“The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organised religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and preservation of vested interests.” –Jawaharlal Nehru.
The reduction of Nigeria’s politics to nonsense, ably manifested in the continued elevation of men with the most disreputable standings, and amplified by the parade of women with vivid display of dishonourable characters to leadership positions, has remained a possibility due to the failing of institutions whose legitimacy would immediately be called to question once the shirking of its uppermost responsibility as the conscience of the society—nay humanity—is effected.
These institutions, if popular sentiments and philosophical thoughts processes are anything to go by, are the home, school and church (mosque, shrine, synagogue, etc.).
The home, being the first contact the child makes ordinarily places its occupants—father and mother especially—as de facto role models in character moulding and formations. This is why a behaviour deviation of a child could immediately put him in the fold of a bastard!
While the school acts as a knowledge factory, acquiring and dispensing truths for the nurture of public good, its custodians, although expected to be bounded by such, might be forgiven should any of them exhibit traits which fall below standard on the morality scale; for truth is somewhat relative, and morality, viewed in a different, non-static fashion by custodians of intellectualism in in defiance to state actors. This is partly responsible for the society’s muteness to the drunken ways of a college professor whose consciousness remains isolated from the intellectual realm until he gets high, while maintaining a stand of inappropriateness when a pastor insists on taking weed before mounting the alter.
Again, the pulpit, a dais whose legitimacy lies solely in its adherence to sets of moral guidelines enjoys no such luxury, especially the Abrahamic faiths whose proponents are expected to live by a sacred code whose existence could be traced to centuries-old customs and beliefs that transcend time and space, albeit to the dismay and disagreement of science. Unlike the home and school, neither the blurred lines between morality and reality, nor the relativity in truthfulness or a lack of it should be made to interfere in the core of religion; for the church without morality is lame; its foundation, rickety; its appeal, unappealing; and its palladium, weak—an appalling state which gives room to all manner of charlatans to brandish the sacred scroll in the appeasement of the stomach and scrotum.
It is this elevation of charlatanry that has produced at the peak of Christendom, funny characters and tithe motivators who bask in glory having taken custody of a hallucinatory kind of halitosis—a pathetic condition which he claimed was ordained by his heavenly father to be unleashed upon anyone who dared to question the humongous fees charged in an institution built on sweat and sustained by tithe!
This plastic bishop, who lives in crass opulence while no less than 100 million souls—mostly lost souls—eat from the sewage, claims to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus! Oh Jesus!
Unknown to the unreflective, the bishop with a jet—just like every other smart animate— knows that the life of Christ was an embodiment of luxuriating ordinariness and selfless living.
Had Jesus Christ lived in 2016, he would still have died jet-less, homeless and shoeless. Had the owner of the gospel whom our subject swears to propagate owned a school, he would not have shut its doors to the men and women who worked hard to fund such edifice. Had Jesus Christ been on earth while this bishop spoke so arrogantly in defence of his stupendous living, neither the threat of mouth odour nor the fear of an ordained curse would prevent him from dissociating his message from that which our subject symbolizes.
The other, a murderer who sees mythic visions of deceit laid “frank” claims of an election after a careful study of popular opinions in both local and foreign media. Had Nigeria not been a country where ruinous impunity hold sway, a character who ordinarily should be confronted with an option of either the electric chair or solitary confinement would not be running his mouth under the garb of the Holy Ghost.
How one is able to situate the gospel of halitosis and tuberculosis with that of a personality like Rick Warren is what amazes me. The latter, an award winning author whose work earned him international acclamation, with at least 10 million copies sold a month could not have preached the same gospel the witch exorcists preach!
Rick Warren on becoming a billionaire through the sale of his book, the purpose driven life decided he was not going to spend the money on himself. He neither changed his car, house, nor bought a private jet under the deluding premise of preaching the gospel. Instead,—like Jesus and unlike Nigerian GOs, prophets and bishops—he added and returned the salaries the church had paid him for three decades, started three foundations to combat illiteracy, malaria, HIV/AIDS and other major diseases across the world, with Africa benefiting immensely from them. There are hundreds of mosquito nets in Ota, thousands of anti-retroviral drugs in Vandekia, millions of lives touched across the length and breadth of the world via the generosity and Christ-like path chosen by the Saddleback preacher.
How many people read the bland, colourless books these so called GOs and bishops write? What about their olive oils, who buys them, Ijabla Raymond? What personal businesses do they have to have warranted their expensive lifestyles? What personal contributions are they having on humanity? Is it not an act of gross wickedness that supposedly religious leaders own private jets in a society where 120 million people earn less than N300 per day? What goes on in the minds of these acclaimed men of God each time they see on their television sets victims of Boko Haram, or teachers in Kwara who got their last salary 13 months ago?
And at least $2m goes to servicing the least of these instruments of flamboyance? The heart of man, dear brothers and sisters, is without doubt, wicked!
Let these charlatans and their blind louts shut their mouths until they inform us of the true owner of the gospel they claim to preach; certainly it’s not that of Jesus. This is why Nigerian Christians have the mandate to take back their religion from the hands of these businessmen. The adherents at the other end have been able to do that to an appreciable extent, a reason why it has remained a possibility for an elephant to pass through a needle than for an Imam or Alfa to own a private jet!
Until genuine Christians begin to speak and act against this opulence and spiritual charlatanry, shabby characters will continue to infect the noble teaching of Christ with halitosis and tuberculosis.
Modiu Olaguro writes from Lagos. You can reach him at [email protected]
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