The tool called religion…
It’s so sad how religion has become a serious tool of division in our world today, especially in our great fatherland, Nigeria. I feel so disheartened that we allow ourselves to be used against each other in the name of religion. More shocking also, is how fast we react or protest regarding religious matters amidst several burning issues which have lingered for so many years unattended. We are grappling with bad and oppressive leadership plaguing the general whole for so many years running, while also struggling with the issues of serving government officials embezzling our funds with impunity. We are neck deep in foreign loans that even the fourth generation unborn will still be paying debts that they were not party to. Our educational system is at the verge of total comatose with the incessant strike actions and half-baked graduates who can barely construct a good simple sentence all over the place. Human traffickers, in the name of helping individuals acquire a better life devour a huge population of our able youths on whose shoulders we should be hanging our future. Ritualists and abductors are everywhere as though it’s a legitimate trade or business. Convulsing power issues are running companies down and out of business, while social media is ravaging our mental spaces breaking homes, corrupting our moral values, destroying our cultural heritage, contaminating our norms and raising for us an army of evil geniuses… Poverty is spreading like wildfire, driving sane people mad and stealing their essence even as unemployment frustrates our youths turning many into cultists, armed robbers, fraudsters and drug addicts. Armed banditry brazenly terrorises the land and wastes human lives as though they are animals, so is the infiltration of the different foreign subversive groups being imported into our land daily in order to perpetually keep the entire citizenry under control through the use of fear. The rising cost of food and high cost of living among many other issues … so, is it now normal to be killed by bad governance and all these other trending issues than to tolerate each other in the name of religious red lines? Wow!
It’s difficult to believe that we are so blind to see what we are allowing to happen to us in this 21st century! Our activities and engagements do not resemble, suggest or project the progress we literally seem to be needing in order to move our nation forward as it should be by any means. The question now is, when are we ever going to get it right? When are we going to drop this act of barbarism in the name of religion? Life is such that even the law does not permit anyone to take their own life how much more will God almighty in which ever name we prefer to call Him be pleased that the life of another very sacred and precious human being He created in His own image and likeness is taken or expired?
It’s true that conflict has been established as a bedrock upon which growth or change is achieved. Life they say is not static but dynamic but what kind of growth are we to achieve with the killing of our fellow citizens or our fellow brothers or sisters? Why do we keep treating the symptoms and not the root cause of our problems? Why do we insist on being so unpatriotic? Why do we put our individual and sectional needs over the needs of our fatherland? If by our actions or inactions we eventually succeed in destroying this great land we call home, is there a spare somewhere we are hoping to go inhabit? Is colonialism and imperialism not enough slavery to have endured or to still be enduring in many obvious practical terms that we want to add more to the already existing sufferings?
Hmmmmm…. Nigeria my fatherland! You who used to be the centre of peace to your warring siblings, the delight of other nations with so many admirers all over the globe. You whose overwhelming human and material resources have kept uneasy the pride of foreign powers… How did you allow yourself to be used as a weapon against your very own existence? How gullible can you be? I used to think we are too intelligent to be manipulated. Apparently, greed has infected our blood and robbed us of our striking intelligence. I used to think information is power as they said and that the more intelligent people are, the easier it is to resolve contending issues, but the reverse is the case in our dear country because of ethno-religious indoctrination which has never served the benefit of our growth and well-being!
