In God’s Name

Kennedy Emetulu

Religion can be a good thing. It has showed over the years its power to bring social stability and individual redemption. It gives man useful education about life and how to treat a fellow man, imbuing him with a sense of purpose and a sacrosanct mandate to eternally seek something greater than himself. But when the rogue fringe of any religion takes to the pulpit, there can be no greater harbinger of mayhem! History has proven both sides of religion as true. Of course, when it comes down to it, those using religion to wrought physical and psychological destruction on their fellow man are usually condemned by the more sober sections as not practicing the ‘true’ religion. But, in the meantime, we have to either win or lose the war they’ve waged, with huge consequences for society either way it goes!

Yet, the beauty of secular society is not in a professed irreligious stance, but in the constitutional and social mechanics that posit religion where it ought to be, which is in the personal realm. Where religion begins to battle with public policy for the control of citizens’ affairs, the result is usually disastrous, with hordes of tinpot gods calling themselves prophets and prophetesses invading every space of reason and infecting decent society with the dark delirium of vacuity and false humanity.

As is standard with Nigeria, someone is giving Christianity a bad name. But this time, it is a name above all else in infamy and audacious heartlessness. On November 12, 2008, the British television station, Channel 4 aired a documentary via its Dispatches programme titled, “Saving Africa’s Witch Children”. It was a head-clutching tale of chilling cruelty and evil from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria featuring Gary Foxcroft, a 29-year old Englishman and Sam Ikpe-Itauma, the Founder of the charity, Child’s Rights And Rehabilitation Network (CRARN) scouring the length and breadth of the state, rescuing little children, some as young as three months old, cast out as witches by their parents and communities. The sickening sight of children tortured, burnt and killed can only be matched by something from the depths of hell. And at the centre of this communal carnage is a fringe of Pentecostal churches ostensibly preaching salvation in God’s name”.

Chief amongst the apostles of this child abuse is Evangelist Helen Ukpabio, the General Overseer of the inappropriately named Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, which she says has over 150 branches in Nigeria. Helen Ukpabio says she has a cast-iron formula for catching child witches, an operative manual for parents who need to know that their bundles of joy are not exactly what they seem. Her findings are recorded in a bestselling book where she proclaims that the key signs in identifying these children whom she describes as servants of Satan are crying and screaming at night, high fever and general poor health! It does not matter to Ukpabio that these children are being born in a society with very poor record of antenatal, gynaecological, paediatric and primary health care. It does not matter to her that these symptoms can be found in any child for any reason (other than witchcraft) at any time in a nation where the vast majority of the people live on less than a dollar a day and where all sorts of environmental and health hazards abound everywhere.  

Heaving from top to toe in near-apoplexy, Madame Ukpabio took intimidation to new heights as she growled her defence in the face of the Dispatchesreporter who dared mention the terrible sight of little children abandoned on the mean streets of Akwa Ibom as witches. She’s in Cross River, not Akwa Ibom, she informed the thoroughly chastened reporter. Yes, she makes little witches’ films like End of the Wicked, but no foreign journalist can come to her country to question her work when they haven’t given J. K. Rowling and her Harry Potter series the same treatment. Oh, and by the way, unlike J.K. Rowling "doing dubious and very dangerous things about children" she, Helen Ukpabio, has a gift – the gift of finding witches!

Clearly, Ukpabio’s comparison of what she's doing in her films with the work of J.K. Rowling is mind-boggling ignorance. She is attempting to make a patently false literary and moral equivalence cum distinction between what she's doing with what J.K. Rowling is doing with the Harry Potter series. J.K. Rowling is a fantasy writer in the great tradition of authors of children classics such as C.S. Lewis, Elizabeth Goudge, Kenneth Grahame and J.R. Tolkein and so on. Thus, it is only those who lack the power or knowledge of literary appreciation that will fail to see the deep political and social messages in the Harry Porter series. J.K. Rowling is simply using the language and time-tested technique of fairytale-telling to explore the relationship between adults and children, especially as it concerns the near-default position of adults dismissing children as unknowledgeable or attention-seeking when they're trying to draw our attention to a huge problem that may cost society dear if not quickly handled by adults in authority. With such themes as poverty, prejudice, depression, anger, disappointment, war, politics, terrorism and death, Rowling excellently sew it all together as a morally powerful tale.

Rowling does not feed on the fear and vulnerability of children nor does she prey on superstition-imprisoned parents quick to believe all sorts of mumbo-jumbo as causes of their everyday problems. She does not run a parallel ministry denouncing little children like Harry Potter as real life witches and wizards. Indeed, the main theme running through Rowling’s work is not the power of magic to order social relations in Harry’s world, but that of love. Harry Potter is telling kids that it is love that protects and sustains communities from evil. That is why in dealing with the nature of good and the psychology of evil, Rowling points out throughout the book that lack of good parenting, especially good fathering, makes evil flourish.

Thus, what Rowling is doing is educating children, helping to positively exercise their imagination, expanding their horizons and entertain them without guilt. She is demystifying authority by creating a fantasy world where children are empowered to use its power to do good and fight evil. Indeed, there is a moral purity to the Harry Potter series that brings out the best in children and adults. On the other hand, what Ukpabio does with her work is to sow the seeds of fear and distrust in families and communities by stigmatizing children even before they utter their first vowels! There is no moral or intellectual import therein, just fear and savagery! And that is why real God-fearing people must find it hard to believe her claim that Christ saved her at 17 to put her to this type of work. If Christ really saved her, then she would know that Christ detests what she's doing to children.

Christ is the best friend of little children, stopping his disciples from keeping them away from him, because theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven! There may well have been children considered evil amongst those Christ embraced, but he did not judge them. He did not say, "You naughty little bastard, get out of my sight!" Why, because he recognizes that anyone who is part of the Kingdom of Heaven cannot be an instrument of the devil! And yes, if the devil manages to use them as his vessel of evil, anyone doing God's work definitely ought to know that they can only be regarded as victims and not to be treated as perpetrators. Indeed, Christ made it clear that anyone who leads little children into sin is better off putting a millstone around his neck and drowning in the sea. The implication of such a statement is that the sin is that of the elder who makes the kid sin and not the kid's. When Christ cast out demons, he did not condemn those he cured to loneliness, vagrancy or death; rather, he reunited them with their loved ones and decent society, restoring personal and communal trust in these people.

But Mrs Ukpabio is not protecting the kids from those who have supposedly given them witchcraft; she is stigmatizing and ostracizing them.  She cannot be collecting money from vulnerable and superstition-ravaged people who are always looking for someone to blame for their plight in an economy and social condition that's in the sink and turn round to tell us she's doing God's will. She cannot say she's doing God's will by destroying the lives of our young people, our future – people she ought to take in and help if she is truly of God. She cannot say she's doing God's work by oppressing little children who cannot fight back and whose parents she has indoctrinated to believe that the source of their joy is the source of their troubles! She cannot be doing God's will by destroying families and creating fear and distrust in communities while she feeds fat on their sorrows!

Faith is not unreason; blind faith is unreason. When an illiterate ‘bishop’ can fleece parents of N400, 000 to ‘cure’ their child of witchcraft, then Mammon has a freehold in his conscience and not even tenancy for God! Christ could have ridden into Jerusalem in flashy chariots, surrounded by gold-bedecked outriders, but he chose to borrow a lowly donkey for his greatest journey. He had the chance to own the biggest palaces in Palestine, but instead went from town to town squatting in people’s homes with his disciples. He did more than any man in his day by way of philanthropy, but no one has yet uncovered his Swiss bank account overflowing with shekels swindled from the faithful.

Often you hear people say the church must clean up its act and call its rogue fringe to order, but really it’s Caesar that must rise to claim his due, because God, the Almighty Father, the all-knowing, omnipotent Lord can take care of Himself. And yes, Caesar did speak. In a news report in the Punch of Tuesday, 25^th of November, 2008, the Federal Government through the Nigerian High Commission in faraway London said all there is to say about the unacceptability of this practice. But it’s not about statements; it’s about action! Every religion-feeding criminal featured in that programme ought to have been picked up by now to face the full wrath of the law. If we have no values at all, we should at least have one for young lives, otherwise we all go extinct! Thus, Helen Ukpabio and her band of fear-mongers preying on the people's susceptibility to dangerous superstition, destroying families and communities, must be stopped now! The state cannot outsource this duty to “religious bodies” as implied by the Federal Government’s statement, because Caesar without his force is as good as a dog without its teeth.

Kennedy Emetulu,

London

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