Nigerians’ Ironic Religiosity

Also published in DAILY TRUST 

         Nigeria's President kneeling down before a pastor 

Perhaps the much publicized finding that Nigerians are “the most religious people in the world” yet among the most corrupt, to say the least, represents the trickiest paradox I have ever come across. Because after all, I know for sure that all religions irrespective of their ideological differences have more or less similar core values. 

For instance no religion tolerates corruption let alone promotes it. It is therefore very ironic for a people considered the most religious in Islam and Christianity to be yet rated as some of the most corrupt on earth. Admittedly this equation is very tricky to solve.

Nevertheless, I reckon that those who classified Nigerians as such must have been carried away by a number of factors e.g. the huge crowds of faithful attending religious functions in Nigeria. As they were also clearly impressed by the average Nigerians’ attitudes of expressing their religiosity in different ways ranging from display of religious symbols and verbal reference to religion in almost everything. Moreover, typical Nigerian houses and automobiles are also decorated with religious symbols and quotes.

Also, Nigerians’ “religiosity” is further underscored in the government’s deep and largely unnecessary involvement in handling, say, Muslim and Christian pilgrimage tours, through which public funds are unnecessarily misplaced and even largely misappropriated as well. Interestingly enough, even in the core Muslim and Christian countries, pilgrimage tours are handled by private tour operators.

Though many analysts while addressing such irony castigate Nigerians as inherently insincere and dishonest, however, I look at it quite differently. I argue that there is a subtle correlation between such ironic religiosity phenomenon and bad leadership that bedevils the country. It is obvious that, over the decades, opportunities for dignified living have been steadily declining in Nigeria. 

One’s prospect of “making it” is largely determined by the extent of his access to public wealth and/or connection with those who have that access, which explains why the overwhelming majority of people are left out to wallow in deprivation amid plenty.

In the face of their persistent frustration, many people resorted to religion for consolation hopefully to gain the eternal compensation in the hereafter, which gave birth to a phenomenal trend of religiosity in the land, alas with no or little adherence to the corresponding moral values, which determine the actual sincerity of any religiosity in the first place.

I may not digress if I point out to the fact that, a few months after Kano state introduced “Shari’a” in the earlier 2000, where the massive crowd of people who attended the occasion was said to have rivaled that of Hajj, a semi battle erupted between the newly formed Hisbah and the same crowd of people, who had ironically converged at the same Sharia’ introduction venue to witness a grand gala occasion deemed morally unacceptable by the Hisbah, who also intervened to stop it.

Anyway, taking the advantage of such ironic religiosity, and in order to kill two or more birds with one stone i.e. to perpetuate their looting spree and in the meantime launder their own image and even win the masses’ hearts and minds simultaneously, the country’s ruling elite and their cronies began to generously support various religious bodies they belong to, through their respective clerics, which, effectively influences the nature of the preaching given by the clerics. 

They have built or facilitated the building of mosques or churches everywhere in the country, and most of them are also patrons of various religious organizations; a step that has boosted the clerics’ fellowship bases amongst the masses, who are on the other hand increasingly going hopeless and naïve hence vulnerable to such clerical/elite continued manipulations.

Consequently, despite the bizarre way in which the ruling elite and their cronies plunder the public wealth, such largely compromised religious clerics hardly bother to seriously address the issue. They instead preach unconditional submission to the status-quo, claiming that the masses’ suffering is not man-made, it is instead predestined by God hence cannot be changed except with prayers. In fact many of them claim that, the widespread suffering represents a divine retribution inflicted on them by God for their sins.

For instance, while many Muslim clerics particularly misquote and misinterpret many Islamic injunctions to convince (or rather subdue) their followers to patiently endure their misery, pray continuously  and wait for the eternal compensation in the hereafter, their Christian counterparts have forged ahead to “guarantee’ their followers worldly wealth and temporal success through “miracles”, at monetary costs of course. 

Both strategies have worked out “well”, as most of the masses have either effectively given up or turned into chasing those promised “miracles”. This explains why religious clerics attract devout followers more than any other public figure in Nigeria today, which also explains the steady and phenomenal growth of religious congregations and gatherings, which is mistaken for religiosity by some gullible observers.

The reality is that, any religiosity that does characterize the leadership and is hardly noticeable in social interactions amongst people is no more than a self-deception. This explains how Nigeria’ ironic religiosity as such fails to solve the country’s chronic socio-political and economic crises. 

This is also the reason why hardly if at all any amount of preaching can inspire a typical bribe-taking civil servant to reject petty bribes, simply because he sees how the thieving elite conspire to siphon the public wealth and subject the masses to worldly hell with blatant impunity.

It is noteworthy that, modern variables have warranted the indispensability of the availability of an enabling socio-political and economic environment for true religiosity to survive and flourish in the first place. 

And such enabling environment comes to being only when there is a credible and competent political leadership under which the rule of law and culture of reward and punishment prevail. And it is imperative upon everybody to contribute towards the establishment of such system, lest the status-quo persist endlessly.