A ‘Chrislamic’ spirit

Don’t let anyone fool you: the elite are always united when it comes to self-interest. Religion doesn’t matter. Ethnicity takes the back seat. In sharing the loot of office, Christians and Moslems, animist and atheists bandy together. The only time you hear a whimper of complaint is when someone feels short-changed. Then he calls on […]

Don’t let anyone fool you: the elite are always united when it comes to self-interest. Religion doesn’t matter. Ethnicity takes the back seat. In sharing the loot of office, Christians and Moslems, animist and atheists bandy together. The only time you hear a whimper of complaint is when someone feels short-changed. Then he calls on his tribe or his religion for backing.

The fact that senators and federal representatives from the Southeast did not walk out of the Assembly chambers when the budget provision for the construction of the terminal building of Enugu Airport was cut from N2 billion to N500 million and that of the Second Niger Bridge was also sliced down, shows you that their commitment is primarily to their private pockets. 

The same goes for Southwest Reps who did not bat an eyelid when the provision for the ongoing construction of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway was drastically cut. Also, assembly men and women from the North didn’t find anything wrong with cutting funds from the Itakpe-Ajaokuta Rail Project, the Mambilla power project and other important projects north of the River Niger?

And where were South-south federal legislators when the take-off grant for the Maritime University in Delta State was reduced from N3.4 billion to N1.6 billion?

Don’t believe their sanctimonious pontifications and denunciations after their betrayal of their people became public. They all conspired to effect the cuts to the detriment of the rest of us so as to have enough loot to share among themselves from the budgetary increase in the National Assembly provision which went up from N125 billion to N139.5 billion – an increase of  N14.5 billion.

The budget cuts were self-serving and anti-people. Whether in the court of public opinion, in the village square or in the church or mosque, none of the anti-people alterations to the 2018 budget by the National Assembly can stand scrutiny. Now you know that those so-called lawmakers are not representing you but only themselves. They are not interested in satisfying your yearnings but in satiating their greed. When next they appeal to your religious or ethnic sentiments, tell them to go suck an egg for, as Voltaire says, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”.

During the Nigeria-Iceland match at the ongoing World Cup, did it matter that it was a Christian Moses who gave the crucial cross to a Muslim Musa to score? Was our fatherland not the ultimate beneficiary of that achievement? But I digress.

I give the thumbs up today to the recent inspiring example of the use of religion for public good by late Alhaja Munirat Mohammed, aunt of veteran accountant Bashorun JK Randle, who bequeathed her property at 14A Bashorun Street, Ikoyi, Lagos, to the Lagos Central Mosque. I choose to highlight this example because it portrays uncommon nobility, the type that many of our so-called political leaders lack.

Alhaja Munirat had been born a Christian and baptised Esther.  Of her own volition she converted to Islam. She later married a moslem, Alhaji Bakre. Her family supported her all the way. Religious tolerance was the prime item on the menu of social relations in those days. Christians married Muslims; Muslims married Christians. Yoruba married Igbo, Ibibio married Hausa, Kanuri married Ijaw. 

Bashorun JK Randle was proud to hand over Alhaja Munirat’s property to the Lagos Central Mosque because the event was an opportunity to underline the trait of religious tolerance for which Lagosians were well known. You could call them Chrislems, the way they tolerated each other’s of other faiths.

Randle gave examples that recommend themselves to the rest of Nigeria in these days of centrifugal tendencies. Alhaji LB Agusto was Chief Imam of Lagos but that did not preclude  him from being the lawyer to the Catholic Diocese of Lagos under late Archbishop Leo Taylor. Alhaji Jubril Martins succeeded Alhaji Agusto as the lawyer to the Catholic church. There was no record of any friction between the Christian and Muslim adherents in Old Lagos.

Indeed, as Randle notes, “Back in 1954 when the “Mariam Congress” was hosted in Lagos by the Catholics to celebrate 100 years of the miracle of Lady Fatima, Cardinal John McIntyre, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, USA, who presided at the ceremony was amazed when moslem children insisted on full participation along with their Christian brethren.  Adults and children were decked out in Ankara uniform regardless of whether they were christians or moslems.”

Can that happen today when our political leaders milk religion for all the wrong reasons to the detriment of our African tradition of watching each other’s backs? Many of us have become more Hebrew than Jews and more Arabic than Arabs in our quest to demonstrate how much our acquired religion has alienated us from our roots. Truly, as Blaise Paschal notes, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious (and I add, ethnic) conviction”.

Let the National Assembly budget benders continue fooling themselves. The wind has blown and we have seen the ugly backside of the hen. Nigerians have seen that party, religion and ethnicity count for nothing in the conspiracy to share loot. Politicians only use those divisive tags when they need to rally the home front for selfish purposes, employing yesterday’s tricks for today’s challenges. The future does not belong to them.