Fwd: DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION IN NIGERIA
Dr. Valentine Ojo
By Olusegun Okeowo
Posted to the Web: Wednesday, March 07, 2007
DEMOCRACY in a given country must be redefined against Abraham
Lincoln’s concept to reflect the struggle for the elimination of
ignorance, poverty and disease through a governance that provides the
greatest good for the greatest number of the people. Since democracy is
a struggle, it cannot be seen or taken as a dinner party, hence the need
for intensive and extensive ideo-intellectualisation of the polity that
sustains its governance. In another language, democracy cannot afford
politically-barren or an ideologically-naive citizenry, else its banks
of governance will go bankrupt. The cardinal point we are stressing here
is that democracy is such a great asset that must be jealously
maintained, retained and sustained to pave way for the total elimination
of the said ignorance, poverty and disease in the polity.
As a pathological optimist, I see democracy as one of the greatest assets
of the 1979 Nigerian Constitution, prodigal as it was, especially for
its legacy of insulating the country from religion, thereby enshrining
it as a secular nation. One of the great assets is the freedom of
thought and expression of same. Side by side with the freedom of
association, which also implies freedom of dissociation, the said
Nigerian Constitution has bequeathed unto democracy the optimism for
survival, even though it is the Charles Darwin's survival of the
fittest.
Today, however, Nigeria confirms the opinion of Che Guevera, (the famous
comrade and colleague of legendary Cuban Fidel Castro) that religion is
the opium of the masses. This is because, logistics show that every
other Nigerian house is either a church or a mosque depending on which
latitudinal side of the Niger/Benue you are. Yet, both the crusading and
the jihading continue with voracious intensity in all nooks and corners
with all known whims and unknown
caprices under one guise or the other.
Today, despite its constitutional secularity, Nigeria is under the
cardinal yoke of fanatical religiousity. To confirm this assertion, the
Holy Bible remains the most popular book in Nigeria while the Holy Quran
retains its position as the most famous. Every other Nigerian is either
an Abraham or an Ibrahim, a Joseph or a Yusuf, a Solomon or a Sulaiman,
a Mary or a Maryam, a Sarah or a Sarat, etc. That is why a smart
bearded guy recently came out with the smart concept of CHRISLAM with
which he doped and duped several lazy preys who are always desperately
looking for myths and miracles.
As at today, if a Nigerian does not answer to any of the above names, he
or she is either a proud Johnson or a Fernandez or a Braithewaite or a
Veracruz or a Ransome or a Craig or a Wilson-Wright or a Holloway, etc.
Indeed, as at today, native or indigenous names are so rare to come by
until recently when a CBN Professor, son of Soludo, came to the rescue
by exchanging his Charles for Chukwumah. Indeed, almost all ceremonials
such as namings, weddings, chieftaincies, holidays, coronations, oaths,
executions, funerals, etc, have been taken over by either of these two
foreign beliefs leaving the traditional custom like a fish doped out of
the deep (J. P. Clark) or like the deserted village (Oliver Goldsmith).
To date, no famous Nigerian is a VIP except he/she is either an Alhaji or
a Reverend and who also owns a sizeable taxable but untaxed religious
industry. Only such Nigerians are potential National Honours Awardees.
Everything is either christianized or islamised or westernized or
easternized albeit, colonialised, except for the Okija Shrine which
repented and converted itself into a University, ‘admitting its
victims as posthumous matriculants and under-graduates! It is only Dora
Akunyili’s NAFDAC and Nuhu Ribadu’s EFCC that must come to the
rescue.
Because many of us in Nigeria are beneficiaries of one religious
education or the other, we have grown up to accept or adopt certain
religious concepts through certain subtle orientations or soft
manipulations or mild inclinations or wild indoctri-nations.
The consequence of the quadrilateral fabrica- tions have subjected us to
such philosophical confusion or ideological equivocations which many of
us never recovered from the womb to the tomb in a Wole Soyinka’s
unending generational tricycling of "The unborn, the living and the
dead". So profuse and pronounced are these religious fabrications that
they have overshadowed the logics, physics, mathematics and logistics of
our reasoning and the rhyme, rhythm, tone and tune of our understanding.
One of such concepts, for example, has firmly planted in our individual
and national psyche that praying in a foreign language is superior to
praying in a native dialect or idiolect, hence the halleluyahs and the
fathias that daily deafen from the churches and mosques across the
country, especially during the recent combined Christian/Muslim
festivals.
The phenomenal manipulation waxes so strong that almost all forms of
traditional religion are being persecuted through one form of national
oppression or suppression or regression or aggression in an open display
of apartheid. •Chief Okeowo, a social critic, writes from Sagamu, Ogun
State.
http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/viewpoints/vp507032007.html_
(http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/viewpoints/vp507032007.html)