God Will Not Help Nigeria Until... (3)

For the more theological, a rare attribute among evangelicals, a plausible explanation might be that God has no hand in the state of the country as those who are destroying it have the benefit of free will. In that case, why pray to God at all to help the country if he would not affect, for better or worse, what a large group of thieves are doing to the country? Why not rely on the political robbers' free will to turn over a new leaf? 

What can be achieved intellectually with the handmaiden of God – or that bendy synonym for God, religion? With the best will in the world, maybe something. Religious inspiration might produce a passionate apologist like C.S. Lewis and his charming books, which make significant efforts to simplify (and amplify) belief but only succeed in doing the good old thing: preaching to the converted. In Nigeria, where there is no such scribal religioneer as Lewis, religious genius only produces prosperity tracts and one-dimensional manuals prolifically written by General Overseers. The sum of human knowledge and advances is mainly secular. A physicist would find it easier to explore the genealogy of the universe if he did not believe that someone, or something, created it four, five or six thousand years ago. Indeed, many of the Christians in the developed world no longer take very seriously the fable that God made the first man and woman from dust, but in a country like Nigeria where the religion was passed to us second-hand – if not third-hand – with instructions to take everything we were told in good faith, scores of years later most people still bear in their heads this blissful yarn and other tall tales from the presumably unimpeachable source called the Bible – and the Qur’an.

The identification of religion as innate in the African is a stereotype about which Africans themselves seem to rejoice. Among the Nigerian evangelicals, for instance, there is now a thrill of entitlement that they are heir to the deed of ownership of Christendom, supposedly abandoned and left fallow by its European owners. But if religion is a good, sweet thing, as it is assumed to be, then we appear to be having too much of it, and too much of anything, as everyone knows, is not a good thing. A hangover or constipation may be the price to pay - and confusion. This is why I don’t think there is anything anyone can do about the May God help us mantra that we often repeat. Bandying God’s name is a function of a deep-seated and misguided metaphysics of a society steeped in the daily ritual of petty religiosities, a society that has psyched itself to the specious seductions of revelation and belief. I almost always sympathise with those who end their articles or speeches with May God help us because I see it as another way of saying I give up on Nigeria. Here, God is a weasel word, a verbal cop-out, a grand elaborate waffle.

Possibly, it was taken more seriously and less ironically when early Nigerian statesmen were saying the same thing. I read the beautifully written essays and memoirs of a late politician and leader. I was marvelled – rather staggered – by how many times he alludes to God, how many times he offers up to God, making out God as the ultimate judge, the resolver of the troubles simmering in Western Nigeria then, and I mean the Christian God because often such references are crutched by ‘Our Lord Jesus’. I refer to this because I believe the current Godfest can be traced to those days when not even a single one of Nigerian premier statesmen thought of rejecting the religion of the coloniser, the tool the coloniser had used to entrench herself. But parading oneself as a Christian was about prestige as much as being a brainwashed necessity; it was about being ‘in’, about moral gentrification. To belong in the patrimony of the elite club left by the colonialists, being a gentle, educated Christian was a requirement.

How sweet it would have been if there were one or two freethinking mavericks among those men who came after the colonisers. Although that was what Nkrumah set himself up to be in Ghana, I am not sure his ‘scientism’ has trickled down to those living in the country today – most Ghanaians are as superstitiously gospelled-up as Nigerians, if not more so, according to a recent poll which puts Ghanaians atop countries in which people profess one religion or the other. Did their late president, John Atta-Mills, not depend on ‘Prophet’ T B Joshua to ensure or foretell ex-cathedra that he would be elected Ghanaian leader? He had to return to ‘Synagogue’ Church for thanksgiving, and this was a university lecturer from whom one should expect a degree of reasoned detachment. One wonders whether Joshua was able to predict the passing of Attah Mills as he self-puffingly credited himself for predicting the death of another African leader, the Malawian president, Bingu Wa Mutharika (here is how I put it in May, two months before the Ghanaian president died: ‘I wonder whether the pastor, who has variously been accused of sorcery, was able to foresee any Macbethal sting in the tail of the Ghanaian presidential good tidings.’)   

As a matter of fact, I don’t think it would have mattered today whether Nigeria’s old politicians were deep-dyed atheists or fire-belching ‘heathens’. Evangelical Christianity is like a raging idea whose epoch has dawned on Africa, Africa’s own great, if not brave, new world. This would not be out of place if it was not so mistimed, trendy, and thoroughpaced in its spread. I see this as no more than a consolation for limitations. In most modern societies, some do find religion interesting. Many do not. But in the 21^st century, it seems everyone in a community of tens of millions sees religion as something so important that they even think a god is going perform every sort of miracle in their lives or that religion is the most important thing in their lives, when religion becomes the ruling ethos, then there is a problem. 
On a large scale, the problem may be an inability to take on more challenging things. Although there may be religious magians with a talent for ‘miracles’ or theologians who would go out of their way to rationalise religion and God, and even people may find comfort, real or make-believe, in both, there is something essentially simple-minded and can’t-do about a society for whom the two things are seamlessly, even exclusively, important. For instance, however gifted you may be, if you spend most of the time reading the Bible, literally taking to heart that God created the world in six days several thousand years ago, there is no way you will accept, even closely access, cosmology or evolutionary biology, the sort of attitude that is displayed by some fringe American pseudoscientists who built a virtual museum where humans and dinosaurs live together. If you believe man was made from dust or clay by some god or the other, there is no way you will be able to create artificial life in your laboratory. If you believe – with the monomania that evangelicals display – that the Bible (or the Koran) is the only book worth reading, there is no way you will be able to parse the difference between Homer’s and James Joyce’s Ulysses. There is no way you will discover the poetry, the élan, of both books. The greater risk of overimmersion in several unguents and the befuddling incense of religion is the poverty of intellect.

Even then, God may very well decide to help Nigeria. Since he is ‘omnipotent’, this is not beyond the realm of probability. We may all wake up one day to discover that a miraculous Passover-like operation has occurred during the night. Now, not the firstborns of those who have plundered our wealth will be wiped out, but the culprits themselves and their often accessorial spouses. There will be an ethicide of old-testament proportions, a pestilential clear-out that will sweep away tens of thousands of political fat cats, incumbent and past office-holders, presidents, governors, senators, soldiers, rep-men and women, council chairpersons, contractors, hangers-on and various parasites. We may discover that the good Lord has let abroad his angels with flaming swords and that under cover of darkness, the men and women feeding on Nigeria’s expansive open sore like leeches and maggots have been cut down, bar none. On the morning after such wholesale immolation, we, the ‘sinless’, shall appreciate it more if there is a vast 3D screen hanging somewhere from the clouds on which all the despoilers can be seen toasting in the fieriest corner of hell or how they are struggling to squeeze themselves through the eye of a needle, to enter heaven. Only then will I be willing to accept that God has decided to help Nigeria and make Nigeria a model of providential favour. Then I may be tempted to finish everything I write or say with May God help us.