NIGERIA AND EXPENSIVE PILGRIMAGES 

Uzor Maxim Uzoatu argues that government should not be involved in religious pilgrimages

Let’s get serious for once in this country.

The government gleefully announced that the subsidy on fuel had been removed and made bold to stress that all subsidies on electricity must perforce go.

Now Nigerians are waking up to the announcement that the government is doling out a hefty $90 billion in support of this year’s hajj.

When I complained about the matter, a dear friend of mine laughed at me, stressing that I do not understand politics especially in regard to the Muslim-Muslim ticket!

A hot tear for Nigeria!

Another friend informed me that the Geometric Power Plant in Aba was built with $800 million which translates to the reality that the $90 billion 2024 subsidy should have been put to a more productive use.

Let’s sing Hallelujah for strategic national planning!

The heart of the matter is that the pilgrimage is now a political weapon in Nigeria.

Governors and even local government chairmen now make it a grand duty of nominating lackeys to make pilgrimages. The religious aspect of pilgrimages is neither here nor there.

Some people are even encouraged to emigrate in the name of undertaking the annual pilgrimages. The country’s image is thus soiled and nobody is ever called to order for arranging the fraudulent fares.

The organizational racket of the money-guzzling pilgrimages is a hard slap on the face of decency.

The pity is that the powers-that-be appear on the take, which explains why nothing is being done to redress the vexatious issue.

The annual pilgrimages by Muslims and Christians alike in Nigeria have been taken to the heights of an industry. The huge allocation for pilgrimages every year needs to be looked into if we are ever to achieve responsible governance in this land.

One understands religion to be a common human experience, happening within a socio-cultural milieu, but it is ultimately an individual matter.

In Islam, for instance, it is of essence that a person making the pilgrimage to Mecca ought to have the requisite wherewithal, and must be healthy to boot.

It ought not to be an all-comers affair.

Government involvement in pilgrimages has turned the matter into a blatant racket. This way, the essence of the pilgrimage has been defeated.

If the pilgrims actually want to worship God or Allah, then the government should stay out of it for good.

A pilgrimage that requires personal sacrifice, at least once in one’s life, has been turned into a jamboree.

Constitutionally, Nigeria is a secular state to all intents and purposes; definitely not a theocratic state.

The Constitution clearly states that the government should not be involved in religious matters.

If Nigeria as a country is truly following the spirit of the Constitution, a quango such as the Pilgrims Welfare Board ought not to exist from the very beginning.

It should not be lost on Nigerians that religion is a very emotive matter, especially with the recall of how the country was nearly thrown into a religious war when it was revealed back in 1986 that then military president General Ibrahim Babangida had surreptitiously made the country a member of the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC).

The pity is that the Pilgrims Welfare Board was not initiated in the first instance with religious motives.

Contrary to what many Nigerians would have thought, the Pilgrims Welfare Board was not set up by the Sardauna of Sokoto and his party, the Northern People’s Congress (NPC).

Many Nigerians do not know that the Pilgrims Welfare Board was set up at first in the old Western Region in the 1950s when there was fierce contestation of power between the Action Group (AG) and the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).

The AG felt that the way to counter the estimated 70 percent of the Muslim votes then going to the NCNC was to appease the Muslims through the setting-up of the Pilgrims Welfare Board.

There were actually five Christians in the seven-man committee that set up the board.

With the passage of time, the Christian Pilgrims Welfare Board is even making more noises than the Muslim counterpart. 

The sponsorship of party men and women has since grown in leaps and bounds in the league of the political patronage system.

It has to be understood that the promotion of the pilgrimage did not emanate through altruistic reasons.

The true religious adherents are hardly ever sponsored to the pilgrimages.

Party hacks and sundry privileged persons happen to be the so-called pilgrims.

It is akin to state-sponsored tourism.

These people are actually tourists, and their affairs should be transferred from the Pilgrims Welfare Board to the Nigerian Tourism Board.

There have been cases where persons from different states had been sponsored to impersonate persons from other states entirely.

It is akin to lying to God. Must we bastardize everything in this country?

Since religion is a very private matter, it is very crucial to scrap the Pilgrims Welfare Board.

The coming on board of the Christian Pilgrims Welfare Board is merely a balancing act.

The fact remains that Israel happens not to be a Christian country. The true Catholics, for instance, should make their private pilgrimages to the Vatican.

If we should take the promotion of pilgrimages much further, then allowance ought to be made for practitioners of traditional religion to make their own pilgrimages to, say, the Osun-Oshogbo Grove or Okija Shrine.

It is indeed a great pity that we can’t develop our tourism, yet every year the country pays huge sums of money in transportation, air fares, hotel accommodation, etc., to Saudi Arabia and Israel in the name of Muslim and Christian pilgrimages that are actually tourist jamborees.

It’s by putting a stop to the deceit that the country can set itself free from people using religion to play bad politics.

 Uzoatu is a Journalist and Poet