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A couple of years ago, I wrote a long essay entitled God Will Not Help Nigeria Until..., a secular-humanist reason-fest (the religious would call it reason-rant). But, for reasons I explain in my new book, Schopenhauer’s Child, I put the essay in cold storage. At first, I wanted to use it as an epilogue to the text. However, I thought it did not add anything to the book; it would be superfluous. In a relative sense, the essay is long, beyond the limits of a mere op-ed, so I have decided to carve it into three parts. The parts will be published here in my blog.

     But, before then, I will reproduce the first two paragraphs of my book here to give the reader a hint of why the article, although concluded, was put in abeyance.

I finished writing the essay and went through it a few times before the news came that my sister had cancer and that it may have metastasised. During the weeks before and after the diagnosis, gradually, it was borne in on me how, in the most desperate moments, fear, superstition, sentimentality and doubt might easily insinuate themselves into the head of someone who prided himself on being deeply imbued with the sensibilities of freethought, ruffle the limpid calm of someone who saw such old ‘humane’ disciplines as philosophy and literature, and a latter one like psychology, as consolations. With the least pomposity and arrogance, I imagined I had risen somewhat above being a blind and shackled captive to at least the first three of the quartet of emotions. As a self-confirmed agnostic, doubt is a given, a necessary quirk; it is my moral business end. But, after the diagnosis, for six weeks before Adejoke finally succumbed, doubt and a reasonable dollop of fear had pre-empted other emotions.

The essay had nothing to do with cancer. It was one of the occasional secular-minded arguments I set out on a website. It had nothing to do with death either, which might have brought on the unease, the fey underfeeling, that such an article would translate into prescience if my sister’s illness ended tragically. The essay, inordinately lengthy and idiosyncratic, was entitled God Will Not Help Nigeria Until… Like most of my articles about religion, God and the eminently godly population of my country of birth, this was written with some degree of petulance – not anger, not condescension. But then, any time I decided to write about undue religiosity among Nigerians, some impassioned truth-crunching, a bit of philosophe-like preening, helplessness, and even playful irony always found their way into it. The essay’s argument was simple: the title was a quibble. The conclusion was that God – who had momentarily put me in the mind of Samuel Beckett’s Godot, which, or who, probably has nothing to do with God – would certainly not help the country, nor any country for that matter. And why would I stop myself sending out such an article before I even knew my sister was seriously ill?

In the first chapter of Schopenhauer's Child, I endeavoured to explain why I did not go ahead to publish the essay. And dear reader, do not try to extrapolate anything from the above passages. Buy the book when it becomes available.