Physically remote but fully involved in the processes leading up to Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s victory at the APC primaries and also in the power play that led to the emergence of Senator Kashim Shettima as the vice presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, it was with quixotic astonishment and predictable derision that the mere suggestion of a controversy over a same-faith presidential ticket provoked my angst and anger.
When are we going to stop laying the foundation of every new experiment in national development on trivia? When will we stop chasing the shadows of selfish greed and particularist obsession with power and embrace the task of national transformation that has become our generational opportunity or imminent apocalypse?
Whatever the permutation- Christian/Christian, Muslim/Muslim or even Animist/Animist – reducing the gargantuan task of taking the country from the brink of socio-economic chaos to a debate over faith reflects the numbness of the elite to the flaring anger of the swarming throng of the hapless and hopeless.
It is an involuntary suspension of reason when in great need. How many of us, on boarding a plane, enter the cockpit to interrogate the religious identity of the pilots? Or do women in labour insist on the faith of the midwife before delivery? In critical situations as these, we trust the expertise of the persons in charge, convinced that we are in safe hands.
Just to remind us and jerk us out of our reverie, look at what the figures are saying.
In terms of poverty, the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics has reported that foreign investment, a principal source of industrial production and jobs in our liberalized economy, declined by 81.46 per cent from $8.49bn in the first quarter of 2019 to $1.57 billion in this year’s first quarter.
No wonder NBS could report that unemployment increased from 27.1 per cent in the second quarter to 33.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020. In this period, NBS reported that 12,160,178 Nigerians had no work to do!
Among the youths aged 15-34 years, the unemployment rate was 42.5 per cent. Embarrassed by the worsening situation of job scarcity, the NBS has cleverly kept the figures for 2021 and the two quarters of 2022 to its chest.
These statistical admissions are the cosmetics of grinding and crushing poverty in urban homes and rural households amidst inflationary spikes because the suffering of our people is beyond what these figures capture. They viscerally illustrate that the economy needs to be overhauled urgently and make an emergency of our ‘normalcy’.
Nobody needs a soothsayer to see the connection between the economic recession and crime, unemployment and kidnapping and between hyperinflation and the citizens’
and between hyperinflation and the citizens’ desperation to run from pillar to post to survive even if it means using children, brothers or neighbours for money rituals whose efficacy is false.
From individual anarchism to sub-national rebellion, from separatist movement to fundamentalist invasion, Nigeria is pulled taut at the seams by centripetal forces even as her legislative, executive, judicial and bureaucratic managers are busy sharing the national cake that remained after the creditors have taken their interest for the month.
And that is why the controversy over a Muslim-Muslim ticket, Christian -Christian ticket or any same-faith permutation is so provocatively out of tune with the needs of a country ridden with poverty and insecurity and threatened by the daredevilry of those who sold the country seeking to return to plunder.
Who gains from the current faith induced anti Tinubu campaign? Certainly, not the millions of devout parishioners and congregants whose meek surrender to fate and hope of a better tomorrow lies in the conviction that Christ has died for their sins. They know they will not be invited to the Villa to attend service with the Chaplain or share Holy Communion with ministers and permanent secretaries.
They know they will not leverage on any pastoral claim to the earthly acquisition of wealth to ask for contracts or juicy appointments. And they know that when state banquets or weddings of the President’s children hold, they would be content to watch their leaders laugh and grin excitedly in conversations with the high and the mighty.
So It is actually the golden layer of Christendom that fears it will suffocate if it has no one to call to circumvent one government policy or the other or consolidate access to authority and the public purse. However, once we refuse to reduce our elected officials to their religious identities, we establish a civic code that enables all of us to engage as citizens and restrain them from violating their oath of office by favouring one religion or another. It will enable them to face the urgent task of rescuing the country from poverty and insecurity by casting away the distractions of religion.
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