Reading this title alone gives you some specific religious imagery. The ideas of spirituality and redemption are two key issues that are fundamental to, especially, the Islamic and Christian religions in Nigeria. Both religions believe firmly in the cultivation of spiritual virtues that have the capacity to enhance a person’s chances of gaining heaven. While Islam holds firmly to the redemptive possibility inherent in adhering to deeply spiritual practices, like fasting during the Ramadan month, Christianity believes in the redemptive power in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Both religions also hold firmly to the capacity that a redeemed person has to become a good citizen of any state. However, and contrary to the promises that these two religions hold for understanding an individual’s capacity to be a good person, Christianity and Islam have both contributed to Nigeria postcolonial predicament. One of the factors making it impossible for Nigeria to achieve national integration, since it gained independence in 1960, is religion and religious fundamentalism.

One can say categorically that the Nigerian state is inscribed within a religious imagination which stands contrary to the religious crisis it is going through. Religious symbolisms are scattered in Nigeria’s national imagination. Even though the constitution states that there shall not be any state religion, the national anthem and the national pledge invoke the name of God, consecutive Nigerian leaders, from the presidency to the state level, are usually found in league with religious leaders and in religious places of worship; and prayers are often said at national functions. Yet, and since its emergence from colonial calculation, Nigeria has had to keep contending with the virulence of religious crisis. This began from the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates of Nigeria in 1914 which laid the foundation of a serious ethno-religious postcolonial crisis whose enormity we are just experiencing at the moment, especially with the Maitasine crisis of the early 1980s, the Boko Haram insurgency, and most significantly with the interpretation of electoral possibilities and administrative efficiency in ethno-religious terms.

At a much more fundamental level, fundamental, that is, to the efficient running of the Nigerian state as administrative machinery for transforming the lives of Nigerians, religious crisis translates fundamentally into a framework of inefficiency and stagnation. This is because religious practices creep into the workplaces in very insidious ways that mark the beginning of administrative and institutional dysfunctions. In other words, religious fundamentalism also becomes a part of the factor that has contributed to the inefficiency of the public service in Nigeria.   Since the citizens have perceived the government as being absent in their lives, and hence they have no investment in its activities, it becomes possible and even meaningful for them to translate government time into religious time. Thus, a worker in a government agency does not find it illogical to come late to the office because he or she had to attend a morning prayer meeting. An entire sector of an MDA could be involved in series of prayer meetings to facilitate the payment of arrears by the government. A cashier in an office in the pay office could keep customers waiting because he or she had to read the Bible or go to the mosque to pray. A director can equally refuse to see important visitors or attend meetings because of some religious functions. Thus, with the ascendancy of religiosity, efficiency in the public service had witness some dimension of decline. Religion further enhance the perception of government work as a sinecure, a place where one goes to just sign the register and then leave immediately to pursue some other productive responsibilities like evangelization!

The task of rethinking the institutional framework and dynamics of the public service, as the most efficient machinery for getting the Nigerian state to perform effectively, has been my forte for many years. and it has become increasingly clear to me for a long time that the public service suffers from a religious malaise that further complicates its optimal functionality in achieving an efficient service delivery that smoothly backstops Nigeria’s democratic governance experiment. In confronting this issue, one need engage necessarily with the attempt, in the literature, to separate religiosity from spirituality. In this regard, religiosity is blamed for all the negative sides of religious manifestations like terrorism, bad work ethic, religious rivalries and stereotyping, and so on. On the other hand, spirituality is taken to consist of the type of openness that sees all humans as one under God. Spirituality, that is, contrasts to the kind of absolute certainty which the Abrahamic religions holds that they are the sole custodian of the nature of God, and everyone else is an infidel. It is this type of fundamentalist dogmatism that gets others killed in the name of religion! Thus, the big vision of spirituality breaks down religious walls.

However, while we can concede that spirituality holds the ace in enabling us to achieve spiritual capital, we must be careful in throwing away religiosity. This is because being religious possesses a lot of substantive meaning for people, and especially Nigerians who are toiling under the burden of underdevelopment and suffering. While spirituality may be tending towards the abstract for most people, it is to religions and all its rituals and liturgies that people find succor and comfort in trying times. It is therefore safe to argue that while spirituality is intimately related to religion, religion does not define the whole essence of spirituality. In other words, you can be spiritual while being religious, and yet you can also be spiritual without being religious. I prefer to argue that religiosity and spirituality are mutually reinforcing dynamics. With this understanding, we can then begin the task of achieving the required spiritual capital—added to the other required political, social and generational capitals—that Nigeria urgently needs to rethink its postcolonial development realities.

Spiritual capital defines the entire body of spiritual insights, paradigms, axioms and dialogues that enable people with different and even seemingly incompatible faiths and religions to work together for a greater purpose. Modeling a development agenda founded on spiritual capital must begin from Nigeria’s understanding of its secular foundation and the requirement of ecumenism. Section 10 of the 199 Nigerian Constitution states boldly, even if not clearly, that the Nigerian state shall not have or profess any state religion. But that is as far as its claim to secularity goes. There is no stated philosophical reflections and legal contents as to the imperatives of secularity for the understanding of Nigeria. This is one of the reasons why it has been difficult for the Nigerian state to respond to severe challenges by its own constituents and even nonstate actors that challenge its supposedly secular basis. Thus, in 1999, Zamfara became the first state to test the bounds of Nigeria’s federalism and secularity when she instituted Sharia Islamic law as the official legal framework in the state.

On the other hand, ecumenism serves as a theoretical and practical points of engagement that allows several religions to relate with one another on non-conflictual but spiritual levels. The first leg in this ecumenical understanding is to define religion in terms of its most minimal content—as a framework of relationship between humans and the sacred that helps human beings to generate ideas of truth and of meaning necessary for coming to terms with their existence and with the necessity of social harmony. At this minimal level, we are on very safe grounds because each of the religions and their claims can be reduced to those values and ethos that enhance human relations—love, peace, unity, justice, tolerance, generosity, loyalty, dutifulness, hard work, and many more. The second leg of this ecumenical understanding is inter-faith or interreligious relationship. Interreligious dialogue essentially refers to the organized framework that facilitates encounters and negotiations between people coming from different religious worldviews and traditions. Interreligious dialogue differentiates between being knowledgeable about some other religious groups and their theological frameworks and dynamics, and being exposed to those other religious groups and their histories and traditions.

Religious conflicts happen because adherents of one religion assume either too little or too much about the other religions and their practices without any attempt at deliberately seeking dialogue and relationships. Spiritual capital is therefore founded on the imperative of all religions relating together because they all either stand or fall together if the Nigerian state continues to fail to make good on its developmental aspirations of making life better for Nigerians. Poverty and unemployment have no ethnic or religious affiliations. Those who are poor are equalized at the level of socioeconomic debasement that leaves out their religious or even theological beliefs. Yet, the greatest advantage of calibrating a framework of spiritual capital is that it provides a foundation around which the spiritual energies wasted in futile religious antagonisms are channeled into fruitful development relations, especially with the institutional and structural apparatuses of the Nigerian state in ways that enhances the aspirations of good governance. Imagine that a Christian and a Muslim working together would focus on the demands of the office rather than on the rivalry as to who should be the next director. Imagine that a Christian and a Muslim would both collaborate in fishing out all manifestations of bureaucratic corruption rather than perpetuating it.

The success of a framework of spiritual capital in Nigeria’s development reflection is hinged on an institutional reform of the existing inter-faith relationship. In 1999, the leaderships of the Christian and Islamic communities came together to form the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) to provide a platform for dialogue on religious conversation and discourse that would douse the religious tension and conflicts experienced everywhere across Nigeria. The challenge now is to integrate more institutional dynamics that will broaden NIREC’s capacity to midwife a religious crisis-free Nigeria. One useful way should be a curricula intervention. The elements of spiritual capital could properly be mainstreamed into the existing curriculum especially in Civic Education. This will serve as an elemental avenue for reaching into the impressionable minds of the Nigerian children and youth about the significant spiritual elements in all these relating religions which Nigeria critically require to forge ahead, and which in turn will rebound on the development capacity of the state to transform their lives.

One of the lasting influences of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) is to convince us that beneath all the rituals and liturgical paraphernalia of religions, we can find some definite spiritual capital that could be conducive to the developmental purposes of the modern state. At least, as he successfully argued, the protestant work ethic of frugality, hard work and investment led to the emergence of capitalism.

• Olaopa is Executive Vice-Chairman

Ibadan School of Government and Public

Policy (ISGPP), Ibadan

tolaopa2003@gmail.com

tolaopa@isgpp.com.ng

 

ON the face of it, Nigeria qualifies to be called an emerging democracy. We just celebrated 20 years of uninterrupted civil rule with transition from government to government facilitated by elections  no matter how flawed.

We have a functioning, albeit high maintenance, parliament in place and the wheels of justice keep grinding ever so slowly in the courts. Our citizens and media are relatively free to express opinion and disseminate information  even if the thin boundary between the hatred and fiction are breached with regularity.

Famous American political scientist Larry Diamond says a democratic order would consist of four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; protection of the human rights of all citizens; a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

While on the surface a structure with the façade of a democracy exists, the temperament of those who operate it is increasingly anything but democratic. A succession of recent events suggests that what is evolving, rather than being some home-grown variant of this system of governance, is a truer reflection of our innate need to dominate others as opposed to a ‘live and let live’ outlook.

Let begin with the recent elections. The European Union observer team at the polls just turned in a final report that was less than laudatory about our efforts. Everyone received flak: from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to political parties and security agencies.

The report spoke of widespread intimidation and sundry attempts to game the system. It estimated that in 150 persons lost their lives in the process.

Why would a process that is supposed to merely produce people who want to serve be so deadly? Yes, there are pecuniary and material advantages in an environment where public service has become the quickest route to staggering riches, but a greater reason is that no one wants to lose, or be sportsmanlike in defeat.

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Every election cycle is trailed by allegations of rigging because all sides are trying to outwit one another using underhand tactics. In a different environment the blatant cases of vote-buying and bald inducement of the electorate witnessed at the recent polls would land many in prison.

Fifty-eight odd years after independence the same claims of malpractice that dogged First Republic electoral processes are still making headlines today as the levels of desperation rise.

INEC reported this month that it had 1,689 court cases arising from the February-March elections. It budgeted N1.9 billion to fund legal fees as a slew of aggrieved candidates dragged it before the courts.

Most of these cases would ultimately be tossed out of court as lacking merit. But that has never deterred the ever litigious Nigerian politician who always hopes to secure on a legal technicality, what he could not earn freely through the ballot.

There’s no guarantee that those rushing to the courts would diminish in future elections. If anything, the allure of what public office offers would ensure that current numbers are eclipsed.

It is this level of desperation and lack of democratic temper that produced the kind of shock that trailed former President Good luck Jonathan’s decision to concede defeat in the tense 2015 contest. Four years one there are many who still flay him for conceding. After all, whoever heard of an incumbent president ceding power so meekly in these parts?

The concept of majority rule is inherent in any democratic culture but recently we’ve been seeing things turned on their heads in that unique Nigerian way. Back in 2015, the All Progressives Congress (APC) naively assumed that its majority in the National Assembly would automatically translate into its chosen candidates emerging as leaders.

They got a rude shock when Bukola Saraki aligned with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senators to install himself as Senate President. You could argue that a majority of senators elected him on inauguration day. In reality, however, he was beholden to the opposition as he couldn’t survive without their support. The minority had the whip hand over the so-called ‘majority.’

Four years spent chafing under this unorthodox arrangement had the APC leadership pulling out all stops to ensure that the majority had its way this time. But didn’t prevent the minority from trying to reprise the 2015 playbook.

The upshot was the ruling party was on tenterhooks in the last three months with Senators Ali Ndume and Danjuma Goje insisting on running in a race for which official candidates had been endorsed.

It was clear that their only chance of prevailing was against forging an alliance with the minority to rule over the majority. The threat of history repeating itself forced the APC’s anointed duo of Ahmed Lawan and Femi Gbajabiamila into a cross-country presidential style campaign for positions which they should have slipped into seamlessly going by established parliamentary traditions from around the globe.

But such is the deterioration of our democratic temperament that the leadership of the PDP didn’t see anything wrong in a minority making a play for power without a mandate. So much so that the former Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, again, threw his hat into the ring hoping for an encore.

The absurd game of numbers is also playing out in Bauchi and Edo States where a minority of lawmakers with the obvious backing of sympathetic governors have installed Speakers under very dodgy circumstances.

In Edo, nine legislators in a chamber of 24 persons chose the new helmsman. When the 15 others tried to meet elsewhere in the state capital, they were set upon by thugs and beaten to an inch of their lives. The last reports say they have fled to Abuja for refuge. Both sides are from the same APC.

A similar scenario is playing out in Bauchi State where 11 members in a parliament of 31 chose a Speaker as early as 7.00am on the day. By the time the majority arrived at 8.00am and discovered they had been served a fait accompli, they promptly elected their own Speaker  setting the stage for confusion of Babelian proportions in the assembly.

The drama in Edo and Bauchi is reminiscent of the days under former President Olusegun Obasanjo when five persons out of the 24-member Plateau State House of Assembly approved the ‘impeachment’ of then governor Joshua Dariye who the president was bent on removing from office.

More than 12 years after that infamous power play, we are still fooling around with manoeuvres that the courts have dismissed as illegal and unconstitutional.

Another recent action that leaves you questioning the democratic credentials of our politicians is the rush to sack duly elected local government chairmen. It a sin for which the APC and PDP are equally guilty. One of the first things Oyo State Governor, Seyi Makinde, did on assumption of office was to summarily dismiss the officials.

This move was replicated in Kwara by Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq  albeit with the pseudo-legal imprimatur of the state house of assembly. In Ogun State, the legislature suspended all local government administrations ostensibly to allow the governor effect some sort of probe of their activities.

It used to be that governors would on a whim fire the hapless chairmen. Now, some are hiding under the argument that assemblies with the power to make laws in their states had directed them to do so.

But the Supreme Court has since ruled that these state chief executives don’t have the powers they are exercising. In a December 2016 judgement it described as “executive recklessness” the act of dissolving democratically-elected local government councils in their states and replacing them with caretaker committees.

The court also nullified the provisions of the laws enacted by the states’ Houses of Assembly empowering governors to carry out such dissolution and replace them with caretaker committees.

More than two years after that judgment state governors are still carrying on like omnipotent, all-conquering military rulers with authority to annul mandates received from the electorate. Whatever legal grounds they were standing on to act in this way, was taken away by the December 2016 judgment.

Just as the president cannot just sack a governor, any state executive removing local government chiefs illegally is skating on thin ice.

The sole reason they oust these officials arbitrarily is that many governors are insecure; they cannot abide the opposition exercising power at such a strategic level. The sheer need to control power absolutely then pushes them into acting illegally  knowing full well that justice would not be served promptly.

No democracy can exist and thrive without respect for the rule of law. The same governors who would at one point or the other be looking at the Supreme Court for succour, should show that they are democrats by respecting the existing judgments of the apex court.

One of the greatest attributes of a democracy is the acceptance that people can differ without descending into hatred. In the last four years the tenor of public discourse has deteriorated. It is almost impossible now to have a civil political discussion without it becoming an exchange of bile and name-calling.

We have become so trapped in our partisan prisons with each side uninterested in enlightenment; only bent on winning the argument. This mind-set drives people to want to win at all cost and when they lose it’s like the world has come to an end.

Democrats are not all-knowing. They respect the other side who are only opponents and not necessarily foes. They understand that you win some and lose some. Today’s opposition can ascend to power tomorrow.

Nigeria’s faces a myriad of troubles that require urgent solutions. We need more democrats who can reach across the divide in a bi-partisan way to resolve them. We can do with fewer of the army of flamethrowers out there.

It’s been a week of celebrating a moment in time when a nation known mostly for the negative, showed that it is possible for it to rise above its primordial divisions.

It was also a week devoted to naming and shaming the cast of villains who ensured that the glimmer of light that shone so brightly on June 12, 1993, was ruthlessly snuffed out.

Everyone has been talking. Kola, the normally media-shy first son of the acclaimed winner of the polls Chief M.K.O. Abiola, in a newspaper interview spoke of a ‘complex conspiracy’ against his father.

He was stating the obvious because, for different reasons, certain individuals in the then military hierarchy and civilian power elite were not comfortable with the prospect of Abiola becoming president.

Over the last 26 years since that dark day when the result of the presidential election was annulled, Ibrahim Babangida who as military president signed off on the infamous action, has borne the bulk of the opprobrium.

As Head of State the buck stopped at his table. But the decision was a collective one taken by the then ruling military council over which he was head. Whichever way he was inclined on the matter, there were powerful voices in that dark, mysterious conclave who were bitterly opposed to Abiola.

Many years after the annulment, Babangida was quoted by confidants as suggesting that had he not played along, his own life was in danger.

Unfortunately, there are no tapes or records of the meetings where the decision to cancel the election results was taken: nothing for the public or historians to review to know the roles played by certain individuals who later went on to become powerful players in the civilian democratic dispensations that followed.

So traumatised was one key player in the saga – Professor Humphrey Nwosu then chairman of the defunct National Electoral Commission (NEC) – who superintended what has now come to be accepted as one of the freest and fairest of elections in Nigerian history, that for over two decades he has been on a virtual vow of silence.

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Not a word from him giving us an inkling of what played out in those tense hours and days. Not a peep into what transpired between him and the military hierarchy in the days before and after June 12, 1993. Perhaps there are reasons grave enough for the poor man to have kept silent for 26 years. He may yet go to his grave with his secrets.

But what Babangida, Nwosu and others have refused to say, a motley collection of ‘insiders’ have been regaling us all week with tales of what happened and outing all the villains who plotted the annulment or worked against the actualisation of the truncated mandate.

You would have expected that it would a Babangida-bashing fest. It didn’t turn out that way. Maybe his critics are sated after what they have been dishing out to him for more than 20 years.

In his place, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has been at the receiving end of vitriolic attacks. Some are offended that he couldn’t bring himself to honour Abiola – his kinsman – leaving it to a Northerner and another former military dictator to do so.

But the most intriguing of the attacks has come from Abiola’s erstwhile running mate Babagana Kingibe, who declared that the former president had foreknowledge of the annulment and did his level best to frustrate all talk about revalidation.

There is no question that Obasanjo for reasons best known to him was never too enamoured of Abiola’s bid for political power. At some point, disgusted with the giddy way Nigerians were falling for the charms of the late businessman on the campaign trail, he declared dismissively that the candidate was not the messiah Nigerians had been waiting for.

The voters thought otherwise, delivering over 60% of their votes to his then Social Democratic Party (SDP) ticket. Despite labouring under the burden of a Muslim-Muslim ticket he won in most zones of the country. Where he didn’t overrun the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) candidate, Bashir Tofa, he comfortably secured the required percentage of votes to be elected.

But Obasanjo was just like many others in the Nigerian power elite – everyone had an agenda in the aftermath of the June 12 tragedy. Many who never wanted Abiola were only too keen for the country ‘to move forward’ – even if that meant Ernest Shonekan’s short-lived Interim National Government (ING) or the soon-to-follow full-blown Sani Abacha dictatorship.

They never believed that actualisation of the mandate was possible, neither did they expect that the fight for it would trigger the political fallout that eventually led to power shift to the South.

So against this backdrop, even without fuller details of what he did or didn’t do, Obasanjo deserves to be categorised with the villains.

If the former president was so bad, where do we put Kingibe who is today passing judgment on him? He was attached to Abiola at the hip on his party’s ticket. If they had made it to office and anything had happened to his principal, he would have automatically become president.

You would have expected that a man in his position would have been more enthusiastic in embracing the fight for actualisation. But he was at best lukewarm, if not even cold. At the first opportunity he jumped ship. The election was in June, by November 1993 he was already in Abacha’s cabinet!

Nigerians should ask Babagana Kingibe where he was on the day Abiola was arrested and taken into custody. He was with the very people who had come to bury his mandate; he embraced them.

One of the most shocking and demoralising developments in the struggle to actualise June 12 was his decision to serve the Abacha junta as Foreign Minister. Kingibe gladly abandoned his right for a mess of pottage offered by the soldiers. By agreeing to serve that regime he became a pallbearer at the funeral for Nigeria’s special electoral moment.

With this history, it is amazing that without any sense of awkwardness or embarrassment he quickly accepted the national honour offered to him for the June 12 election outcome by the Buhari administration. The decent thing would have been for him to graciously decline having renounced the struggle for actualisation.

Today, without any sense of irony, he’s the one naming and shaming ‘villains’! Only in Nigeria! Obasanjo for all his faults was an outsider looking in. Kingibe was part and parcel of a ticket that received an unprecedented pan-Nigerian mandate.

He sold out to those who stole what was rightfully his. He chose to cooperate with them while Abiola who picked him over others was incarcerated. There never was a worse case of the pot calling the kettle black.