FRIDAY DISCOURSE BY DR. ALIYU U. TILDE Discourse 289
There is little wonder why Nigerians are generally rated
the most religious people under the sun. We are never tired of pubic
holidays at the slightest opportunity.
Eid el-Maulud,
Eid el-Fitr
Eid el-Adha,
Easter, Christmas, etc, are annually declared public holidays. This is not
to mention our Sunday services, mid-week fellowships, five daily prayers,
Jumu’ah
prayer, and now,
Tahajjud
or Kiyam
el-Lail
which are traditionally observed after midnight! On all these occasions,
places of worship are flooded with worshipers at a frequency and quanta
that captures the admiration of the eye. Without any contention, the world
conceded the gold medal of religiousness to us.
Paradox
Unfortunately for this country,
religiousness is not the same as piety. If the two were the same, this
nation would have been the best of nations in socio-economic outlook.
Foreign investors from Europe, America and Japan would be knocking at our
doors, begging for opportunities. But here we are, in spite of the
hundreds of Presidential trips sourcing for investors, the world has kept
a deaf ear to our invitation, exception for some GSM suckers and few
wandering racist farmers. Evidently, the simple fact is that the world
does not trust us. As a testimony, three years ago, the world gave us a
silver medal for corruption; last year, we won the bronze, notwithstanding
our religiousness.
To understand this paradox we need to
examine the relationship between religiousness and piety. Sociologists
judge religiousness by the outward expression of identity, like wearing
the cross, turban or beard, and participation in worship like attending
Sunday services and Friday congregation. Piety, on the other hand, is not
the act of worship but the righteousness that is attained or improved upon
by getting closer to God through worship and numerous other means. As the
pious leaves his place of worship, he remains conscious of God in all his
worldly dealings. In his relationship with other people, his actions are
characterized by affection and sympathy, the precursors of kindness,
tolerance, honesty, dedication and communality, which are universal
indices of mental health. While belief remains in the heart, these acts
are the expressions of piety, the genuine manifestations of that belief.
The relationship between religiousness and
piety, therefore, is supposed to be a positive one. Practically, in
Nigeria, both the scale and dynamics of the relationship vary with
individuals. For few, the relationship is very strong, when piety is
motivated by strong events and ideas that make them to spontaneously
forever break from the past. For some it is simply linear: their piety
increasing gradually over time, as does the worship. To both groups,
worship is as important as it is beneficial. But for most, and
unfortunately for this country, the relationship is a line running
parallel to the axis of worship with no increment in piety no matter how
distant we move on the axis of worship. And lastly, for many worshippers
among those who believe they “found it”, there is a negative correlation
between worship and piety, or between religiousness and mental health.
Though they are the most ardent worshippers and hardly do they engage in
alcohol or adultery except on few occasions when they are “overcome by the
devil”, they exhibit some dangerous forms of mental illness, like
xenophobia, which lead to the prevalence of hate and intolerance.
Evidence
The evidence supporting my claims is
overwhelming. I often wonder if the church or mosque at Aso Rock has any
importance if, as alleged, 56% of the corruption in the country takes
place there. The remaining 44% is shared between Government Houses in
States and other establishments of government, many of which also have
places of worship in them. Few minutes ago some of these officials could
break from duties for a prayer at a place of worship nearby. Just
thereafter, they will return to their desks or meeting rooms to continue
their corrupt practices and to formulate policies that will cause serious
hardship to all Nigerians and deaths to hundreds on daily basis. Where is
the God in the hearts of such officials? If there were any positive
coefficient of correlation between our religiousness and our mental
health, Nigeria would have been a different country.
Otherwise, how can we solve the riddle of
an Alhaji in the position of a governor or Inspector General of Police
stealing over N17 billion of public funds, or a JP (Jerusalem Pilgrim)
Governor on the run from the M15 and another in British police custody?
What did these people tell God in Mecca or Jerusalem when they go for
annual pilgrimage? In another instance, how do we reconcile the
“born-again” claim of a President who has increased the price of fuel from
N12.00 to N75.00 per liter in just six years?
At a lower level, how could some of our
public servants who pray five times a day and attend every Wednesday
fellowship and Sunday service divert the public resources under their
custody? We have some medical directors and health personnel of pubic
hospitals, for instance, who, in spite of their religiousness, steal
important hospital equipment, drugs and reagents; many teachers who have
perfected the commerce of examination malpractice; many drivers of
hospital shuttle bus, meant to convey the sick, who use it to transport
firewood and sacks of maize from the villages; traders who import and
distribute fake drugs and spare parts, causing the deaths of thousands of
Nigerians annually. The irony of all these is that part of the ill-gotten
wealth is used in the building of mosques and churches! May God reject
their offer as he rejected the sacrifice of Cain!
While the locusts of white-collar corruption are ravaging
our economy at the national level, the termite of dishonesty and
intolerance is devouring every bud of prosperity at the grassroots. Today,
the commoner, who never misses a congregational prayer, exhibits the same
degree of dishonesty as the corrupt official at the slightest opportunity.
Make the mistake of appointing a villager the farm manager who will
supervise your farm operations and you are sure to harvest bails of
disappointment at the end of the season. Give another commoner a taxi to
drive, or a commercial motorcycle to ride and he will pocket more than
half of the returns daily. This is the principal reason why the transport
sector in the North is dying rapidly. Or leave the village, find a Fulani
man in the bush and entrust him with your herd of cattle and you will
definitely receive fabricated reports that
sammore
has killed a cow last month,
boru has
killed another this month, and so on. The Hausa, for instance, whom the
Igbo once regarded as the epitome of honesty and whom he could lend
without any collateral has squandered that trust. The Igbo will adduce all
evidence to prove that the “Hausaman” of today is not the “Hausaman” of
yesterday. He is no longer marginalized in the game of corruption. Thus,
all attempts of the individual Nigerian to create wealth, as many of us
have experienced, is consistently greeted with pervasive breach of trust
that makes it impossible for wealth to multiply and provide more
opportunities of survival to many. Consequently, and in spite of our
abundant resources, poverty has become the destiny of over 70% of our
population.
Reasons
Very few Nigerians would fail to share the same
observations. The next thing is to probe the cause that severed the link
between religiousness and piety or good conduct among Nigerians. First, I
think many Nigerians have a misconstrued notion of our secularity. Many
fail to see the extension of the mosque or the church beyond the premises
of worship. To God is the worship, they think, and to the devil the
profane. They think public treasury is an
alheri
(goody) or a booty that does not belong to anyone.
At another level, we often underrate the
effect that our mental sickness causes to the development of the country.
Even when we are educated enough to foresee the consequences of criminal
actions, we are so callous that we hardly give a damn. A medical director
stealing an X-ray machine or a consignment of drugs knows the exact
consequences; A kleptomaniac principal or education officer knows very
well the damage the contribution he is making to the falling standard of
education when he steals textbooks, lab equipment and food items. Yet on
both accounts, these officials will go ahead to commit their crimes with
the connivance of their superiors who will gladly receive a share of the
theft. Their belief in God and their prayer has both failed to restrain
them from evil.
The most important factor, however, is the
increasing penchant of a good proportion of the clerics to acquire wealth
through the same dubious practices as the laity. These are people who are
regarded as the inheritors of the Prophets, the symbols of religion and of
all the values it preaches. The proliferation of churches and mosques and
the manner in which many custodians of religion are competing with one
another in the display of material wealth is unbecoming for people of
their kind. Their acts encourage the looting of public property. They
praise corrupt public servants and callous merchants at ceremonies or when
they pay them visits; they beg them for donations to complete the
construction of a church or a mosque; they receive from them gifts of
expensive cars; they annually lobby for allocation of hajj seats or
tickets to the Vatican or Jerusalem. Once indebted to this extent, the
cleric loses his conscience and his intellect become reluctant to confront
his benefactor with the unalloyed truth. Instead, the interpretation of
verses from holy books will be twisted to justify the intentions and
actions of the patron. As such, an opportunity that could be used to
remind the leadership of its responsibility as practiced by egalitarian
leaders like Umar bin al-Khattab, for example, is wasted in the praise of
people whose indulgence is causing untold hardship to millions of
Nigerians.
The two – the clerics and the ruling elite
– are in partnership for the obvious. On the one hand, the cleric needs
the wealth of the ruler. On the other, the ruler needs the political
anesthesia that the cleric administers on his followers. Through the
preaching of doctrines of predestination, the follower is consigned to
God, as the alleged mastermind of his condition of ignorance, poverty and
disease. Through the preaching of hate and intolerance against other
religions and denominations, the population is too divided to fight
against the injustice of the ruler. It becomes embroiled in one sectarian
crisis after another. In the end of such crisis, not a single cleric do I
know who has lost a son, nor a president, governor or senior government
official. All those who lost their lives are masses. That is the price
they pay for their gullibility.
But as we have mentioned earlier, the mass himself cannot
be trusted. He is only waiting for an opportunity to cheat, for an
alheri
to come his way. And any attempt to emancipate him by blunting the edges
of differences and clearing his xenophobic mind is greeted with the
hostile language of heresy, blasphemy and hypocrisy coming from both the
cleric and his pitiable followers.
The Future
What role does religion have in our future?
Definitely, there will be in the near future many prayers to be said
daily, many Ramadans or Christmas to observe annually. But for what
benefit will they be? I am not an advocate of secularity in any sense.
People must admit that God has a positive role in their day-to-day lives.
It is the failure of the religious to excel in the worldly that has led to
this separation, which in turn is causing a lot of havoc to many nations.
Custodians of religion have ceased their contribution to discoveries since
their great contributions to philosophy in the Middle Ages. Almost all
advances in science and technology of the past 200 years have come from
people who barely believe in God. That is why such discoveries are applied
to the detriment of humanity. And it is saddening to predict with good
degree of certainty that the next vaccine of AIDS or of malaria is
unlikely to come from an ardent observer of Ramadan or a born-again
Christian, neither will it come from an Imam or a pastor.
Therefore, what we expect from our
religious leaders is the role that their predecessors played, people like
Avicena (Ibn Sina), Averoes (Ibn Rushd), Thomas Aquinas, and many others.
These were men of religion who played the roles of scientists,
philosophers and clerics, at the same time. They did not separate between
the divine and the profane and had a heart that embraced the whole
humanity. Had they lived in our age, they would have been the first to
discover atomic fission before Einstein and used it to generate
electricity and medicine instead of using it to destroy Horishima and
Nagasaki.
In addition, religious leaders must live as
leaders, setting the pace of piety for us, their followers. This will give
them the moral locus, without fear of losing the lucrative opportunity of
material acquisition, to correct the society right from Aso Rock down to
the remotest village.
However, they will not succeed in their job
without a firm commitment to the Hereafter as they have to this world.
This will lead them to acquire and respect knowledge, labor, justice and
humanity, ideals that will place them at a great distance away from their
present state of contempt for the fundamentals upon which any just and
progressive society is built. God has decreed that his Earth be a
commonwealth of different people from different backgrounds in ethnicity
and belief. And so it must remain.
So let Christmas and another Ramadan return and find a
better composition of worshippers among us. Let them meet Nigerians who
are imbued with the fear of God and all what it engenders: the supremacy
of God in belief and in action; the belief in the Hereafter and its
reflection in whatever we do, belief in the universality of the human race
nurtured by love and sympathy; and belief in dedication to duty and
profession. The same fear of God dispels the ills of sin, crime,
dishonesty, hate, bigotry, intolerance and laziness. As a now, without any
significant correlation between our worship and our piety, I feel we are
cheating God, breaking our promise to Him. No. We are only cheating
ourselves:
“Whoever breaks his promise to God, breaks
it at his own detriment. And whoever fulfills the promise he made to God,
We will soon give him a handsome reward.”
Abuja
9 April 2008 |