The use and manipulation of religion is big business in Nigeria. Sometimes people that worship “objects” that no one can explain are the first to “buy” religious fight. Some that have not seen the four walls of a church or Mosque in a decade are sometimes the first to shout religious persecution over some policies and programmes of government. Some of them will not study and digest the policies before taking a position. Some of them have fixed positions and remain within the confines and ambit of those fixes positions. These religious merchants, manipulators and entrepreneurs do the same with ethnicity.
They incorporate and run businesses with people from different and varying ethnic backgrounds. They firm out their sons and daughters to their friends from different ethnic backgrounds. They sit in the boards of big corporations with people from different ethnic groupings.
They steal money together, manipulate the economy together and are in the same political groupings with people from different ethnic groups and do not see anything wrong or untoward in what they are doing.
So, when it comes to their economic and filial interests, religion and ethnicity are secondary. While these religious merchants and entrepreneurs continue their business relationships, some of them will not fail to remind the ordinary people of Nigeria that we are religiously and ethnically different. Some of them try to replace the clerics in finding scriptural justification for our religious and ethnic differences. This they do because ethnicity and religion provide a veritable anchor for their staying power and since some of our people for various reasons are vulnerable in matters of ethnicity and religion, they are easily persuaded by some of these political jobbers that want to keep the ordinary people perpetually apart.
Unfortunately, when some members of the ruling elite want to steal, they steal together and when they are caught they plead ethnicity and religion.
They steal on behalf of their ethnic and religious groups and you cannot find any tangible thing they have done in their communities with the funds they stole on their behalf. Yet, when a matter involves religion, they are the first to jump into the fray. I have said it before; I do not trust the Nigerian political elite in matters concerning religion. When some of them pretend to want to regulate religion in our national life, they do it for selfish political reasons and purposes.
I am not sure that the ordinary people of this country started state sponsorship of pilgrimages. Yet the issue of state sponsorship of pilgrimages is big business. In some states, the states grind to a halt when it is time for pilgrimage.
The state simply empties out and even some of the courts adjourn themselves indefinitely pending the conclusion of pilgrimages. We also have situations where the scarce resources of the State are used in importing all sorts of pastors and religious people for one form of Christmas carol or crusade. And yet the State and their functionaries pretend not to have anything to do with religion. Just watch the public outing of some of the Governors and political leaders. Some of them are choristers and compete favourably with modern televangelists.
Some of them won’t pay salaries and use false religious piety to hold the people down. Some of them will not start any programme without calling their Commissioners and Special Advisers with special skills in religious matters to lead in prayer. Some of the Governors, Ministers, Commissioners, Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Government Agencies govern and do their work based on the advice and direction of their spiritualists.
That is why some of them do bizarre things that defy logic and commonsense. But the truth of the matter is that some of them deploy dangerous arsenal in the name of religion and end up giving religion a bad name. Two events at the 2014 National Conference convinced me that we should look elsewhere for the challenges of our nationhood and that religion may not be the source of our problem. The management of the 2014 National Conference divided the issues for deliberation and set up 20 Committees and asked delegates to indicate in which group they wanted to serve.
We had Committees on Foreign Policy and Diaspora Matters; Politics and Governance; Citizenship, Immigration and Related Matters; Political Restructuring and Forms of Government; Land Tenure Matters and National Boundaries; Public Service; Energy; Civil Society, Labour, Youth and Sports; Social Sector; National Security; Law, Judiciary, Human Rights and Legal Reforms; Political Parties and Electoral Matters and the Committee on Religion among other Committees.
For some inexplicable and understandable reasons, the Committee on Politics and Governance and that of Political Restructuring and Forms of Government had the highest number of volunteers while the Committee on Religion had the least volunteers. At the end, the management of the National Conference forcefully grafted some of the delegates to the Committee on Religion.
Some of the delegates that got to the National Conference on religious platforms refused to serve in the Committee on Religion. Of course, the Government gave generous slots to the Christian Association of Nigeria and the Jammatu Nasir Islam at the 2014 National Conference. We also had the National Council of Traditional Rulers of Nigeria, Elder Statesmen and sociopolitical/ cultural organisations at the National Conference.
The second issue relates to the consideration of the Report of the Committee on Religion. Given its explosive character, one expected that the Report of the Committee will be subjected to forensic examination and may lead to stampede at the National Conference. Somehow, for reasons best known to religious merchants and manipulators, the Report of the Committee passed the crucible of the National Conference without rancour.
Even my proposal that government funds should no longer be used in organizing crusades was shot down effortlessly. It is a combination of all these that makes people suspicious of any attempt by the State and its functionaries to regulate religion or religious preaching’s and practices. Government and its functionaries can easily misuse and manipulate such ventures and it is self evident in our national life.
In listing the dimensions of religious discrimination and prejudices, the 2014 National Conference Committee on Religion agreed that “central to the issue of religious harmony in Nigeria is the elimination of religious discriminations and prejudices.
In order to do justice to the mandate of the Committee it was agreed to list and analyze the various dimensions of religious discrimination and prejudices which are prevalent in Nigeria.
The following were identified: Discrimination in granting of land for places of worship and cemeteries; discrimination over opportunities to education; discrimination in employment, promotion and admission; pilgrimage sponsorship; infringement on right to religious attire and symbols; deprivation of access to religious studies and instructions in public educational institutions; religious hate speeches and sermons; religiously partisan public policies; discrimination against religious minorities; destruction and desecration of places of worship; discrimination in the compensation of victims of religious violence; unequal access to media for all religious faiths; forceful conversion and persecution of religious converts; denial of access to appropriate courts; and discriminatory public holidays”
Rather than promulgate a law and domicile extraordinary powers in the hands of State Governors and their security advisers, it will be in the interest of justice and equity and Nigerian democracy to adopt the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference wherein it recommended “the establishment of an independent RELIGIOUS EQUITY COMMISSION (RECOM) with branches in every state of the Federation with statutory mandate which inter alia includes advocacy, enforcement of constitutional religious right.
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