Pushing the problems of Nigeria on God may be a cheap test of the faith of members of the public.
When Nigeria obtained independence in 1960, the consensus among leaders was that Nigeria was the result of human construction, hence, the various constitutional conferences that culminated in the Republican Constitution of 1963. Nobody, not Frederick Lugard, Ahmadu Bello, Obafemi Awolowo, and Nnamdi Azikiwe called Nigeria a creation of God. It was not common in the world at that time to pass the buck of poor or good architecture to God, as many highly placed leaders tend to do these days. To reinforce the status quo, political and cultural leaders have had for too long the tendency to make claims that are not realistic or rational, namely that it is God who created Nigeria, implying, in effect, that nobody should do or say anything that challenges God’s design.
President Buhari’s recent exchange with Pastor Kumuyi is not the first of such message from the top echelon of political or cultural power in the country. The intention of today’s piece is not to challenge the right of President Buhari to proclaim that God put the various nationalities in Nigeria, but to discuss the implications of such statements to citizens’ understanding of the complexity of the problem facing the country in respect of the role of human beings in the country’s social, economic, and political affairs. Granted that there are millions of citizens without any form of literacy and that most of the ones with a measure of literacy may not have had adequate exposure to critical thinking, such an innocent statement that God created Nigeria may confuse or mislead citizens who are interested in solving problems affecting development in the country.
None of my two parents was born a Nigerian in 1912. All history books including those written by British authors told us that Nigeria was created by Frederick Lugard. But young Nigerians reading Buhari’s speech are likely to be confused to hear that it was God that put the country together. As desirable as the country’s unity is, it is unnecessary to over mystify any aspect of its evolution. Narratives are important to political communication, but narratives that are too bizarre have a way of losing their force. It is an avoidable hyperbole to say that God created Nigeria, and those who prefer religious views of essentially political matters should not overdo this kind of mythmaking. It is also capable of further de-secularising the country, just as the myth that Nigeria is a multi-religious country was used several years ago to override the constitutional principle of secularity of the state.
Before this season, Nigerians were already used to hearing that it is God that appoints leaders, especially when some nosy citizens accused ruling parties of election manipulation. This happened in 1979, 1983, 1993, 1999, 2003, 2007, and even in 2011, particularly when those who lost elections challenged the integrity of such elections. Resorting to metaphysical explanations of political activities has been for some time part of political rhetoric in the country, but the relapse to etiological exercise got to a crescendo in the last few years, particularly since demand for restructuring or re-federalisation became more pronounced and the rise of MASSOB and IPOB became a rallying narrative for the Southeast Region.
Mystification and distortion started to become popular during the regime of President Obasanjo, who equated call for restructuring with demand for secession, as his way of calling the dog of restructuring a bad name to get it ready for hanging. Most Nigerians had no reason to expect that there would be an emergence of such dare-devils as the Kanu group with inordinate ambition: breaking Nigeria so that Biafra can be revived, to allow what the group considers a Master-race nationality in Nigeria to move ahead and reclaim its manifest destiny.
When MASSOB and IPOB emerged on the landscape of the country’s geopolitical struggle for the soul of Nigeria, those calling for restructuring got eclipsed by the bellicose rhetoric of IPOB. And some of the new theorists of etiology seized the moment to remind citizens that it was God in his/her infinite mercies that created Nigeria and that nobody born of women has a right to question God’s design. Of course, mystification has its function. It either makes critical individuals to interrogate what they perceive to be overdone or get simple-minded ones intoxicated or indoctrinated by the sheer force of the oversize image that may have no connection to reality.
For far too long, political and cultural leaders have relished making God responsible for the way Nigeria has become, but such leaders need to be careful what they wish for. Pushing the problems of Nigeria on God may be a cheap test of the faith of members of the public. Apart from the use of such mythmaking to confuse the Nigerian public, it can also make members of the public to see everything in terms of belief in God or not, to the extent that when the country’s problems continue to fester, the doubt that should have been about the manner of altering a bad situation might throw up Islamic and Christian prayer warriors perpetually on their knees for divine mercy or blessing. Citizens may start throwing up their arms while saying this is the way God wants Nigeria to be. The choice of form or content of national conversation should not be between etiology and sociology or fatalism and humanism. It should simply be about the sort of polity a people—homogenous or heterogeneous—ought to have from time to time, regardless of the identity of the energy that founded such polity.
Those who govern and those being governed need to understand that Nigeria, like any other country, has not been perfectly made, largely because those human forces behind its design are not perfect. Nobody knows how Lugard would have felt if he had been given another chance to re-sculpt Nigeria today. Ideas about keeping Nigeria united should be to reinvigorate national conversation on how to make living in the country better, not to create fear for the public about divine source of its existence. Such rhetoric has the potential to limit the space of choice in political and social organisation. It does not strengthen any argument to push every problem on the lap of God, as doing so gives human beings the chance to expect miracles about what they could have been able to improve on their own, as the history of most countries in the world has shown.
Certainly, Nigeria needs active debates to throw more light on what the issues that weaken the country might be. But the type of debate we do not need is leaving to God what should have been the responsibility of Caesar. Citizens should be put in no doubt about the function of their political leaders and of governance. The job to make Nigeria better than what it has been rests, first and foremost, on the shoulders of those who have asked citizens to vote them into power and on citizens to be quick to ask their leaders, not God, what the problems are and how to solve them.
This piece had appeared in a slightly different form on this page before. The recent claim by President Buhari in Abuja about “God not making a mistake for putting 250 ethnic nationalities in a place called Nigeria” is the reason for republishing it today, to warn citizens against oversimplification of an essentially complex matter, especially given the fact that President Buhari says at the same event: “With my experience as a governor, minister of petroleum, head of state, chairman of Petroleum Trust Fund, I thought I had seen it all, but Nigeria has a way of going at its own speed.”