The 'God Factor.'

Olusegun Obasanjo, former Nigerian president, reveals in his overly God-slathered book, My Watch, that the grounds of Aso Rock where Nigeria's presidential residence is situated, have all of four mosques and two churchlets, otherwise called chapels. It was one churchlet to four mosques but when Obasanjo got there, like a kind of retro-Levite, he said to himself: 'In the name of the Lord we Christians will not be outmatched here.' So, he built yet another Christian praying house. After Obasanjo, the state house has been tenanted by two presidents. The Muslim Yar Adua may have added yet another mosque before he died, and the ever-kneeling, equally God-proud Goodluck Jonathan may have tried to raise the tally of churchlets in the state house. Even if the statistic remains the four mosques and churchlets that Obasanjo left, six places of religious worship in the abode of the Nigerian president are still alarming. What is the point of four mosques and two chuchlets on the grounds of the so-called villa?

Constitutionally speaking, Nigeria is a secular country, and there shouldn't be any monument to religion in the president's estate or, if any, there should be balance. Or, if for the convenience of the distinguished tenured guest of that rarefied space, a church and a mosque were built - six of one and half a dozen of the other, if you ask me - then there should also be shrines to Ogun, Amadioha, Olokun and the thousands of deities that populate Nigeria's ethnic enclaves. After all, Obasanjo, who now struts around as a born-again Christian, was a self-proclaimed 'traditionalist' in his first coming as head of state; he even advocated the use of juju and voodoo as the sole armament against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Doesn't this again show how Africa has lost its way - honeycombing the so-called presidential villa and its surround with 6 sancta of foreign religions in one of the most important countries on the continent?

I am irreligious in every sense of the word, so I do not have any time for 'African religions' either; their shrines or altars should also not have any place in the government house. Okay, maybe a fire-belching, hawk-eyed head of Sango installed in a shrine would be better than the hypocrisy and the cultural mimicry inherent in building churchlets and mosques. If the presidents are superstitious enough to believe in a foreign god and build many shrines to it (taking cognisance of the fact that Allah and Yahweh are indeed Tweedledee and Tweedledum), it might not be beyond them to impute the powers of a purveyor of 'retributive justice' and sulphurous punishment to Sango like Obasanjo once did.
One has to read Obasanjo's book to know how fixated he is with what he describes as the G-factor or God factor: parrotlike he repeats God, sings God, snorts God, burps God, spews God, bloviates God, spits God, farts God, he blusters and bullshits with God, the portly former president of Nigeria sweats God from every pore of his Sir Toby Belch-like frame. The word 'God' is repeated in the book several hundred times, so much so that what Obasanjo calls the God factor I'd call 'God complex,' a kind of Freudian-Oedipal over-attachment to his 'heavenly father'. The project of making Mr Adeboye the Billy Graham of the Nigerian polity began with Obasanjo and peaked with lame-duck Mr Goodluck Jonathan, who used every opportunity during his presidency to kneel before the all but pontificated pastor, seeking some kind of benediction or 'favour.'
Now, I don't have any problem with anyone following whatever religion they like or namechecking God as many times as they want. I could easily stop and get on with something else if I felt too irritated by Obasanjo's life story. But I had to keep on plodding through the man's 1,000-page ego-trip out of curiosity and because of what I had gleaned from a couple of his earlier books: an attempt to reconfigure Nigerian history not only from his sometimes insightful perspective but also in his own self-adulatory image - although by all appearances this last tome may have been ghosted by any number of hacks. 
As I pointed out above, the presidents are only tenant-occupiers of the state house, and I think there is a certain satire, if not an absurdity, to the way the men are ingathering mosques and churchlets in (and around) their taxpayer-supported grace-and-favour residence. Beyond satire, it is simply lamentable. All right, there are worse ways to squander Nigeria's money than scattering religious follies around the presidential compound, but this is still evidence of the lack of accountability and the civic irresponsibility which drives decision-making in that country. In a saner secular state, building a single place of religious worship would call for debate, consensus and compromise. Niceties like the separation of religion and state have no place in a superstition-laden society like Nigeria. But this bombastic business of interplanting mosques and churchlets in every free soil of Aso Rock is very much symptomatic of the 'belief' and 'faith' meme which has eaten into the very core of our being. I shouldn't be surprised that Aso Rock boasts six Abrahamic temples, or even sixty; this is a reflection of how the whole society has tatted itself up in pious vestments; it is indicative of the collective religiose monomania that has taken root in the country. Would I be miffed if I heard that the president's living quarters had all of six libraries and/or reading-cum-quiet rooms? Yes, as I might argue, that six were too many - more so with the likelihood that they were underused. Even then, I would still feel better that the rooms and spaces were devoted to something more worthwhile than being shrines to the 'invisible man' whose more thoughtful worshippers now argue might not be resident in the sky after all but might be some kind of 'spirit' or 'presence' or whatever.