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Of
Shrines, Religion, Nigerians and Law By Ike Okwuobi A
few weeks ago, I visited Anyhow
on this faithful day, the Chief Priest - as in Senior Pastor, Mrs. Sarah
Omakwu – a woman after my own heart and perhaps soul, was giving an
important sermon "I want you all to seek out a special place in
your homes, a place you can call your own, a place you can worship alone
with God, a place you can visit anytime you want to interact with God, a
sacred place…" she preached. Having already abided by such rules,
I thought to myself, "Surely this lady is on the same page as some
of us as to the importance of communing with God by manipulating the
energies of silence, serenity and solitude in an enshrined space." The
multitudes who abide in the villages dotting the landscape of the belly
of It
is logical to assume that the jurisdiction as regards the mediating
venue of these 'truth challenges' must have become an issue (since all
other challenges were determined by the To
mediate, the villagers soon understood that there may be many truths,
but there is only one spirit of the highest truth, which in retrospect
brings their hindsight to 20/1. In my opinion the truth is like an XML
Open Source Language that can be encapsulated in a portal and unleashed
on demand, just as one may declare the truths about oneself in a state
of frenzied worship and hold those truths dear till they come to be, the
Nigerian ancestor reckoned that this truth, if manipulated in various
forms could unleash the highest truth of any scenario - incredulous to
conceive, but proven in traditional circles, and so in traditional
societies the punishment and deterrent between two parties in these
matters was to invoke an unwholesome malady to befall the falsifier. Enter
August, 2004: Fifty bodies are found in the heart of the Igbo land.
Despite the uproar - and rightly too, the States legal team is at a
dilemma as to how to discern and dissect this matter. Who will be
charged and for contravening what law? After all, it is said that all
parties came there in two’s to swear in the enshrined space in full
knowledge of the fact that only a pair of feet will walk away unscathed
with the certainty that the living pair of feet would not belong to the
prevaricator. Coincidentally,
all this happened the very same period a couple of thousand people
rushed across the National Stadium in Abuja –the venue of the Full
Gospel World Convention to offer their souls to Christ, perhaps buoyed
by this and the success of the demolition exercises that have recently
rattled Abuja and coupled with the magnality of the gruesome find, the
news that all shrines across Nigeria must come down was welcomed with
relief. The question this scuttlebutt begets is "whose shrine are
we talking about?" Are
we talking about those inspired by Chief Priest Rev. Omakwu? Or the age
old Roman Catholic shrines? Surely not the entombed shrines tightly
guarded in hundreds of thousands of family-homes across I
perceive it is from this standpoint, that Col. Achuzia – assumed
Nigerians were on the same page as he without realizing the steepness of
the learning curve, jumped the gun by declaring (1) It was reported that
those who died came to settle the truth with one out of every pair
loosing out (2) That this process is not new to the Nigerian society and
(3) So why report it like it is an Igbo-specific issue? Ironically, the
Pan-Igbo political group Ohaneaze, which Col. Achuzia was representing,
was not impressed. Perhaps
it was insensitive or politically incorrect to address this issue so
soon after such an atrocity, but folks; question number 3 may just be as
valid as putting this in perspective irrespective of the outcome of the
investigation. Nonetheless, it has been interesting to watch the good The
solution The
solution to my mind lies in the Nigerian constitution. If This
is relatively easy to achieve since in the case of the native, both
parties must agree on the capital punishment before they proceed to
encapsulate themselves in the revered presence of their ancestors.
Interestingly, this may even put For
those racing towards the western religious leadership, here's some food
for thought as to where we may be in a few years. Bill Maher, the noble
American statesman recently proclaimed on Larry King Live "Two
types of people are on earth trying to navigate their way through life;
one faction resolving this with a compass, the other, with the entrails
of a chicken...I'm with the compass people" he declared.
Ironically, the "chicken part" wasn't about these Nigerian
natives, but really about all religions where logic is compromised. If
we could catapult ourselves 50 years ahead, in hindsight, what in this
present scenario would be constant? My guess is this live, open-source
document called truth. What's yours? http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1176750/posts http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/headline/f111082004.html |