The state, religion and ecclesiastical courts
“Nigerians behave as if our own brand of religious affiliations is different and distinct and somehow, our sacred books are superior to the Constitution. The Constitution, which is what holds us together, has assured us that Nigeria aspires to the ideals of a state where there is no favouritism of one religion over the other, […]
“Nigerians behave as if our own brand of religious affiliations is different and distinct and somehow, our sacred books are superior to the Constitution. The Constitution, which is what holds us together, has assured us that Nigeria aspires to the ideals of a state where there is no favouritism of one religion over the other, or where people are discriminated against on the basis of religion… Whatever may be the case, we are running a Democracy not a Theocracy. The question is: how can the ideals of the Constitution guarantee the unity and common values of our citizens?”
– Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, November 22, 2015.
Today, it has become urgently necessary to ask: where lies our allegiance as a nation, in the Constitution, in the Bible or in the Quran? I ask this salient question because on December 6, 2016, a bill seeking to amend the Nigerian Constitution to provide for the establishment of Ecclesiastical Court of Appeal in the 36 States of the Federation and the FCT passed second reading in the House of Representatives. Since the news of such a move went public, it has generated a lot of anxiety among Christians and non-Christians in Nigeria. According to the sponsors of the bill, the Ecclesiastical Court of Appeal “shall complement the regular courts in adjudicating matters relating to the tenets of the Christian faith between individuals and groups that yield and submit to its jurisdiction.” The Ecclesiastical Court, if and when established, will preside over cases involving personal Christian law where all parties to the proceedings are Christians.
To any perceptive Nigerian, this matter borders on the relationship between religion and the Nigerian state. It is within this purview that the proposed bill should be read and understood, because it seeks official legal backing for the establishment of a judicial court for Christians, since Muslims have always had their own Sharia Court of Appeal recognised by the Constitution. Article 10 of the 1999 Constitution states that, “The Government of the Federation or of a State shall not adopt any religion as State Religion.” This is what many people understand when it is said that Nigeria is a secular state. All religions are equal before the law. The secularity of the Nigerian state does not mean that the government has nothing at all to do with religion because the preamble of the 1999 Constitution declares that Nigeria is “one indivisible and indissoluble sovereign nation under God.” To put it mildly, Nigeria is a secular state, but it is also essentially religious. We are not a theocratic state, neither are we an atheistic state. We are a democracy.
The move for the establishment of a Christian court has been long in coming. During the 2014 National Conference, a fringe group of Christian leaders started pushing this agenda. They argued that if Muslims in Nigeria have the Sharia Court of Appeal, which adjudicates on Islamic religious matters, Christians should likewise have their own Ecclesiastical Court to adjudicate on Christian religious matters. The matter was presented as a way of balancing the present lop-sidedness in Constitution. For the pushers of this agenda and for many Christians, a situation whereby state law favours one religion over another does not augur well. Such a system, according to them, amounts to discrimination and seriously compromises Article 10 of the Constitution. The proposed alternative was that the state should abrogate the Sharia law from the Constitution so that all Nigerian citizens can live under the provision of a common law.
In their position statement, “Religion and State in Nigeria” submitted to the 2014 National Dialogue Conference, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) highlighted some of the “dangerous ambiguities and confusion” that we have been living with as a country in these matters. One of these obvious ambiguities discussed was the place of Sharia law in the Nigerian Constitution. They noted that this ambiguity is a historical baggage foisted upon us by the colonial system, which we have not been able to honestly address. They thus called for a jurisprudential surgery to rectify this ambiguity. “If we have been living with contradictions and ambiguities in these matters up till now, it is about time that we decided to streamline our institutions for a more effective governance” (CBCN Statement, No. 7).
Going further, the Bishops said: “We are aware of the efforts of some people to make a case for the introduction of what they call ‘ecclesiastical courts’ as a Christian counterpart to the Sharia. The only purpose we can see such proposal serving is to forcefully bring home to our Muslim compatriots the lop-sidedness of the Sharia system in our Constitution, which has nothing similar for Christians. We stress that if Islam is a way of life, so also is Christianity. We are guided by Christian norms and rules which we administer within our respective religious communities, without dragging in the state. At the risk of appearing polemical, we sincerely urge our Muslim community to do the same. That there are millions of Nigerian Muslims who have been living in accordance with Islamic injunctions without a state-established Sharia law is enough proof that what we now have in our Constitution is not a requirement for the free exercise of their faith”(CBCN Statement, No. 8).
From the above citations, it is obvious that the CBCN is not in support of the establishment of a Christian court in addition to the already existing Sharia court. Their intention was to get Muslims and Christians to appreciate that we cannot successfully live in peace as a nation if there are two sets of laws commanding two orders of allegiance from citizens of the Nigerian state.
Against this backdrop, the proposed bill may have been propelled by righteous self-justification, but instead of balancing the legal equation, it will dangerously balkanize the nation on the basis of religious differences and further promote disunity. It will compound the already faulty legal foundation of our nation, something we have been struggling to undo with the many constitutional review and amendment processes that have been set up over the years. It will then appear that to correct one mistake we need to make another new mistake.We should not be surprised, therefore, if practitioners of Traditional African Religion wake up one day and ask for their own special court.
But there is a bigger problem that the lawmakers are not foreseeing. There is no such thing as a common Christian legal code that is acceptable to all Christians. So, how are Christians in Nigeria going to arrive at a common Christian jurisprudence for the proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Court? In the interest of peace, the lawmakers sponsoring this bill should totally erase the idea from their minds. We should all be comfortable as Nigerian citizens to live and operate under the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.As the Bishops concluded in their statement, “The powerful potentials of religion for good and peace will be enjoyed only if and when we find the courage to remove contention from religion as much as we can. A balanced and rational relationship between religion and the state will be in the overall interest of both the state and religion itself.”
Father Ojeifo is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Abuja.