that is to be conducted on us. It is normal to get angry and abnormal to be happy at all time by anybody. Like love, the emotion of anger when a trigger has been pulled, is normal to erupt. What is abnormal is the lack of control over anger or over love both of which can lead to fatalities such as murder and suicide respectively for both emotions as presently observed in modern societies.

So, my submission is that Nigerians have been emotionally and psychologically dazed in the wrong directions that they laugh when they should be crying, not different front the action of a mad man walking the street naked and laughing, not knowing that he is mad.

Is it any wonder that most Nigerians feel nothing, emotionally and psychologically nothing on the sight of human blood or dead people that are littered along the streets of the cities of Nigeria?

Somehow, it seems like something human has been taken away from all of us and we pride ourselves to be the happiest people on the earth. What a misfortune!

I have written it elsewhere that somehow, someday, a shock treatment, the type that may be given to a madman walking the streets naked without knowing his predicament to restore his sanity, may be administered to Nigeria, my beloved country of birth that I love so much, in the manner of a social upheaval, to jumpstart her so that she stands once again on her feet.

The above extreme measure, by the way, is the immediate threat we face!

(Abuchi Obiora is an Author, Journalist and Media Consultant. He is also a Biographer, Public Affairs Analyst, and the Web Content Creator of a Channel called “The Master’s Chamber”)
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