In fragile and unstable post-colonial states and nations, the incursion of religion into the state arena ought to be avoided like a plague. This is because religion, being a faith-based and emotive phenomenon, is resistant to logic and the rational intellectual constructs on which modern nationhood is founded. No amount of logic and intellectual rigour on display can sway the religious adherent. Magic cannot be explained away rationally. In its purest form, religious worship is based on the suspension of logical and intellectual disbelief.
This is why religious disputes are a potentially explosive affair. Yet Nigerian authorities find it very hard to shy away from religious contentions. If religion is truly the opium of the people, it may well be the adrenalin of the ruling class in Nigeria. The Nigerian post-colonial state, like a condemned moth, finds religious conflagrations very conducive and appealing indeed. It is like an addictive urge to play with fire, just to test one’s fire-fighting skills. But there are fires and there are fires.
Yet it is also obvious that despite its strength, its power and capacity for violence, its ability to instil and inflict terror on the populace, the state continues to be vulnerable to certain traditional institutions and religions particularly in Nigeria. Why this is so goes back to the very foundation of the colonial state on the continent and the emergence of the Nigerian nation from the colonial laboratory of artificial insemination.
Events of this past week have brought to the front burner the explosive mix of religion and statehood in Nigeria. Jim Obazee, the rogue regulator at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), in an attempt to bring the leadership of the non-traditional church in Nigeria to HEEL brought himself to heel instead and brought the federal government to precipitate fury in an unhelpful and maladroit manner. For a government often characterized as slow and tardy in response to national emergencies, the retribution was swift and severe. In one fell swoop, Obazee was dismissed and the council reconstituted.
The ripple effects of this dramatic denouement are still very much with us. Many have lined up behind the government and the embattled leadership of the non-traditional church. Superstitious intellectuals, an oxymoronic formulation unique to Nigeria and Africa, are having a field day. The alleluia boys and girls of the press have risen as one to condemn what they consider to be an unwarranted interference in freedom of worship and choice of church however its structural and fiscal eccentricities. While the senate kept a dignified silence, the house waded in in an unwieldy and unhelpful manner.
This development leads to several interesting and intriguing paradoxes which must be teased out in the interest of national clarity and state illumination. Some of these need to be immediately isolated for the sake of analytic leverage. For example, is the Nigerian post-colonial state a secular state or a theocratic state with pretences to secularity based on its choice of democratic governance underscored by secular parties, secular ideologies and secular elections based on secular freedom of association and leveraged by a free, secular press?
The very idea of a theocratic secular state is a contradiction in terms. Despite the prevalence of theocratic rule in certain segments of the human society, the modern-nation state is premised on the secularization of the state and the subordination of religious practice to the rule of law as FASHIONED by the state and its agents. This development occured when territorial space came to be defined by earthly authority rather than religious identity. Whereas in the old arrangement, religious identification and spiritual affiliation was all that mattered, in the new arrangement it was national identification and a pan-ethnic identity which superseded tribe and tongue. Thus was born the modern nation and its concomitant nationalism.
It is to be noted that like all human activities the advent of the modern nation-state is not a result of peaceful contemplations, political decrees and philosophical postulates. It was as a result of relentless human exertion in the field of battle followed by peace treaties, particularly the Treaty of Westphalia and later The Treaty of Utrecht. Indeed, had the OTTOMAN Turks sweeping all before them not come to grief outside modern Serbia, we might have been talking of global Islamic theocracy.
The subjugation and pacification of the continent of Africa by the European imperialist powers followed much the same pattern. It was a function of relentless and dogged secularization. The motive was economic and political and only secondarily religious.
Several nationalities with different religions were BOXED together and slammed with a national identity with the state superintending.
In Nigeria, the marked preference of the colonial authorities for a cohesive north even with its different religious affiliation shows that theocracy was far from the pressing agenda. By this same token, it shows that any attempt to impose a theocratic solution on the contradictions of a multi-religious nation like Nigeria is bound to come to grief.
This leads directly to the other paradox. Is Nigeria a multi-religious state? Contrary to some prevalent political illiteracy, there can be nothing like a multi-religious state. The idea of a multi-religious state is a violent contradiction in terms. Nigeria is a secular state superintending over a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation and adjudicating among different factions of the political elite who often use the blackmail of religion and ethnicity to pursue their economic goals and interest. The idea of a multi-religious state presupposes a turn by turn power arrangement in which different religious leaders take turn to rule the nation which can only presage much division and disruption.
The question to be asked is this: why is it that despite the fact that Nigeria is not a theocratic state, religion is often allowed to invade the arena of the state in a way and manner that threatens the secularity of the state, its sacred ethos and fundamental covenant? Virtually all of Nigeria’s post-military leaders in the Fourth Republic with the exception of Umaru Yar’Adua are guilty of this relentless de-secularization of the state.
In the case of General Obasanjo in his second coming, perhaps in an attempt to validate his sense of messianic exceptionalism, Aso Rock was virtually turned into a permanent Christian Revivalist kingdom with tropes and totems of His Second Coming dotting the landscape. But if this can be excused as arising from the psychological trauma of a man who nursed cosmic vengeance against his tormentors, what can one say of a man like Goodluck Jonathan who became a footloose prayer warrior routinely kneeling before religious authority in a vote-garnering political gimmick bristling with spiritual chicanery?
Yet the fact that Jonathan became a virtual praying mantis abasing himself and the sacred ethos of secular authority did not stave off looming defeat and the crippling economic depression he and his cohorts inflicted on the nation. There is another historic reference point. In the Second Republic, the pious and prayerful Alhaji Shehu Shagari was known to retire upstairs to commune with his maker as his acolytes took the nation to the financial slaughter slab. It seems as if the more underdeveloped a nation is the more over-religious its leaders are.
In the particular case of General Mohammadu Buhari, it may well be that his ascetic and abstemious NATURE, the solid and stolid credentials of his Islamic piety, do not admit of the spiritual razzmatazz of his Christian predecessors. Nobody can fairly accuse him of religious one-upmanship in his public conduct or utterances or of turning the precincts of Aso Rock into an Islamic redoubt with minarets blaring.
Yet the paradox on ground suggests that in a bid to avoid the tar of religious fundamentalism, he has raised the decibel of the politicization of religion in the country particularly in his last two campaigns as political exigencies led him to court and cultivate certain religious pressure groups at the expense of the secularity of the state simply to demonstrate that he is not a fanatic but a much misunderstood statesman.
This is precisely what has returned to haunt the government in the Obazee affair as the Buhari administration appears to bend over backward to please and mollify a particular religious tendency with presidential vote-husbandry and the next election in view. To be sure, Obazee, driven by petty animosity for a sect that had reportedly sanctioned him for an earlier pastoral infraction, demonstrated grave political irresponsibility by not clearing matters with his superiors.
Yet the bald fact remains that in a secular state, all religious groups are subordinate to the directing vision of the secularized Leviathan. This is what guarantees societal cohesion, intra and inter-religious harmony and economic prosperity certainly not religious piety. Even the bible enjoins us to give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar.
Ordinarily, respect for freedom of association ought to preclude the state from unwarranted interference in the internal political structure and tenure of leadership of private associations such as non-traditional churches. But it is also the case that government cannot refrain from intervention where the conduct of certain non-traditional religious associations constitutes an economic security threat to the nation or when the internal jostling for power or succession struggle is deemed as prejudicial to public order.
Having been forcibly constituted as a modern nation-state by colonial conquerors, it would amount to a great historical tragedy if the nation were to regress into Stone Age religious anarchy where religious leaders hold the nascent state to ransom. In contemporary Nigeria, there is a marked disjunction between inner spirituality and overt religiosity, otherwise why is there so much wickedness and wanton cruelty such as we are currently witnessing, despite the nocturnal vigils and endemic fasting?
As some SECTIONS of the political elite fan the embers of religious cum ethnic schisms in several flashpoints leading to widespread mayhem and industrial killing, it is the bounden duty of the Nigerian state to rise to the occasion or lose its fundamental raison d’etre. If that were to be the case, both the state and the nation it is supposed to superintend will unravel in the shortest possible time.
Finally a word for our spiritual leaders and people of God. To whom much is donated, much is also expected in terms of probity, accountability and fiscal godliness. They cannot continue to resist or cleverly evade state audit of their finances as long as they remain an integral part of the nation and not some theocratic enclaves operating at some interstices beyond state surveillance.
But even more important at this perilous conjuncture for the nation, our religious leaders must avoid inflammatory political rhetoric and divisive statements which tend to put the entire nation at grave political risk.
They must avoid the temptation to turn their exalted political platforms into a bullying pulpit for the sole purpose of wresting political and economic concessions from the state. From the events of the past few years, it is obvious that many of them need political minders. May God grant them the wisdom to appreciate the fact that we are not equally endowed and that a religious avatar is not the same thing as a political genius.
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