The Nigerian sees himself as a master of his own fate, which he manipulates with impunity. Even though there is a greater outward veneration of God in Nigeria by the shuffling of feet to religious houses on Fridays and Sundays, a typical Nigerian heart’s ability to absolve God into his day-to-day dealings with his fellow man or ability to allow Him to rule over his affairs is as impenetrable as a carapace.
The apparent risk of writing this piece is that it is liable to gross misinterpretations. And quite sincerely, how does one proclaim either the death of God or His expulsion from a country, where He has enjoyed hypocritical veneration for close to a century now?
Of course, God has died in the heart of the Nigerian and it is time to kick His carcass out; no pun intended. By now, it is apparent to all and sundry that the idea of God is no longer effective in preserving public decency in Nigeria. Here, the foundation of human values, the Christian/Islamic values, which have kept many nations of the world together, is slack. We live in denial everyday of the ineffectiveness of the Nigerian’s understanding of God to effectively keep our society together. Universal moral law, which is accepted as binding upon all individuals all over the world, is lost in Nigeria.
A few weeks ago, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni got close to articulating the death of God in the hearts of the people. At Uganda’s 19th National Prayer Breakfast at Hotel Africana in Kampala, he urged the people to spend more time working, not praying to God. According to him, humanity’s fundamental mission on earth is to work and invent ideas and solutions that would help them have dominion over all creatures. Museveni expresses revulsion at the helpless spending of days and nights “praying…praying and shouting as if God is deaf,” while ignoring the fundamental role of dominion over nature. He said that in the last 500 years, Africans had been missing from the fundamental mission of dominion over other creatures, and unlike Chinese and Europeans, “have been active in copying what others invented.”
The inspiration for this Sunday ‘heresy’ came from a similar chain of impunity which the name of God was put to in 19th century Europe. Apparently on the same page with Nigeria, Europe of that period had thrown objective moral value into River Thames. God was no longer considered to be at the centre of earthly things. Of course, it was the period of the Long Depression, a worldwide price and economic recession, which began in 1873. It was the most severe economic retrogression in Europe and the United States. At this period, the United Kingdom lost its large industrial lead, with 18,000 businesses reported to have gone bankrupt, as well as 89 railroads, which went comatose. Ten states and hundreds of banks also reportedly went bankrupt and unemployment got to its peak in 1878. With it came sundry impunities and government, as well as the
Christian religion, which were not only complicit in the regression of values, but were right at the centre of this theatre of the absurd.
The Nigerian situation today is perhaps worse. As things stand right now, it is either God is completely dead in the hearts of Nigerians or we were fooling ourselves ab initio that we understood the idea of God. Things have worsened to the extent that anyone who professes God today attracts instant fear from his audience that he has inbuilt Satanic manipulative tendencies. If indeed God possesses all those superlative attributes that man says He has, God is a lie in the heart of the Nigerian.
Before the 19th century, African traditional religion reigned in Africa. Nigeria had a sizeable share of this. Traditional religion was rooted in the cultures of Africa, which gave ample regard to the existence of the forces of evil, malevolent spirits, witches and wizards. The religions of Africa also had very ample prescriptions as solutions to day-to-day problems, which were based on the local beliefs of the people. Small pox, for instance, was consequent upon the anger of the god of Sanponna, so says Yoruba cosmology. Thus, rituals, exorcism, prayers, fasting and placement of sacrifices at crossroads “where three footpaths meet” were rife. God sat at the zenith of these beliefs, based on the people’s understanding of how to approach Him. Lore, mores, proverbs, interpersonal relationships and many more bore testimony to the fact that God, for them, was the uncaused causer and the invisible manipulator of man’s destiny. They revered Him. They believed anyone who dealt with his fellow man dubiously stood to be apprehended by some unseen hands, either now or in the hereafter. More fundamentally, they believed seriously that recompense awaits the evil doer right here on earth. They called Him different names, had different interpretations and explanations for the existence of God but none diminished the fact that they believed He supervised the affairs of man.
In pre-colonial Nigeria and Africa, morality stood at the cliff of human relations and it sustained a balance between man’s tendency for evil and the societal need for good. Anyone who dealt with his fellow man dangerously or deceitfully was dealt with either by ostracism or through a strong and effective social mechanism which sanctioned evil behaviour. It is not that there were no evil men – evil being innate in man – but society was on top, mediating evil’s natural interface with good. There were very many examples of providence’s judgment on avaricious and wicked rulers, many of who experienced fatal deaths, which, for society, were equivalents of what today’s criminal justice system will call stare decisis or previously decided cases.
In Nigeria, God has become a piece of commodity sold for cash and his angel, morality, has been mortally injured. Private and public domains are littered with fossils of morals of yore, reminding us of the service of God with the purity of heart of the pre-19th century Nigeria. Nigerians have literally killed God and morality, or incapacitated the twin so badly that they are both shadows of their old selves.
The present day Nigeria is a converse of all of the foregoing. Morality and God have died natural deaths in the hearts of Nigerians. The Nigerian sees himself as a master of his own fate, which he manipulates with impunity. Even though there is a greater outward veneration of God in Nigeria by the shuffling of feet to religious houses on Fridays and Sundays, a typical Nigerian heart’s ability to absolve God into his day-to-day dealings with his fellow man or ability to allow Him to rule over his affairs is as impenetrable as a carapace. While statistical accounts of the attendance of churches/mosques and the number of houses built to outwardly venerate Him have stupendously multiplied since the 19th century incursion of religion into Nigeria, God has been imprisoned and suffocated in our hearts ever since. Nigerians spend more time outwardly worshipping God, yet our actions are a converse of everything that God stands for. Early in the morning when they should be at work, Nigerians pray and pray. We claim to possess objective morality and are repulsed when we hear of lesbianism, and sodomy in western democracies, yet in those places, in spite of those manifestations, they exhibit God in relationship with their fellow men, than we who wear God on our sleeves.
In Nigeria, God has become a piece of commodity sold for cash and his angel, morality, has been mortally injured. Private and public domains are littered with fossils of morals of yore, reminding us of the service of God with the purity of heart of the pre-19th century Nigeria. Nigerians have literally killed God and morality, or incapacitated the twin so badly that they are both shadows of their old selves. In their places, we erected a huge domain for Mammon as our current credo of ultimate good. We search for Mammon with such exhilarating hunger that proclaims its ascendancy more than anything else. Its image is by the corner of our homes, in public places, in government houses and he is the god we worship with baffling veneration.
Fathers are selling their children in exchange for Mammon; children are killing their fathers for Mammon; husbands are killing each other for Mammon. You can’t be stranded and ask for direction without your benefactor invoking the god of Mammon. Nigerian churches/mosques killed God first and asked that the rest of society join them in interring His remains. Daddy G.Os are riding jets and their congregants can’t afford daily meals.
Governments and those running them carry on, aware that God is either dead in Nigeria or remains totally irrelevant in our estimation. The way governors, ministers and everyone who has ever had access to government mindlessly loot the Nigerian treasury does not show that we believe that God is not dead. Those who are not in government practically show that God is dead in the way they relate with the creations of God.
The consequence of all this is that, it is either we have all murdered God outright in our hearts or He is so badly incapacitated that we may need to completely throw His carcass out of Nigeria. This pretentious Godism sickens and saddens. Unable to tolerate this hypocritical veneration when He had already been interred in the hearts of the people, German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his 1882 collection, The Gay Science, but more articulated in his classic work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, said God had died in the heart of Europe of his time. He died a long time ago in the heart of the Nigerian.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?” Nietzsche had said.
So, who is attending God’s burial? The vault is the heart of the Nigerian.
Festus Adedayo is an Ibadan-based journalist.
