Religion without humanity

A mobile policeman shot and killed a truck driver on Creek Road in the port city of Apapa, Lagos on Wednesday. The unconfirmed story was that the policeman was angered by the truck driver’s refusal to give money demanded. Seeing the result of his uncontrolled anger, the policeman took refuge in a nearby bank.

To avenge the death of their fellow, irate truck drivers, joined by ever-ready Lagos hoodlums, mobilised to the bank to demand that the trigger-happy policeman be handed over to them. When their request was turned down by security forces attached to the bank, they beset the bank, gathered disused tyres and set the bank building ablaze, specifically targeting air-conditioners and ATM counters. Not done, they also set ablaze another nearby bank and also attempted to molest bank staff and customers. It was only the arrival of policemen from Area ‘B’ Police Command and soldiers that quelled the situation. Bank staff were promptly evacuated.

The killer mobile policeman, the rioting tanker drivers and the hoodlums all certainly profess one form of religious belief or the other. Typically, since they are Nigerians, each of them would either be a Muslim, a Christian or an adherent of a traditional religion.

As we got into Apapa that day, we heard several gunshots. The story was that the security forces fired shots into the air to scare away those angling to loot cash from the burning banks. Those would-be looters would be either Christians, traditional worshippers or Muslims.

Every now and then a fully-loaded truck or tanker trips and falls while struggling through our dilapidated death-traps, spilling its contents – say, bags of cement, cans of drinks, petroleum products, etc already paid for by someone like us – and our compatriots, rather than offer help, descend on the spilled contents and begin to loot. Those looters profess one religious belief or the other. The other looters – those in government who have ensured that these roads remain dilapidated by embezzling funds meant for road construction/repair – also profess religious beliefs.

Same scenario obtains in accident scenes, be they road or air. Human beings who should sympathise or work to save lives actually steal from the dead. Some take snapshots of these scenes and share on social media while fellow human beings writhe in agony. How can they play the Good Samaritan? Are they from Samaria?

Hit-and-run drivers, pick-pockets, ritual killers, treasury looters in Abuja and state government houses, armed robbers and all other criminals adhere to some religion. Suicide bombers do it in the name of religion.

Nigerians are a highly religious people. We pray at every event/meeting – opening prayer, closing prayer. When there is economic or political crisis, as now, our politicians who brought the woes upon us in the first place ask us to pray. I’m sure no researcher has been able to document the number of churches in the entire country. Not even Christian Association of Nigeria can give you that number, reason being that new churches seem to spring up on an hourly basis.

Christianity is today one of Nigeria’s major exports to the world. Mosques are springing up in the most unexpected places, even as the debate rages whether there are more Muslims than Christians in the country or vice-versa. The traditional shrines, despite decades of onslaught on them by invading foreign religions, have refused to die off. The only thing that uproots them these days are developmental projects in rural communities. But all of these to what effect?

“Religion without sacrifice” is one of the Seven Social Sins published by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in his weekly newspaper Young India on October 22, 1925. Others are “Wealth without work”, “Pleasure without conscience”, “Knowledge without character”, “Commerce without morality”, “Science without humanity”, and “Politics without principle”. What exists in Nigeria today is religion without humanity.

Traditional African societies were mostly known for communal living. Everyone looked out for everyone else. Perhaps the problem is with the foreign religions – or the model brought to us. Of course, all the European countries that engaged in the obnoxious trade in slaves and colonialism in Africa were Christian. Indeed, some historians contend that Christian missionaries were as much part of the colonising forces in Africa as were explorers, traders, and soldiers. And they never applied humanity or conscience when the imperial interests of their home countries were involved.

Hypocrisy was a key word. In the Brass area of modern-day Nigeria in the 1880s, for example, while George Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company held monopolistic sway, emasculating the local people economically and driving them out of business, the missionaries looked away. The Brass people complained about the “iniquity, oppression and injustice” embodied in the RNC, saying to the missionaries, “You be all white people, you missionary preach one thing and the Company do the other.” But the missionaries told them to pray to God who could remove the difficulties in his own good time and way.

E. A. Ayandele, in his chapter contribution to Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Ibadan: University Press,1966) edited by J. C. Anene and G. Brown, sums up this hypocrisy thus, “He preached equality of all men before God but in the church he was frequently the imperious master; he emphasized the spiritual danger of the faithful converts laying up for themselves treasures in this world, but at the same time the missionaries’ ‘brothers’, traders, concentrated on earthly prosperity, often at the African’s expense; the missionary preached against the sinfulness of drunkenness, but the Africans saw themselves being compelled to exchange their oil and elephant’s teeth mostly for exciting spirits.”

It is perhaps this religion without humanity that is fuelling the growing scepticism in the minds of many young Nigerians who are constantly questioning the relevance of religion and tending towards atheism. But religion can remain a positive force in society if only adherents of the various faiths could live by the tenets they profess.

 

CHUKS OLUIGBO