OF DEMOCRACY AND CONSTRUCTIVE SERMONS
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is the face of a presidency that is keeping its promises to Nigerians. Food may have become unaffordable; insecurity may be suffocating many, but the president has remained hopeful that his government can deliver.
Historically, democracy has not always yielded its famous but sometimes fictional dividends. In fact, in many places where there has been a democracy, it has sometimes gone on a barren run, the majority content that it fills a vacuum that dictatorship would otherwise fill, unconcerned that it remains childless.
Nigeria’s experiment since 1999 has not been barren even if it has yielded only very few fruits. One of such is the four-year election cycle which brought President Tinubu to power in May 2023.
Democracy doesn’t give people a voice. Nature does. What democracy does is to help people find the voice which is already in them. This voice is expressed in so many ways and forms. A free press, a free podium in religious houses, and just in the basic expressions of freedom.
When journalists, clerics find their voice in a democracy, not much more can be demanded of that democracy for a voice is a sentinel that keeps the state on its toes.
The president feels that clerics in Nigeria should watch their sermons and be careful to keep them constructive. He conveyed this feeling about a week ago through Ajuri Ngelale, his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, during Ramadan Iftar with religious leaders and traditional rulers at the state house in Abuja.
The romance between religion and the republic in Nigeria is a historic one. Divisions along religious lines remain razor-sharp in a country where millions identify as adherents of one religion or the other. The romance has been used to win elections and even hand out death in the past.
These divisions sharply flared up when President Bola Tinubu chose Vice President Shettima as his running mate in 2022. The furor was instant, forcing a farcical hiring of ‘bishops’ to give a flavor of nationwide acceptability. It spectacularly backfired.
In essence, the president’s retort was that religion should regulate its rabble and rabble-rousers.
Unsaid but unremovable from the advice was that the highly placed and ‘deeply devout’ public officers should be able to sit through sermons without the shards of shame and embarrassment that searing sermons can easily scatter, stabbing at what’s left of their conscience.
What should sermons in Nigeria consist of? Sugary sops, empty eulogies or grandiloquent grandstanding?
Should pastors and imams mind their business and pinch their lips so they don’t say too much, or should they give lip to the suppressed lamentations of their people, stripping in the process the silence that strips of all dignity?
In many ways, it was an unnecessary preaching to the converted. The danger is clear when public officers abdicate their primary responsibility of statesmanship to don the robes of priesthood, no matter how briefly.
Religion is a lot to Nigerians and religious leaders wield no little influence over their followers. This almost hypnotic hold hobbles along with a duty to hold the government to account. While there have always been legitimate questions over how this duty should be fulfilled, questions over its legitimacy have never held firm.
Sure, there is a delicacy to be negotiated when those who reap others for God from the pulpit also have to rattle the source of society’s problems that often lie in the grand landscape of the government, but how should it be done? Should it even be done at all?
There is a near consensus that in speaking truth to power, bite should never be sacrificed for balance, especially as those concerned are often likely to be hard of hearing as a result of their time in the echo chambers of power.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
