© Numero Unoma
How does a society who spends so much time in churches and mosques, in prayer and fasting and in all manner of religious fervour and zeal, then still exhibit such low levels of morality, ethics and integrity? I am talking to you, Nigeria.
Ours is a country where these days, meetings in government offices and ministries are opened with a hollow and meaningless prayer. After all we all know that the same civil servants who belt out the supplication, or holler AMEN to punctuate the lengthy pre-meeting prayer with affected fervour, will go back to their desks and expect to be bribed to do the job for which they are being paid a salary. It wasn’t always that way, and I ask myself when we departed from a healthy separation between church and state. Wikipedia defines the separation of church and state thus: “The separation of church and state is a philosophical and jurisprudential concept for defining political distance in the relationship between religious organizations and the state. Conceptually, the term refers to the creation of a secular state (with or without legally explicit church-state separation) and to disestablishment, the changing of an existing, formal relationship between the church and the state.”
We did not always blend church and state in Nigeria, and back in the day when the two remained separate, we had a stronger moral fabric in society in general. Provisions traders could leave their stalls unattended for enough time to take a bathroom break, or even go off on the school run. In their absence, customers would come and take what they needed and just leave the money there. The transactions were always conducted honestly, and nobody dreamed of making off with the money left at the stall.
Those were the days when you could go to the passport office in Ikoyi, and not fear the necessary getting early arrival to beat the queue. Much later, after American style pentecostal churches had spread throughout Nigeria (and Africa) like viruses, sheltering under the canopy that had been provided for those in the passport queue meant that you were a sitting audience for one lay cleric after another. Why would I call them lay, you ask? I’ll go into that a bit later. In any case I plugged them out by plugging in my earphones, eliciting looks of horror and disdain at was was felt to be perhaps a blasphemy.
I was talking to a friend the other day, just looking at life philosophically, feeling grateful and making observations on humanity, and he concluded that our species is just an inherently wicked one. In the context of what we were discussing (several aspects of Nigeria, since you ask), one might indeed say so, heaven knows examples abound around and about us. There are the police who shoot young men because they wear their hair in dreadlocks, the Muslim terrorists who steal people’s daughters from their boarding schools, the politicians who leave their constituents to languish in abject poverty, even as they embezzle more money from the state coffers than it is possible for one human to spend in a lifetime, the pastors who fund opulent lifestyles on the faithful tithes of their parishioners, the wealthy business men who knowingly cheat others and also the everyday Nigerian who will devise a way to squeeze a buck out of the most innocent of situations, like charging to take a seat at the police station.
On the other hand though, I have to say that I have often also experienced human kindness beyond measure, and one must never forget that in the very same time and space where Hitler’s hatchet men hunted and persecuted Jews, sending them to their death in concentration camps, there were ordinary Germans who risked their lives and those of their own families, hiding Jews in their homes, and helping them to escape. In the Nigerian context, I have to say that the most ‘Christ-like’ acts I both experienced and witnessed, have come mostly from Muslims. One Christian, whom I call the Kaiser, (you know yourself) will forever remain blessed in my prayers, because just like the Muslims to whom I refer, his acts of kindness came with no expectations, except that he could serve to be used by God in the life of a fellow human who was in need, where he could help, and he did it discreetly.
I am constantly flabbergasted by the callous members of the Nigerian so-called elite, who live opulent lives on stolen wealth, in the midst of abject poverty and suffering (which they directly have caused through their thievery) and don’t so much as see the suffering of even their own overworked and underpaid staff, by whom ironically, they continuously complain of being exploited. These are the loudest hallelujah criers in any congregation, perhaps they are thanking Providence for not letting God reward their evil deeds so far. These people will manage to ignore a friend in a financial crisis, not returning their calls or texts, but just as soon as the friend drops dead, often from the sheer stress of what they are going through, they will make an extremely generous donation to the Funeral Fund of said ‘friend’, and they never forego the vulgarity of putting their name and the amount of their ‘donation’ in print for all to see.
The filthy rich (the adjective refers in this case not just to the quantity but also to the quality of these people’s wealth) have the best seats in the churches, and they seem often to go more for the fanfare and show of wealth that their clothes and accessories imply, than for any growth of their warped souls, that are bloated with the spoils of their avarice and theft. Because for all the church-going we do in Nigeria, we are no better humans for it afterwards.
Alibi religiosity has become the order of the day, and anybody who knows me knows that the minute somebody proclaims themselves to be a Christian is the very moment I lose trust in them and view them with suspicion going forward. ESPECIALLY if they are a pastor. Everyone seems to be a pastor these days. The only qualifications needed is a chequered past of substance misuse and debauchery, an implied Road to Damascus watershed of repentance, and the ability to spin a good enough yarn to relieve people of 10% of their earnings, and convert that into tax-free personal income. All this embellished with the affective fervour of any zealot worth their salt.
Which brings me back to why I called them lay earlier. Of course I all them lay, I am of the Roman Catholic persuasion of Christianity. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking. FYI RC priests are educated for many years at tertiary level, of which a good portion is studying theology, so they understand everyone else’s concepts of God as well as their own.
Then there are the low blows: People often accuse them of paedeophilia, as though there are not scores of RC priests who fall prey to the silly celibacy oaths they are made to take, in normal heterosexual ways, and also as though the Pentecostal churches are not also rife with all manner of sexual predators and scandals. Moreover, people will say that we Catholics ‘belong’ to (is that meant to mean come from, or what?) the richest country in the world. You guessed right, the Vatican. Own government, own currency, all that rhetoric. Not sure what that is supposed say about an individual’s faith, but hey. Oh then there is this ironic statement that where you find the most Catholics, you find the most poverty. Well given that according to Wikipedia “Of the estimated 2.3 billion Christians in the world, about 1.3 billion of them are Roman Catholics ” this almost makes sense, because the richer countries have seen drastic declines in the numbers of Christians, a well as significant increases in ‘alternative new age religions, a come back of ancient belief systems as well as an growth in the numbers of agnostics and atheists. But the Catholic bashers never keep things in perspective by mentioning the chronological head start the RC Church has had on many others, because their timeline dates all the way back to the living times of Christ’s apostles, which would explain the numbers. Nor does anybody admit that the RC Church has over centuries been instrumental in giving some of the best education and healthcare in the world, and a lot of was for free. This is a church who has never guilt-tripped their congregation into parting with a tenth of their earnings or forfeit God’s mercy, though Catholics are otherwise notorious for having the best brand of guilt trip in Christendom.
At least Catholic priests give up all their worldly possessions, and subject themselves to being sent to the corners of the earth, most not comfortable places, at the behest of the bureaucracy of the Vatican. Theirs is a much more plausible alibi, if you ask me, especially if you are a Jesuit priest dispensing excellent educ
ation. On the subject of the flashy flaky pentecostal clergy, verily verily, I say unto you…Too many shepherds, not enough sheep.