By Dr Festus Adedayo
Last week, President Muhammadu Buhari unwittingly provoked the age-long discourse on the relationship between God, religion and the state. Confronted by hundreds of dead bodies and rivers of blood aftermath a gruesome carnage suspected to have been unleashed on Barkin Ladi, Riyom and some parts of Jos South of Plateau State by Fulani herdsmen, Buhari, who had made a pleasantly shocking, prompt visit to Jos, as against his wont, lapsed into a narrative that is difficult to piece together. “I contested for this position (presidency) four times before I got it, so I cannot complain of the challenges we are facing,” he had said. In the same breath, he had said that, “Nobody can say that we haven’t done well in terms of security, we have done our best, but the way this situation is now, we can only pray.”
As I will argue presently, Buhari’s we can only pray reveals and indeed symbolizes the character of Nigerian leadership since independence and by that very fact, the key reason why Nigeria has remained grossly under-developed. God and prayer, on one side; as well as the State on the other are a major issue whose need for matrimony or permanent divorce has been subjected to debates for centuries. The question has always been should there be a formal/mutual relationship, separation or distance between religion, its observances and the state?
In America, Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation propounded a doctrine that he called “the two kingdoms,” reinforced by James Madison, its modern proponent, who articulated the need for the separation of the church and the state. This doctrine can be said to be a precursor of today’s conception of separation of religion and the state.
Though secularism is enshrined in the Nigerian constitution, the country obeys this verse of its grundnorm in abeyance. While secularism means that a country does not officially recognize any religion, Nigeria attempts to recognize both Islam and Christianity in equal proportion.
This actually isn’t the tragedy which Nigeria finds herself; it is that her leaders, over the years, have hidden under the banner of religion to foist charlatan rule and their personal limitations and inadequacies on the people.
Under the maximum rule of General Sani Abacha, marabouts and imported Islamic clerics were alleged to have been flown in from Senegal and other neighbouring African countries to divine solutions to knotty issues of state.
Live cows and human beings were rumoured to have been buried in the four corners of the State House and the marabouts decided the Commander in Chief’s itinerary. Not much is known of the now-bearded Abdulsalami Abubakar.
When Olusegun Obasanjo took over the mantle of office in 1999, he merely substituted the long apparel-wearing and unkempt-bearded marabouts of the Abacha era with his Christian religion brethren who wore clean suits to cloth their innumerable sinful lives.
Failures of state and its runners were explained from the prism of Christianity. In spite of all the flakes of misrule which dogged his government, those who encountered Obasanjo at the Aso Rock Chapel testified of a fire-spitting, Holy Ghost tongue-speaking prayer warrior whom you could not reconcile the numerous infractions of his government with the pious, sober character he was once he entered the “House of God.”
While his Deputy, Atiku Abubakar, accused him of purchasing a Peugeot 607 saloon car for a woman friend allegedly dispossessed while mediating between her and her estranged husband, with proceeds of the Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) and his soldiers stomped their blood-thirsty feet on Odi and Zaki Biam, mowing scores to their deaths, Obasanjo, with his blood-tainted apron, was busy at the chapel acting the biblical King David and rolling on the chapel floor.
Then came Umaru Yar’Adua. Dogged by an undecipherable sickness which, at the twilight of his life, was largely veiled from the rest of Nigerians, the Villa under him was said to have been taken over by Islamic clerics who took sole proprietary of divination of solutions to Nigeria’s 21st century problems and the Head of State’s health challenge.
When Goodluck Jonathan took over the reins from him, he merely reversed to the Obasanjo template as he was held by his presidential apron by a self-acclaimed Bishop who once confessed that he smoked marijuana while growing up. We are now in the reign of Buhari, a man whose subservience to Islamic clerics and religion is said to be legendary.
What unites virtually all of these rulers is what I call the disease of African Government Houses where the leader hands over government into the hands of foreign religions or African metaphysics.
I still insist that, never in the history of the country, had there been such river of bloodshed within such a spate of time, except during the civil war and perhaps, the Northern genocide against the Igbo in 1966.
More instructively, TI accused the Nigerian government of complicity of silence in many of the killings. The genocide by Fulani herdsmen last week is still riling the globe, especially when gory pictures of disemboweled victims and cracked skulls of children flash back to its memory, making world leaders lose appetite at meal time.
The world wonders why such two-footed animals who inflicted such horrendous savagery on their fellow man could have been lumped together in the same human space with it.
In the midst of all these, all Buhari could do was throw up his two hands in resignation. For, we can only pray is nothing but resignation and total handover of a purely governmental issue which needs a thinking, committed and unbiased leadership, into the opaque, unscientific, prone-to-abuse hands of metaphysics.
Let it be said that if Nigerians believed that the existential problems ravaging the country were basically spiritual, Muhammadu Buhari was not the most qualified to be entrusted that responsibility. If they were convinced that securing the country was solely in the province of appeal to God, perhaps Enoch Adeboye, Mathew Hassan Kukah or even the Sultan of Sokoto, would be most qualified to call the shots today from the Aso Villa.
But Nigerians, apparently erroneously, with the benefit of hindsight, believed that their problems, though can be sprinkled with some garnishing of prayers, can be solved solely by mental alertness of the leadership.
If the President is this helpless to ensure peace in Nigeria, he can as well vacate office and let someone who can think through the problem take over from him. We can only pray mocks us as a people and shows that our leadership is clueless, lazy and deserves to vacate office immediately.
Nigeria needs a leader who can heal deep wounds not another Buhari ―Atiku