Corruption: Osinbajo’s indictment of our churches

Theodore Roosevelt, a former president of the United States, it was, who referred to his office in the White House as ‘bully pulpit’. He meant by it, an elevated or excellent position from which to set a moral agenda, canvass a point of view or whip the nation into a frenzy of sorts over a desirable course of action.

In different degrees and with varying skills and effectiveness, Presidents around the globe have sought to unleash the instructional and inspirational capacities of their offices and auspices. In Nigeria, the wide ranging possibility of presidential rhetoric has been vastly under expressed, with most of our leaders staying monotonously glued to speeches written by their aides, which they read indifferently to bored audiences.

Given this backdrop, it is refreshing to have the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo, quoted in the opening section, speak out, now and then, with urgency and conviction on burning issues that define the Nigerian Condition. To be sure, some of his opinions, such as his recent unitarist, somewhat rigid position on Nigerian Federalism, are debatable, but he is to be thanked for bringing to bear on his office, the resourcefulness of a vibrant bully pulpit.

Osinbajo went on record on Sunday as calling on our churches, and impliedly, organised, religion to enlist their formidable influence on the behalf of the anti corruption struggle, rather than descending into arenas of fund raising, which major on giving, while remaining blissfully indifferent to questionable sources of wealth. On a broader note, churches often come under withering criticisms by believers and agnostics alike. It was only a few years ago, since top flight British historian, David Storkey dismissed the Catholic Church as “irredeemably corrupt from top to bottom” stirring a hornest’s nest.

From the top of the church hierarchy, Pope Francis, earlier this year, admitted that the Catholic Church harboured, ‘streams of corruption’, featuring sexual abuse of minors by church officials, gay lobbies, among other moral howlers.

Back here in Nigeria, a former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, in April this year, lambasted the churches for accepting gifts “from just anybody without asking questions”. One way of understanding Osinbajo and Obasanjo’s indictment of our multiplying churches and other religious centres, is to picture notorious kidnap baron Chukwudi Onwuamadike, aka Evans, who claimed enigmatically to deploy Psalm 23 for ‘protection’, entering a church, and in response to a sermon on giving, strolls majestically upfront, to announce a donation of 10 million naira, drawn, of course, from the proceeds of his murderous escapades.

The church roars in applause, while the pastor rejoins with thunderous supplication for divine protection for the kidnap kingpin. This is obviously an extreme illustration; but it helps to underline the ethical no man’s land, in which the church or better still some churches have dragged themselves. Someone may ask, how is the church to know whether the giver of a tithe or an offering is an out and out criminal or somebody engaged in honest work?

It must be admitted that there are no quick fixes, but there is a world of difference between not caring to ask any question at all, and exercising a conscience based on rudimentary intelligence which can finger the morally decrepit.

What the French calls pavement radio (trattoir) which traffics in reliable gossip and whisperings about people’s sources of wealth may be deployed, to screen big time donors, and in this age of lucrative whistle blowing, even report on them.

Doctrinally,the upsurge of a gospel of predestination,salvation by grace, material prosperity, and instant or miracular upgrades, have come to predominate in our religion, and to shape the attitudes and behaviour of both priests and laity. Consider too that the emphasis tends to be on individual success and splendid consumptive habits rather than impluses towards the church becoming the social conscience of a nation morally adrift. What we have, therefore, is christianity without christ and the Islamic religion without Mohammed.

Another way in which the church and other religions can take to heart Osinbajo’s admonition, is to rediscover the ethical and moral glues which bind together and make real the fundamental truths and founding visions of the Holy Books. Christianity and much of organised religion have become little more than the opium of the reprobate and the salve of disturbed consciences.

An anecdote told to this writer by a colleague will make the point clear. A couple of years, back my colleague was studying for a postgraduate degree in Wales in the United Kingdom. According to him, a revival had broken out, attended by a harvest of souls and miracles. Consequently, the crime rate in the town dropped dramatically of the revival,making the job of the police and local authorities far easier than it had been.

By contrast however,everyone knows that the tremendous increase in religious observances in Nigeria, is not matched by corresponding advances in sobriety, godly living, and neighbourhood ethics. Even when we allow for the fact that the ethics of a downturn may be situational, and related to the exigencies of survival in distressing circumstances, it is still difficult to explain Nigeria’s descent into a moral abyss, side by side with the explosion in churches and organised religion. Put in other words, the desperate poverty of an increasing share of the nation’s population creates its own ethics and a rising percentage of those who make a living in the nooks and crannies of a poorly governed, poorly policed society.

Another dimension to the moral decay in our churches is the fact that the Nigerian state has politicised and elevated religion beyond its constitutional ambit. Partly because an under performing state has weak legitimacy, it turns to religion for support and borrowed authority.

So, our government sponsors religious pilgrimages, establishes churches and mosques, welcomes pastors and imams to state houses, organises and pays for prayer chains to procure favourable election outcomes, and distributes largese to pastors and imams. A former president of the Christian Association of Nigeria became an elite body guard to one of our former presidents, with predictable consequences.

An amoral state has bred an amoral, if not immoral religion in its own image. That apart, there must be a linkage between the moral dissolution in our leadership, and the moral torpor prevalent in our churches, given that religious institutions are very much rooted in the societies of which they are a part. That is another way of saying that Osinbajo’s reformist gospel will sound truer if the Nigerian state, in keeping with its constitutional description as a secular one, will not only hands off religion but will stop manipulating it for political purposes.

A related issue concerns the need for churches and other religions to return to the ethic of hardwork as a route to success, in a setting where so much unearned wealth is afoot. The link between laziness and criminality is too clear to require elaboration. Our churches and state officials may wish to take this aspect of the problem along, in the search for reformed religion.