2007 Elections: The Catholic Church and Missed Opportunities 

By Efeturi Ojakaminor 
 

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I would like to remind our religious leaders, and indeed all black people, that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people’s problems on earth.- Steve Biko

I would like to remind our religious leaders, and indeed all black people, that God is not in the habit of coming down from heaven to solve people’s problems on earth.- Steve Biko

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     Shall we begin with the obvious? In April 2007, there was a rip off of the electoral process in Nigeria, and what a rip off it was! As Wole Soyinka observed before the U.S. Congress, “I assume that it is universally agreed that what passed for an election in Nigeria in April 2007 was an abuse of the word ‘democracy.’” Indeed so profound was the rip off that Wole Ogunjobi called it a holocaust and TheNEWS magazine had it that “the 2003 elections were a total farce, and its 2007 variety was worse than useless.”¹ The necessary corollary to this is that any government that emanated from such a skewed exercise can only be described with one word: illegitimate. Now, as with the case of tyranny, once it is established beyond doubt – do we still need any proofs after the overwhelming testimony of all observers, both local and international? – that a particular government is illegitimate, it forfeits the moral right to govern and the people acquire the moral right to resist and also find the means to protect their own interests against a usurper. If elections do not represent the wishes of the people, then the country is left with a fraudulent government, which has neither the credibility nor the moral credentials to rule the nation. By definition, such a government has no moral legitimacy. “A government that was the result of such a woeful democratic collapse belongs in a special category of its own, one that defies definition.” Again, that was Wole Soyinka.

      As would be expected, apologists of the winning party were not lacking and they quickly put their expertise on display. Therefore, in spite of the blatant rape of the electoral process, they asked with glee: “If indeed the 2007 elections were unacceptable to the majority of Nigerian voters, why have we not experienced a spontaneous and sustained protest as we experienced in 1993?”² We need not answer such questions. We know that elections were not only rigged, but not conducted in most parts of Nigeria. Let us not forget that when the results were announced and victors had been declared, there were no jubilations anywhere – not even in the camp of the victors. Obviously even the “victors” were embarrassed by their own victory. In effect, having “voted” the populace slipped into a collective depression. There was in the whole country a palpable sense of mourning, a pall of grief. Nigeria is the one country where a presidential candidate will win about 71 per cent of votes and yet everyone including his supporters will be in a mournful mood. Please give us a round of applause!

      Another peculiarity was to follow. Those of my generation had witnessed the 1979, 1983, 1999 and 2003 elections before the ones under reference. In none of these did professional congratulators feature. But in the aftermath of the Iwu-elections, some Nigerians were so impressed that they decided to take out full-page adverts to congratulate Prof. Iwu for conducting such wonderful and successful elections. We are obviously in love with novelties. It was obvious that someone was sorely in need of plaudits.

      Please, let no one come up here with such gratuitous piffles and bagatelles as President Yar’Adua is doing well, therefore, let us give him a chance, or the president is already winning and deserves the good will and practical support of all Nigerians. This is not the point at issue. This can only serve as a distraction that will leave the real issue unaddressed. I am well aware that it is difficult to find a people celebrate mediocrity the way we do.  What they seem to be saying is: “how a leader comes to office is not important. What matters is the quality of leadership he offers.” Niccolo Machiavelli’s disciples still abound. Like all people who live in denial we pretend not to remember the many legitimacy-seeking regimes that began with some “wonderful” moves aimed at sedating the people. Far from giving Yar’Adua a chance, people with integrity, and I would imagine that Christians would be among such persons, ought to have made a deafening call or demand for righting the wrong of the April polls. Because the April elections were a veritable crime perpetrated by an individual who was captive to his own messianic complex and believed that he was the answer to all of Nigeria’s problems and went on to subvert their wishes. Let it be said loud and clear that no good government can be founded on a stolen mandate. And some people must stand up and say, ‘this is not acceptable, this is not good enough.’ Because ours is a moral universe where good and evil matter. And for believers and all men and women of good will, the good must be sustained, upheld and propagated, while evil must be challenged and repudiated at all times.

      Before I continue, as an aside, let me say that having watched the political situation these past nine years I am close enough to the canvas to know that it is almost impossible to passionately reflect on an issue such as this without appearing to be a radical or liberation theologian. I deny this of course, and vehemently. But if that happens, I have no apologies. All I would do is hold Fr. Isara responsible. I will tell him, look what you got me into. I found myself in a quandary when he mooted the idea of this topic. I could not say no to him and at the same time I was aware that I am so unapologetically sanguine about the Nigerian condition – and in the case at hand, a certain line has been crossed – that addressing this publicly will inevitably cause a stir in some quarters. Since I am painfully aware of how our dear country is moving backward at full throttle to the future, I am likely to see things only as black or white and therefore leave no room for grey areas. But I accepted because I felt it will give me an opportunity to reflect together with others not only on an event that took place some six months ago, but one that somehow affected all one way or the other.

      A second caveat that ordinarily should be self-evident is that I am not a politician. My constituency is the Church and my mandate is the Christian Gospel and, as we all know, the evangelical mandate is not an ideological thing. Yet, let me also say that I am not speaking for the Church as that is not within my competence. 

How did we get here?

      We must be awake enough to ask ourselves this question. Because unless we know where we are coming from, we cannot know where we are heading. As a Yoruba saying has it, a river that forgets its source will definitely dry up. My reading of the situation is that the Yar’Adua conundrum was hurriedly thrown up as a result of the failure of the third term misadventure. Check this out. Those who urged prudence so that Nigeria can move forward after the April 2007 fiasco, a manifestly colluding elite, were the same ones who told Nigerians in clear terms during the third term debate that in effect, apart from the grammatical problem they had with third term, they did not know what the legal basis was, and that the grammatical sequence was what they did not get.” This, after they had been ocular witnesses to surreptitious attempts to push an illegal constitution canvassing tenure elongation under their noses during the equally ill-motivated and ill-fated national confab. Talk of being blinded by allegiance to the Aso Rock god and you will be on the right side of history. We shall come to these characters shortly. Of course, they could not “get it” because they chose to confuse themselves. There was nothing ungrammatical about the terminology. It simply meant someone had served two terms and wanted to get one more.

      Back to the April elections. The 2003 elections were described as 419 on account of the brazen rape of the people’s mandate. But then those who coined that expression could never have known that as the Americans say, we ain’t seen nothing yet. In 2007, President Obasanjo subverted the political will of the Nigerian people, stole their electoral mandate and handed same to a safe pair of hands he trusts would cover his dirty acts and do his bidding. Doubting Thomases, please look at the list of ministers and ambassadors. One did not need any special aptitude to see the clear discrepancy between popular sentiment and what was put out to the public as election results. The people did not rise in protest only because they did not see any credible leader to lead them. This in turn was due to the fact that we all seem sedated. Of course, the political elite failed to act because they failed to realise that their own good is promoted by the common good. But I am digressing.

      After the elections, we were fed with the twaddle that few would doubt that Yar’Adua would have won by a wide margin in an election free of irregularities. Turn it, tie it, and twist it: prattle, taradiddle and drivel. Such disputants forget that in the absence of such free and fair elections we cannot know and establish that Yar’Adua would indeed have won. After all, the taste of the pudding is in the eating. Besides, it is difficult to get a handle on that considering that Yar’Adua was Obasanjo’s sponsored candidate. It was a measure of the enormity of the former president’s unpopularity that Nigerians were even ready to give someone who was not really elected a chance just to get rid of him.

      It was difficult to see any reason why Nigerians would have voted massively for the PDP as Obasanjo and his friends claimed. Patrick Wilmot could not have expressed it better. “If Nigerian elections performed the functions they’re supposed to, the PDP would have been wiped out in April 2007. In terms of performance it was a failure: it provided no jobs, education, housing, health, water, electricity, public transport, or security. In terms of leadership, it had some of the most unpopular leaders ever and its ex-president, in spite of his exalted opinion of himself, was universally loathed.” (Patrick Wilmot: “President Yar’Adua At ‘The Last Chance Salon’”, TheNEWS, Aug. 13, 2007). In the history of elections in this country, we had had landslide, moonslide and seaslide victories but this time, through the PDP, we surpassed ourselves and achieved a worldslide victory. Indeed, as Wole Soyinka remarked in another interview, “We have had bad elections before, … this time, I think we have plumbed the abyss.”  A wiser and sober Fr. Kukah who now sounded repentant would later say that “For the PDP to suggest that Nigerians overwhelmingly gave them the over 90% at the National Assembly is sheer madness.” But this, for reasons that we shall see shortly, was coming too late if you ask me.

      Umar Yar’Adua did not win the election and if what we practice in Nigeria is democracy, he ought not to be allowed to rule even if he is an angel, as some would have us believe. In a democracy, any leader who is not endowed with the voluntary empowerment by the people must be recognised for what s/he is – a usurper, and so must not be allowed to rule. Some seem to believe that he is going to work miracles to change a system he has been part of and of which he has been made a major beneficiary. Was there any doubt about the irregularity of how he emerged “winner” of the election? His mother and immediate family cleared any lingering doubts if ever there were. Mr. Yar’Adua had hardly moved to the presidential villa when his mother and members of his family went on pilgrimage to Ota to thank Gen. Obasanjo for making their son and brother president. That he sent his mother to thank OBJ for stealing the national heredity and handing same to him has already questioned his authenticity. Thus through the machinations of Obasanjo and INEC whose partisanship was so undisguised, Nigeria came to be saddled with a president whose mandate is the most questionable in the country’s history. In fact, Yar’Adua himself admitted that the manner of his emergence was fraught with imperfections, yet he went ahead to grab the tainted mandate. Obviously, even the angelic Yar’Adua too is yoked to the passions that flesh is heir to.  

Unity Government: Highway to One-Party Democracy

      In the manner of all Nigerian politicians, Yar’Adua was shrewd and he quickly offered to the parties of the opposition to join him and form a unity government. This was clearly deceitful and insincere. It was a situation determined by the perpetrator of evil, the illegitimate party and then offered to the opposition parties as a concession. In return for legitimacy, he offered the spoils of office and even promised to conduct reliable elections in 2011. This was clearly fraudulent. It was a bid to minimise the damaging effect of the shifty process that brought him to power, an exercise which was aimed at shoring up an illegitimate mandate. He was very much aware that the jury was still out on the question of the shamelessly rigged election that brought him to office. Thus, he was cleverly trying to achieve an unearned legitimacy for the dubious ticket that was stolen for him by OBJ and INEC. Of course, the ANPP fell for this bait immediately because its members were aware that as usual this offer meant come and chop. This should not have come as a surprise to many since “Nigerian politicians have always seen public office within the context of ‘something to eat.’” (Olusegun Adeniyi: The Last 100 Day of Abacha, p.61). It stands to the merit of Muhammadu Buhari that he refused to touch this offer even with a ten-metre pole.

      What many failed to realise in the situation created by Yar’Adua’s offer, was that the country was on its way to a one-party democracy which is a contradiction in terms. The emergent political culture in this kind of arrangement does not encourage the existence or the flowering of the opposition. Where there is no opposition, there is no democracy and in the situation at hand joining the president to form a so-called unity government meant being subsumed into the main party. Yar’Adua had cleverly set a trap to which he invited the opposition with a tantalizing bait. I find it remarkable that in the situation, the ANPP promptly grabbed the offer and immediately went on to withdraw its petition before the presidential election tribunal “in the overall interest of Nigeria and particularly in the interest of peace and tranquillity in this country and in order to move the country forward.” Who can be more patriotic than the party that withdraws from litigation? But one should honestly ask how with a thin gruel of only two ministers of state in a cabinet of about 40 ministers and of two ambassadorial posts in a list of 62, the ANPP can make any impact in a Unity Government or further Nigeria’s democracy?

      An illegitimate mandate cannot be redeemed by recourse to a disingenuous contraption in the form of unity government. Sovereignty, by which is meant here the prerogative of deciding what kind of government should be put in place, ought to reside with the people. Nigerians did not go to the polls to consecrate the idea of a unity government. The concept’s provenance lies in an attempt to sustain an illegality, a fraud, i.e., the massive disenfranchisement of the electorate. (O. Ndibe: “Why Not The Best?”, NVS, July 31, 2007).

      If, as we seem to believe, an illegitimate government has no legitimacy but fraud, then the question of its continuation can not arise since it should not exist in the first place. If a government rests on fraud rather than consent, we cannot consent to its prolongation. Illegitimate power is totally devoid of all authority and can only be maintained by declaring war on the people. An illegitimate government can thrive only by securing our communal indifference and nonchalance, which was what our preachifying moralists achieved for Yar’Adua and his government.

      If we are to sound coherent, our understanding of corruption must be holistic. At the same time that we are crying our eyes out on account of economic corruption we must do the same about political corruption which, in a sense, is even worse.

      We acquiesced to the perversion of the people’s mandate. What we did as a people was nothing but a pure act of cowardice and this gave Mr. Yar’Adua some semblance of legitimacy. It is clear that we have lost our civil courage just as we have squandered our social capital. In other climes people are known to have been moved to speech or song by that which permeates the thoughts or appeals to their emotions in times of political turbulence, for which through the April elections we should have realised that a certain line has been crossed. Elsewhere even monks take to the streets. Not Nigerians. General Obasanjo realised, I think rightly, that as a people we are simply dumb and he capitalised on it. He carried on the way he did because he knew that Nigerians do not have the spine to stand up to him. What the aftermath of the 2007 elections has clearly shown is that Nigerians pray for a better life but instead of doing everything possible to make it when called upon, we rather pray and chicken out when the time comes. There was no better time for us to wake up as a people than the aftermath of that sham. In the long run no government can survive without some measure of popular support. Expectedly, the international community turned its back on Nigeria and said let them fight it alone. Why would someone else try to save a people who neither wants nor does anything to be saved? We could have called on the international community to help us if only we made any attempts to react in the face of the political heist cast on us by the ruling class. But we vacillated and such hawks and vultures as Lady Chalker swooped down to feed on the carcass of a dying giant. If anyone would suggest that Nigerians did not protest this rape of their sovereignty because they are peace-loving, then let it be said loud and clear that Nigerians are peace-loving to a fault. I hasten to say that I am not advocating violence.

      Unfortunately, we all grumbled and withdrew each man into our shells. Some of us appear to have sought refuge in prayer. Such pious souls are to be admired. What such persons failed to realise though was that a prayer that is not accompanied by willingness to achieve what is prayed for is a useless prayer. Thus in this state of misguided piety we continue to ask God to do things that he has already given us power to do.

      Of course, propagandists and ideologues of the winning team quickly took refuge in, and made real attempts at fobbing disenchanted Nigerians off with the argument that the OBJ administration had in the past shown itself to be capable of the worst form of ruthlessness – as if we needed to be reminded that despots do not take kindly to anyone questioning their knavery. After all, President Obasanjo himself was reported to have said in the aftermath of the election that: “The prerogative of violence is in the hands of the government and the taxpayer is paying for it. Anybody who tries it will regret it for the rest of his life.” (cf. Tola Adenle: “Rtd Gen. Obasanjo’s ‘verdict of history’ is already in” The Nation, Sept. 16, 2007). The late South African activist, Joe Slovo looked humanity in the face and said that the world will be a poorer place if it was peopled by children whose parents risked nothing in pursuit of social justice, for fear of personal loss. We accepted the result of the rigged elections only on one ground: fear. Because of this fear we witnessed and swallowed the devaluation or denial of our dignity. Dignity is the worth of being human and it is so important that its loss, in many cultures, Japan most famously, makes even death mandatory, exile coming as a second best. What we were subjected to in April was the worst form of indignity that signalled the final affirmation of the nullification of our human status by a cabal that had subjugated us for eight years. Because we are fear-driven our captors capitalised on it and treated us as less than human.

      Why did our preaching moralists not demand that the people whose rights have been violated stand up for their rights and demand restitution of their oppressors? Why did they not insist that restoration of the people’s sovereignty was not negotiable? Why did they not insist that the dispossessed enjoy restitution, and the humiliated be restored to dignity?

      There can be no doubt about what was needed in the aftermath of the so-called April elections. Nigerians had a cause to revolt or protest and it was a cause that was manifestly just. If it is true, as Desmond Tutu opined, that nothing united a disparate group so effectively as having to face a common enemy – and the experience of the third term debacle seem to have confirmed this – then Nigerians had no better moment to revolt against Gen. Obasanjo and his altar boys than the occasion of the April elections when they felt rightly that he had breached their right to choose their leaders and by so doing had constituted himself into a common enemy of the Nigerian people. Because what Obasanjo had done was to deny the majority of Nigerians a just participation in the decision-making process of the land of their birth – because he was always convinced that he knew what was best for Nigerians and therefore had to decide for them. This was the highest form of contempt, and by this choice, OBJ and the PDP had constituted themselves into a bulwark between Nigeria and her potentials. When you strip a people of their prerogative to choose their leaders, you enslave them since they end up being ruled by those imposed on them and not those on whom they would have wished to confer legitimacy as leaders.

      Let me make a very important point here. I am not advocating violent mass protests. I am a crusader of non-violent mass protest and if I may put it this way, my patron saints are Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I am aware that violence begets violence. I am aware that there is no room for violence in the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am also aware that our callous leaders will only be too happy to see some form of violence coming from the people so that they can capitalise on it.  

Need for a Prophetic Church

      As a church, we have kept quiet for too long. We are not a minority by any means. The Catholic Church in Nigeria has a population of over twenty million. By any standards, that is a force to be reckoned with. As at the time of the 2007 elections, we had passed the stage of verbal denunciations and moral exhortations. The Church needed to have moved from teacher to witness, keeping in mind that “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” (Paul VI: Evangelii Nuntiandi, #41). Let me quote Monsignor Aniagwu here: 

The time may well have come for the Church in Nigeria to borrow a leaf from the examples of The Philippines and Poland and to take to the streets to drive home all her sermons about justice and human rights that have so far gone unheeded. It is to be understood that bishops, priests, seminarians, and nuns will be at the head of the proposed mass action. There should be no dearth of laymen and women to march behind their spiritual leaders. (Aniagwu: The Church in The Service of Justice, 1995, p.15.) 

      Please note that Aniagwu was speaking when the country was under a military dictatorship. In 1996, when Fr. George Ehusani’s book, A Prophetic Church was published it was received with a lot of excitement. In this very prophetic book (no pun intended), Fr. Ehusani noted: “The bishops are not only kings, but also priests and prophets. … They are shepherds in the fashion of Christ the true shepherd, not hirelings. Like Christ they should be ready to lay down their lives for their sheep. Nigerian bishops must not shy away from martyrdom, even real martyrdom, should that become necessary in the course of witnessing to truth and justice.” (Ehuasni: p.136). Need I say that I am in total agreement with Fr. Ehusani? I may not be a very willing candidate for martyrdom, since I know that I am not courageous enough, but in case of any action I can assure anyone that I will be part of it. Again, despite the military occupation at the time, Ehusani came out fearlessly. As Desmond Tutu once remarked, “What is it they can ultimately do? The most awful thing they can do is to kill … and death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian.” I am aware that Fr. John Odey reasons along the same lines. Therefore, from the look of things those who would take an active part in such a prophetic action are not lacking in our midst.

      An essential factor to the attainment and sustenance of genuine democracy for which Nigerians were yearning is the empowerment of the masses. The citizens must be educated, enlightened and mobilised in such a way as to be able to defend their rights, uphold their choice and ensure accountability of the government to the people. They must be able to freely protest against government policies which are viewed as anti-people, in a peaceful manner and without harassment or intimidation by the powers that be. (Wole Ogunjobi: “Is Nigeria Democratising?”, The Nation, July 25, 2007). This is what the social doctrine is about.

      There can be no doubt, if you ask me, that the church is (or ought to be) eminently qualified for this task of educating and mobilising the people. In the heady days of apartheid in South Africa, a number of theologians (among them Catholics) met and drew up a document that came to be known as the Kairos Document. It is not an overstatement to say that this document shook the apartheid system to its very foundations. The document saw the situation in South Africa at the time as the moment of grace and opportunity, the favourable time in which God issues a challenge to decisive action,  …. a dangerous time because if the opportunity is missed, and allowed to pass by, the loss for the Church, for the Gospel and for our people will be immeasurable.  Jesus wept over Jerusalem, over the tragedy of the destruction of the city and the massacre of the people that was imminent, ‘and all because you did not recognise your opportunity (KAIROS) when God offered it’ (Lk 19:44). The document then went on to say that “At this moment in South Africa, the Church is about to be shown for what it really is and no cover-up will be possible.” (See KAIROS: “The Moment of Truth”). 

A Missed Opportunity

      I propose to argue that the aftermath of the April elections was indeed a KAIROS, a golden opportunity for the Nigerian Church to enact what other Churches have done for their people. It was a time during which the Church should have heightened its prophetic role of organising, advocating and protesting on behalf of social justice. It was a time during which the Church should have mobilised the people to call for righting the wrong that was the general elections. The Church lost a rare opportunity to stamp its moral authority on the consciousness of the Nigerian masses. Because we have failed to educate the people, the present-day Nigerian Church – which is the one I know – has only succeeded in breeding a class of citizens that stays aloof in an island of indifference. The danger here is that our credibility as a Church is being seriously eroded. This is inevitable because our people have seen what changes the Church has ushered in in other countries. They are right in asking us: why not now, and why not you also?

      In this, the Church will have to do a real soul searching. We have adopted a spirituality that is totally indifferent to what is happening “out there” in the world of the oppressor and the world of the oppressed. Admittedly, the Nigerian hierarchy is very prolific in pronouncements. For example, we see this in the communiqués it issues after its meetings. But if we must be realistic, we must admit that these seem to have little or no impact. It is the belief among many observers that this is so because the faithful (and the general public) do not see their pastors do anything concretely to effect the contents of these pronouncements. Thus in one of their communiqués a few years ago, our bishops told the nation that they were going to effect the dissemination of the social teachings of the Church. It was a pronouncement that gladdened the heart of many a Christian. Alas, what has become of that promise?

      As far as the April elections were concerned, the Church needed to have gone beyond mere pronouncements. The idea of non-violent mass protests is not beyond our practice. I am aware of the “prudent” excuse that miscreants could hijack such protests. If I have to be honest with you, I must say that if it was necessary some of us could even give our lives and it would not have been in vain – at least we would have died for our people.

      The Church must be able to commend and criticise government as necessary. In a situation of injustice, neutrality is not acceptable, indeed neutrality is an aberration as it enables the status quo of injustice to continue – and the Leviathan continues to grow. The slogan “let the Church be the Church” is often used as a way of escape from political commitment into neutrality. Those who make such a call should be ignored, because we know that at about the same time that the Church is accused of practicing politics, the demand is made that she pronounce on the most delicate questions of national politics. The reason for this is not hard to guess. There is hardly any other organisation that has such a body of highly educated individuals in its leadership positions. Besides, as John Paul II emphasised, “when the Church concerns herself with the “development of peoples,” she cannot be accused of going outside her own specific field of competence and, still less, outside the mandate received from the Lord.” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, #8). This is because there are no areas in human life that are removed from the influence of the Gospel. If the Church becomes irrelevant in the struggle to shape society politically, then it would have lost its saltness – and all the consequences that go with this.

      Why would the Church have called for righting the wrong? The Church in Nigeria is not populated by aliens or foreigners. It is populated by citizens who are Nigerians and therefore have a stake in what affects the nation. It has to be emphasised also that obedience to faith is the wellspring of this call which is a commitment to justice. It is on the foundation of faith that we realise that the political emancipation of our people is a cause to which we must be committed. Christianity can never hope to remain abstract and removed from the people’s environmental problems. In order to be applicable to people, it must (of necessity) have meaning for them in their given situation. If they are oppressed people, it must have something to say about oppression. This is why the Church’s social teaching has come to be understood as a contextual application of the Christian message. Its application must be a situational interpretation of Christianity and what the Christian message has to say in any given milieu and at any given time. One of the greatest lessons of our time concerns the conditions under which human freedom and human dignity – values that have come to mean a lot for modern man – can flourish, and they do not flourish under regimes based on lies. The Gospel of Jesus Christ compels us to reject falsehood. A Gospel disconnected from justice is not good news. This is why the Gospel cannot be given a purely spiritual interpretation in isolation from social and political relevance. The meaning of the Gospel must be brought to the great struggles of human living. As a result, the Church must increasingly provide a platform for prophetic interrogation of government policies.

      As believers we must challenge whatever is not consistent with the demands of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Injustice of any kind is contrary to the will of God, therefore we must stand against it precisely because it is not consistent with the Gospel. This was certainly why “at a time, during the struggle in South Africa, Church pulpits and assemblies provided an unrivalled array of platforms when few others were available in the black community.” (John Allen: Rabble Rouser For Peace, p.233).

      We must not be vague on the Church-involvement issue. Following the lead of the late Martin Luther King, Jr., it is clear that “It is impossible to speak of the role of the Church without referring to the ministers. Every minister of the Gospel has a mandate to stand up courageously for righteousness, to proclaim the eternal verities of the Gospel and to lead men from the darkness of falsehood and fear to the light of truth and love.” In this, we need not look beyond the confines of our Church. In a reflection on the African Synod, Archbishop Onaiyekan noted: “The Church’s exercise of her prophetic role of denouncing injustice in society will be in great part through the voice and action of the priest. The priest cannot join those who idly sit back and ask ‘what is the Church doing?’ As an agent of development in the rural and urban communities, the priest is a positive promoter of justice and peace. … In the political arena, the priest ought to know his true role and play it fully and courageously. (…) Making people aware of their rights, encouraging and empowering them to insist on those rights, reminding them of their duties as citizens – all these are eminently political roles, often more important and lasting than vying for political office in partisan elections.” Again he noted, “Many countries, including our own, are caught in the vicious circle of successive bad government, building up an oppressive system of endemic corruption and the breakdown of the rule of law. To challenge and break through this vicious circle will require not only sustained prayer but also a generous spirit of involvement, with all the risks that go with it. To overcome pervasive injustice with truth and peace requires that a price be paid, otherwise nothing will happen. Since justice and peace embrace all facets of life, the whole society must accept responsibility for the state of the nation, and each one must play his or her part.” (Onaiyekan: Reflection on Synod, pp.214-217). Please take a look at those phrases highlighted and you will realise that this has gone beyond a mere Reverend Father instigating the people to revolt – and you bet we are not talking Sunday school material here!

      We are quick to hail the various Oscar Romeros and Desmond Tutus, but we are never prepared to go the way they chose. In the aftermath of the dismantling of the apartheid regime, Archbishop Tutu said with a tinge of pride and satisfaction, “We have been greatly blessed by God in the privilege we have had to witness and minister against apartheid. … And some times we have had our witness, all of us, authenticated by different kinds of suffering. We have tried to witness for justice and equity. We will still have to be around to be the voice of those who will be marginalized and voiceless in the new dispensations.” (Tutu: The Rainbow People of God, p.230).  We should ask: why is the Nigerian Church afraid of taking risks?

      One is very much aware that our people look to the Church for moral guidance. In order to provide this the Church must first make its stand absolutely clear. There must be no ambiguity about the moral duty of all who have had their hopes of choosing their leaders dashed to resist this and struggle for the validation of their rights. Considering that our people are wont to take the pronouncements of their leaders with biblical faith, the suspicion must be strong that some of us may have unwittingly stood in the way of a just and remedial action. Thus, we became obstacles to legitimate response. And I call on all of us to look inward and do an examination of conscience – the type we are used to exhorting our people to do regarding minor sins while leaving the thieving leaders to wallow in their cursed affluence.

      This has become necessary because we might be accused some day of having abdicated from our task of proclaiming a structural redemption and of having concentrated on exhorting the faithful (often the victims) to individual conversion and thereby leaving evil entrenched in social structures. In a sense it must be said that we, as pastors of God’s people, have failed in this important dimension of our ministry, and part of the reason for this is that we have failed to instruct our people as to what is expected of them in the political arena. Let us be very honest, at least to ourselves. Just how many of us have made the social teachings of the Church the object of our homilies or catechesis in our parishes or fields of apostolate? The logic is simple: you cannot reap where you have not sown. Therefore, we cannot be too surprised that some of those who were involved in this show of shame are Catholics. Certainly, it is grating to see Catholics perpetrate acts of injustice without remorse. Even the chief umpire whose partisanship was so undisguised is a Catholic. If one may ask, where is their Christian conscience in all this? This is worrisome and it is a strong indictment. Upon reflection it can only mean one thing, namely that we may have been concerned with making people become Catholic but we have not formed committed Christians. The question that the Nigerian Church’s leadership may as well begin to ask is: what must we do to make the immense wealth of the Church’s social doctrine impact positively on our people? The answer is obvious!

      Let us observe in parenthesis though that this is not an attempt to take our laymen/women off the blame line. As Paul VI noted, if the role of pastors is to teach and to interpret the norms of morality to be followed in socio-political matters, it belongs to the laymen, without waiting passively for orders, to take initiatives freely and to infuse a Christian spirit into the mentality, customs, laws and structures of the community in which they live.³

      Owing to the fact that our people are wont to take their priests very seriously, another important imperative is that priests, especially those in the public glare or close to the political establishment must be very careful in their utterances. Our utterances will not go unnoticed also outside the Church and these may reflect on how the Church is perceived.

      Let me also draw attention to the presence of what the South African Kairos document called “State Theology” as opposed to prophetic theology that was endorsed by that wonderful document – a kind of theology that supports the status quo and blesses injustice, canonizes the will of the powerful and reduces the victims to passivity. It is a theology that supports government policies irrespective of their legitimacy or otherwise. That kind of theology justified the apartheid system on “biblical” grounds. Of course, I have nothing but contempt for that kind of theology. A sampling from one of the nation’s dailies. “Yar’Adua came on, more or less a stolen ticket but he will change everything. Do not say he is not born again. Pharaoh was not born again before God began to show him dreams and visions of what is about to happen. Nebuchadnezzar had to declare there is no God like this, therefore God will reveal Himself to him as he makes decisions on any issue. … I make it a law in this house that at every prayer hour you must begin by praying for President Yar’Adua, saying God bless Yar’Adua.” (“Yar’Adua, God appointed President, says Pastor” Daily Sun, July 30, 2007). Of course, courtiers of the president immediately jumped on this chariot. And so they asked us: “If President Yar’Adua has won the heart of conscientious and critical figures such as Pastor Tunde Bakare who has publicly endorsed him, how could anyone dream of up-staging him now in a fresh election?”⁴ Yes, Pastor Bakare has become the oracle and his public endorsement is now the criterion for deciding whether there should be a rerun or otherwise of the elections. Just how low can some of us descend in this country?

      We must convince ourselves with the conviction of biblical faith that the Church has a social role to play, that the Church must be involved in the fight for justice, but not along party lines. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case because our Church is populated with clerics who seem oblivious of the Church’s role within the local and national community.

      As Desmond Tutu once argued, “The Christian God cares about the political situation of his children. … If God did not care about this, I would not worship him for he would be a totally useless God. Mercifully, he is not such a God.” God cares about right and wrong, and we, his children created in his image and likeness must care about right and wrong. Along the same lines, if we must take our mission seriously as pastors and leaders of God’s people, then we must be concerned about the plight of our people, we must be concerned whether they are deprived of their rights to choose leaders of their choice or not, we must be concerned whether they have justice or not. In order for us to do this effectively, we must leave the comfort of our rectories and offices and protest our disgust at the crude use of power by the powers that be. 

The case of Fr. Kukah

      In Nigeria, Fr. Kukah is a name that rings not just a bell but several bells. Kukah is both a totem and a household name. He commands an enormous amount of respect and influence in the country. He is a senior confrere both in age and in the priesthood. He is an erudite scholar. He is one person whom I hold in high esteem as a priest, scholar and the high moral premium he has built for himself. I look at his credentials with awe and a sense of reverence but with due respect, I refuse to be intimidated. On the issue of the April elections and possible reactions that Nigerians should have come up with, I beg to totally disagree with Fr. Kukah. Fortunately, this is not a dogmatic issue over which we must all agree as Catholics. To the best of my knowledge he is not an oracle on this! Of course, neither am I. Certainly, it was unbelievable that with all his erudition and exposure, Fr. Kukah could see some strange link between mass protests, the types of which, with microphone in hand, he had sung their praises to high heavens in other countries, and Nigeria relapsing into political instability that will hinder her from catching up with the rest of the world.

      According to a report published in Thisday newspaper of 30^th April, 2007, regarding the mass protests that were being called for by the opposition parties, Fr. Kukah rejected such mass demonstrations. According to him, such demonstrations would not solve Nigeria’s problems, they would create “confusion and destabilise the current democratic dispensation.”, they would create political stalemate and “set the country back by almost fifty years.” He said such calls for mass protests would eventually lead to confusion and destabilise the country. For him, “mass protests should not be the best alternative as the corporate existence, peace, unity, and oneness of this great nation should be uppermost in our minds.” Kukah concluded by urging Nigerians to be patient noting that the next transition programme when a core civilian president Yar’Adua will organise elections for the country, then it will be purely civilian to civilian transition. As if Shagari was a military president when his government rigged the elections that brought his party the famous 1983 landslide victory. One would imagine that our responses would be shaped by the role of memory and precedents. Kukah said, despite the electoral irregularities observed, mass protests against the election is not the best solution but rather those who feel shortchanged should seek redress in the courts or election tribunals, adding that “only God can determine who the leader should be.” Is the idea of restitution alien to our conceptual powers? On the matter of God determining who the leader should be, unless this is sustained with some qualification, I have serious problems with it, unless you want to convince me that a character like Obasanjo stands in for God.

      I trust that we are all guileless enough to realise that this is neither an attack on the person of Fr. Kukah nor an attempt to impugn his character. However, if truth be told, these utterances coming from Fr. Kukah left many who had known him totally dumbfounded. It was therefore to be expected that he would run into a hailstorm of criticisms both from within and outside the Church. I shall come back to these shortly. Before then, let us listen to an earlier Fr. Kukah.

      We must note that over the past few years, the learned Kukah had been all over the place either through his writings or conferences talking about how the Church, led by the late Cardinal Jaime Sin, went into the streets with rosaries to confront the armoured tanks of an oppressive regime; how once again holy pictures, crucifixes and rosary beads in the hands of frail Catholic nuns and millions of others, had proved to be superior to tanks and jet bombers of a Ferdinand Marcos. The same sources talked about how “in South Africa, as in the Philippines, we found the Church rising up to a role that was assigned to it by virtue of its mission. This is what is called the prophetic mission of the Church. It demands fearlessness, forthrightness, firmness, truth and genuine love of God, nation and people.” (Kukah: Religion and Politics of Justice in Nigeria, pp.9-10).

      Perhaps these stories were good for other countries but for us here in Nigeria, they can be useful only for their entertainment value. In Kukah’s calculation, even the advice to go to the election tribunals was superfluous since he had already concluded that Yar’Adua will be the one to conduct the next elections. And he was speaking barely one week after the elections.

      As I mentioned a while ago, Fr. Kukah ran into a barrage of criticisms both from within and outside the Church. Fr. Uzochukwu J. Njoku, a Nigerian priest lecturing in Leuven, Belgium, had this to say: “These views, reportedly expressed by Fr. Kukah, appear as a propagation of the ‘gospel’ according to Obasanjo. Kukah is a personal friend of Obasanjo, he is also very close to his administration and the Nigerian political establishment. Nigerian Television Authority’s pre-election documentary of Yar’Adua featured Kukah’s endorsement for the candidacy of Yar’Adua. I do not oppose the association of a priest with the high of society. It is however devastating, when the individual priest (who should be a prophet and vanguard of justice and truth) is so much taken over in these associations that his prophetic vision and mission regrettably become compromised. Fr. Kukah has been variously described in the Nigerian media as ‘a radical clergy’ (sic), ‘fiery priest’, ‘outspoken’, etc. Unfortunately, Kukah’s comments concerning the recent general elections (even against the background of a general outcry) make a caricature of his own (presumed) public image and a betrayal of his priestly prophetic mandate.” (Njoku: Oh no, Fada!, May 6, 2007).

      One has the impression that Fr. Kukah became dazed. In a later analysis, he turned 180 degrees. The same Kukah who had urged the losers to have recourse to the electoral tribunals asked, “how can you contest in the tribunals if the tribunals all belong to the government? The tribunals tell us that Yar’Adua is good, but in what way? I’ve travelled in the state where he is a senator (governor?), and it is no different than anywhere else in Nigeria.” Fr. Kukah seemed to have lost much of his eloquence. Was this an attempt to walk both sides of the street? It did not take long for Nigerians to be reminded by another analyst, Leburah Ganago that “the clergy also has its own share of the colluding elite.” He observed that while in other countries the clergy have used the pulpit to fight against evil, “in Nigeria ‘men of God’ are using the pulpit to aid evil and oppressive rulers for a fee, the story is different.” (Ganago: “In Pursuit of Our Stolen Mandate”, Nigeriaworld.com, July 26, 2007). We may not like this bitter truth, but to use the title of a very famous book, we may have to “eat this frog” as clerics. Most painful was the conclusion of a foreign analyst, Garvin Chait. Said he: “Kukah looked worried. Perhaps the man spent too long wondering in the corridors of power and some of the mud has splattered.” (Chait: Nigeria, or the idiot’s guide to stealing an election”) One may not agree with this, and I am personally not of this school because I know Kukah personally, but it is indicative of how the outside world evaluated his utterances.

      Have we not failed our people? If only that our people could see credible leaders, especially in the form of religious leaders! Imagine a Fr. Kukah speaking out forcefully to those in high places that the people have a right to protest and so should not be harassed. Imagine the same Fr. Kukah leading a protest march and the following that he would achieve. It is bad enough when despicable crimes are perpetrated in the land, but it is more despicable when those who should speak out keep mum out of fear and mundane considerations. Yes they give excuses for their wise silence, while suffering and agonising cries of the weak and poor reach a deafening crescendo and the land is raped again and again by men of restless and insatiable appetites. And we must ask: where are the prophets?

      In moments like these our understanding of the basic principles of moral theology becomes handy. The idea of restitution is not beyond our ken. In a case of stealing, the only way we can achieve justice is by way of restitution. Therefore, rather than appeal to the “defeated” candidates to either go to the electoral tribunals or withdraw their petitions altogether, which was nothing but our usual practice of always blaming the victim, what our moralists should have done was to appeal to all the vote-thieves to give up that which they had forcibly taken for themselves. If Nigerians had stood up to defend their vote, the message would have been put across that the people were no longer prepared to condone the rigging of elections. It was only such a mass protest that would make the thieving parties to discontinue with their culture of impunity, election-rigging and other forms of illegality that are inimical to the growth of democracy in the country. And this would have been the foundation of a new way of thinking in the country that would have served as a deterrent for future riggers.

      We must accept that the statement that 2011 will usher in better elections is puerile and jejune. Must we continue to deceive ourselves and remain naïve? Must we continue to put up sheepishly with the ravages of post colonial injustice in Nigeria? Things can only get worse. The danger is that seeing that we do not protest the violation of our rights those who benefit from such fraudulent exhortations get emboldened and act with even more impunity. 

The Nigerian Catholic in the 21^st Century

      If we are serious with our religion, then we must realise that in twenty-first century Nigeria there is no way for a Catholic to follow Jesus Christ without following him into politics and public policy. The age long bon mot to the effect that the price paid by the wise for not participating in politics is to be ruled by the unwise comes handy. For too long we have sat on the fence of indifference in political matters. We must wake up and replace complacency with re-dedication, and waking up, as Jim Wallis pointed out, is spiritual metaphor for conversion. And if there ever was a time that Nigerians should have woken up from their corrosive lethargy it was after the 2007 contrived selections because evil thrives when good people do nothing. We must always remind ourselves that God has not given us a spirit of timidity (2Tim.1:7).

      What almost the totality of the Catholic clergy has done is to univocally push our people into looking inward to find faults in themselves. This is wonderful and we cannot question the importance of a personal examination of conscience as a means of personal growth in holiness. After all, Aristotle once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But while we are encouraging this, we forget to tell the people to also look around and get involved in what is happening around them. The result is that while our people are singing ‘mea culpa’, they are joined by the ruling elite who sing a different version, ‘tua culpa.’ Have we forgotten how President Obasanjo dismissed the public outcry over the results of the elections as an expression of the Nigerian people to always complain about any election conducted in the country? The time has come when we must integrate our inward looking with a commensurate attention to structural sins in society.

      One of the major contributions of the people of colour to contemporary Christian discourse is what has come to be known as Black theology. It seeks to show that Christianity is an adaptable religion that fits in with the cultural situation of the people to whom it is imparted. It is only with this kind of understanding that our Church-talk can make sense to the men and women of our time. You cannot abstain from a process and then hope to change it. Part of the reason for our collective amnesia may have been that our emotional energy was non-existent so that no one can reasonably argue that it was drained or deflated. Thus, the general feeling was, what is in it for me? Because it is obvious that people’s willingness to sacrifice to a cause is directly related to the extent to which they can identify with the object. But this was worrying because this means that as a people we have lost our sense of right and wrong. Such a collective indifference can only mean that we are not concerned with our environment, and precisely because we do not care about our environment, we do not understand the society in which we live. This is why we do not seem to make valid moral judgements because “it is not possible to make valid moral judgements about a society without first understanding that society.” (KAIROS, 1985). Besides, as long as we continue to mind our business, our collective future in Nigeria is at stake, and we can refuse to take a public stand on matters of this kind at the risk of becoming irrelevant, if not at our own peril. The only way out of this is to redefine the gospel message to make it relevant to the situation in which our people find themselves.

      Given the Church’s mandate to proclaim the Gospel, which is a mission to the whole world, she must continue to provide a strong prophetic voice in society. If the Church becomes irrelevant in the struggle to shape society politically, then it would have lost its saltness. Needless to say that in that case her credibility would have been seriously eroded. The inconsistency of such a situation will not be lost on many of our young people who rightly question anything that is unjust, and from there to dropping out of the Church in droves will be a question not of when but in what proportion.

      The Yorubas have a common saying: Iku ya j’esin lo which roughly translates ‘Sooner death than indignity.’ This is not an exhortation to suicide. Yet men and women have been known to sacrifice that basic impulse of human existence – self preservation – in defence of human dignity. The responsibility that we owe our children is to act in such a way as to prevent a reoccurrence of such denigration of our humanity by any group no matter how powerful.  

Back to the Drawing Board

      The learned Justice Chukwudifu Oputa once declared: “When I am asked to write a paper, all I have to do is look at what others have said on the subject. If I agree with them, I quote them; if I don’t, I challenge them. That is how knowledge develops.” (The Chinua Achebe interviews, March 10, 2006). I think there is enough wisdom in this philosophy to subscribe to it. Therefore, I propose to look at the suggestion of Archbishop Onaiyekan and present it as a reasonable solution to the travails of the April 2007 elections.

      We are all agreed that both the Constitution and the Electoral Law need to be reviewed and improved. President Yar’Adua has already taken some concrete steps in the area of the reform of the electoral process by setting up a panel headed by former Chief Justice of Nigeria, Mohammed Lawal Uwais. This is encouraging and many believe it is a step in the right direction. But as Dr. Onaiyekan noted, “Those who are pessimistic about the ability of the present system on the ground to oversee a serious review of our Constitution and our Electoral law should not be dismissed as mere pessimists; they may have a good case.” We all know that attempts at such reforms have never been lacking in the country. Let us now turn to the suggestion of Archbishop Onaiyekan, and I quote: 

Meanwhile, it would do no harm to look in other directions for other ways to sort out our present political impasse. Since the tribunals are overburdened and largely incapable of dealing with the situation, it is not impossible to imagine a situation where we all agree to go back and do a proper election. That will entail reconstituting a truly Independent National Electoral Commission. Such a new body would call Nigerians out to vote for the candidates of their own choice. The heavens will not fall if this happens. This can be done within a year. Those who presently consider themselves elected should have no fear of going back to their people to renew their mandate. That way, the country can start off with a greater hope for now and the future. That will also give us a good opportunity to redeem our badly dented democratic image with the international community. It may on the long run be far less costly to consider this option than to continue to fumble and stumble along for the next four years. Is this a naïve impracticable idea of an archbishop? 

      My support for this position is total. No doubt, this is a very balanced and time-specific suggestion and it should be given serious consideration. Some would disagree because, according to their argument, this can only take us back to Square One. This sounds good and patriotic especially when it is placed alongside our famous resolve to move the country forward. For goodness sake, why are we so scared of the famous Square One? One more Square One will not drown the country. The proof is all the other Square Ones we have experienced before. Why can’t we for once face reality and opt for that which is true, beautiful and noble and build on a solid foundation? We face great risks in the hands of those who hate the truth, those who do not want a mirror held up to their activities.

      Others of a more deceptively subtle bent argue that an outright cancellation of the April elections will not portray us as a nation of serious people – as if the very (mis)conduct of the elections has not shown the world that we are a nation of unserious people. Besides, one should ask, which is more disgraceful, the acceptance of a fraudulent election or the sincere and genuine attempt to correct a fraudulent process?

      We have also heard such fanciful arguments as “let us look at the positive side: For all of Nigeria’s long history of electoral irregularities, the nation, for the first time, finally has a sitting President, honest enough to admit that the process that brought him to office was flawed. …” To this, we must respond. If the president acknowledges the fraudulence of the process that brought him to office, if he is a man of integrity he must resign and return a mandate that was not conferred on him by the people. Since the process that brought him to office was fraught with irregularities, he had no moral qualification to set in motion an electoral reform process, and this is not about the person of Yar’Adua. How can Yar’Adua be preaching the importance of due process and the rule of law? Of course, one is aware of the news coming from the judiciary. But the rot is so deep that it cannot all be dug out in litigation.

      Following Archbishop Onaiyekan’s train of thought, I argue that it is still not too late. All the discourses about healing the wounds of the April elections sound good. But then where there is injustice – and injustice was at its highest in the 2007 elections – invariably, peace becomes a casualty. The truth can never be relative! I am all for reconciliation and healing, but how can you have reconciliation without restitution? It is true that we have a short memory span in this country, but I trust that we could not have forgotten just so soon that Gov. Chris Ngige was removed from office after almost three years and the heavens did not fall. The same can be applied, mutatis mutandis, at the national level. This may sound anachronistic to some, but it is not too late to set in motion a process to right the wrong of the April elections. A major step in this direction will be the dismantling of INEC as presently constituted. If this is a dream please don’t wake me up. Thank you for bearing with me. I rest my case. 

This was delivered as the 3^rd Cardinal Ekandem Annual Memorial Lecture on November 28, 2007