They are all ceremonies of violence. The ritualist in Lagos, the suicide bomber in the northeast, the ogre in Ozubulu. The one chants incantations, stews up dark concoctions, rules the mind and enacts deaths.
The second is a little girl or boy, strapped with a lethal device and little promise from heaven, walks into a school or market or mosque or church, the bomb goes off just like the spleen and limbs.
The third, driven by revenge or some other addiction, decides to walk into a church, rattles off bullets in all directions. Families mourn afterward.
The last subverts a ceremony with a gun. Not allowed are the communions, the prayers, the solemnities of songs and sermons. The others also subvert as well.
The ritualists in Lagos are not giving children to the childless or healing to the sick, or succour to estranged families. They are doing the strange thing. They are luring or coercing innocents into dingy tunnels, making slabs like abattoirs where human parts are cut into packages. They also torment and rape.
All three have one thing in common. They appeal to faith. Whether it is traditional religion, Islam or Christianity, they are sourcing the power of belief. They are revealing to us the potential of faith for violence. Nor has it begun today.
But they tell us to be wary of prophets and prophesies, of the Bible and Koran, of amulets and crucifix, of charms and incantations and glossy beads and blood sacrifice. They tell us that a religious people are not necessarily a godly people. That in every faith is a potential for fealty to a goon, a ritual killer, a kidnapper, a prophet of doom.
So, a religious people can bear a belly for violence. The Ozubulu case is a story that needs more probe. But we need to see the accounts that went into building the beautiful church where blood was shed at will on Sunday. It tends to turn upside what the bible says of the house of God. “The name of the Lord is a strong tower: the righteous run into it and is safe.” “Or all those that be in Judea, flee into the mountain.”
Yet with violence, with the confidence of gun and the casual precision of a mad man, about a dozen lives peter out. The story of rival gangs is still in the air. But the mere fact that it fills the imagination tells us how violence and drugs have been associated with the temple of the Almighty.
But more potent in this story is filthy lucre.
The story is rife that the big guns whose source of money beggars the mind helped build the church. Perhaps if we investigate the money that churches have used to build pulpits and foundations around the country, we will know that God has no hand in them. Purer are the days of David when God forbids him to build his temple because his hands are soaked in blood. David did not do drugs, but he fought war for his people, God’s people. Yet it disqualified him to build a temple.
The Ozubulu story invokes filthy lucre of distorted glamour. Ethnic entrepreneur Nnamdi Kanu wanted to turn it into a nationalist affair by blaming it on Herdsmen. Biafra is too pure to infect the church or kill fellow Biafrans. His story did not gel even among his followers.
But the case of the suicide bombers and ritualists tell us how poverty leads to overthrow of the purity of the spirit. The use of small boys and girls in the northeast dates back to poor governance. Boko Haram evolved with hooves of blood. Yusuf was killed, but he had built an alternative society. He gave them bread, shelter and clothing. He gave them brides and grooms, he gave hope when society reeled with fear and failure.
The successive bad administration created it because they had government. One of the past governors, Sherriff who just lost out in PDP, once boasted that the media wasted its time reporting anomie in his enclave. His people could not read. Hence Boko Haram rose in blood and cruel belief.
The people had no jobs and they had no skills. Current Borno Governor Kashim Shettima is, with focus and collaboration, confronting the task of rescuing a society from a generation in the sewer.
The ritualists are also taking advantage of a society lost to fear. Where there is no prosperity, mischief reigns.
It is a story of faith without work, not faith without works. Both work and works are singular. Faith without works means, faith with adherence to the higher ideals of love, hard work, honesty, etc. Faith without work is materialist. It is about bread and butter. So, if in Apostle James’ inspired words, faith without works is dead, in Nigeria today, faith without work is deaths. Deaths from suicide bombers. Deaths from ritualists. Deaths in Ozubulu. It is a travesty of the lofty ideal. Philosopher Hume saw it when he said, “the corruption of the best produces the worst.”
At the root of the intersection of religion and violence is bread and butter. The biggest religious conflicts in history, The Crusades, had economic calculations of territory and power, other than the so-called argument of the profanation of holy lands by infidels. In his novel, The Interpreters, Soyinka proclaims that religion is the “justification of existence.” It is a way of asserting the right to be free. The ritualist wants to be free to be ritualist, as Boko Haram wants to be free to impose its weird Islamic cosmology. With thinking like this, philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned that the twentieth century was complicating the definition of freedom.
But religion has never been free from commerce. Hence Churches preach bread and butter more than the spirit of joy and the blessedness of love. We don’t see the Babalawo today as a spiritual vanguard as older society consecrated them. They now carry the strokes of woe. Islamic clerics can tell you how to snatch that husband or overthrow that contractor. Max Weber, the sociologist, argued that the most religious societies tended to be the most mercantilist, a point he suggested in his opus, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. John Calvin who led the Calvinists to God and profit, became Weber’s ballast of proof.
If Nigeria is a religious society, it should learn to distinguish between worship of values and money. That is what makes a society great. At this moment, God has been submerged under mammon. So, we need faith with both works and work.
Boko Haram by cocaine
Yale University co-conducted a recent study about how children and juveniles hide bombs in hijab and detonate them in public places. That report is out of date. The young ones don’t even care to wear hijabs to kill. Their masters cleverly strap the device around their waists and torsos. But more striking from my investigation is that the Boko Haram goons inject the boys and girls with heroin and cocaine. They drop them off in strategic locations, like schools or markets, and the innocents walk under the narcotic influence until the bombs go off.
I hear the security forces are now looking for ways to undercut this tragic new innovation in cruelty.
The cycle
Last week, I mused over the cycle of life when I addressed a group of young writers in Ibadan and attended a funeral for the mother of Governor Rauf Aregbesola in Ilesa. All in one day.
I was to address the students and quickly be on my way to Osun State. The event, called Young Writers Summit, was spearheaded as a labour of love by Victor Adejumo-Bello, who rallied students from between age 10 and 17 to write poems, shorts stories, plays and essays. Over 70 finalists emerged from about 400 participants. Many adults, including teachers and parents, attended.
I was plied with many questions, and I knew I could not make it in good time to Ilesa. I chastened myself with an epiphany. I was addressing those who had just begun a life journey. They wanted to be tomorrow’s stars. In Ilesa, I was going to a woman who had just ended hers, and she also had left us a star in Aregbesola.
I recalled my recent visits to some of his schools where the feeding programmes and facilities, et al, were making stars. I eventually arrived in Ilesa, the event almost over. But I had placed my foot in both, the beginning with student-writers, and the end with departed beloved, who had sown a seed in a son, who is sowing seeds in his state.
