Last week, Nigeria’s public space witnessed some kind of charging from the pulpit. It wasn’t like anything new was being said but who was saying it made all the difference.
In a way that probably had not been witnessed since our warped security situation took a turn for the worse under the present administration, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese said it as it is. He held no bar and matter-of-factly hit home the message.
Nigeria, he said, is at a point where we must call for a verdict, adding that there must be something that a nation should be ready to die for. Sadly, or even tragically, Nigeria does not possess that set of goals or values for which any sane citizen is prepared to die for her.
He regretfully noted that, instead, the average office holder is ready to die to protect his office rather than die protecting the nation that has given him or her that office.
Now, what is this all about, you may ask. First, the erudite Bishop was speaking at the funeral service of Seminarian Michael Nnaji, who was brutally murdered by armed men suspected to be kidnappers. The seminarian from Sokoto Diocese was abducted along with three others at the Good Shepherd Major Seminary, in Kaduna, on January 10, 2020.
The four Catholic seminarians were taken away from their hostels by gunmen who had invaded the school.
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Registrar of the seminary, the Reverend Father Joel Usman, who confirmed the incident in a statement, said the body of the seminarian was found inside a bush at Kakau village along the Kaduna-Abuja highway. The other three victims were later released on ransom.
Michael, as apparently enraged Bishop Kukah said in his sermon, was the first seminarian to carry the mark of this brutality and wickedness. Although priests have died in the hands of these wicked beings, Michael was in his first year of training.
“I had seen him in his cassock, which he wore in my presence, not with pride but with dignity,” Bishop Kukah said in his homily.
He lamented that northern Nigeria, in particular, had become “one large graveyard, a valley of dry bones, the nastiest and the most brutish part of our dear country,” recording thousands of needless deaths of innocent persons in the hands of Fulani herdsmen, militia, bandits or Boko Haram militants.
He likened Nigeria to ‘a ship stranded on the high seas, rudderless and with broken navigational aids, which he explained is the moment that separates darkness from light, good from evil.
“Today, our years of hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud, and Pharisaism have caught up with us. Nigeria is on the crossroads and its future hangs precariously in a balance.” He stressed that only the President, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, who was voted for in 2015 on the grounds of his own promises to rout Boko Haram and place the country on an even keel, can address the situation.
In a 27-point, 4, 080-word sermon, which became a major point of discussion throughout the country last week, the eloquent Bishop, while lamenting the spate of killings, among other things, regrets, however, that no one could have imagined that in winning the Presidency, General Buhari, who promised to always lead Nigerians from the front, would introduce nepotism and clannishness into the military and the ancillary security agencies, thereby putting the lives of the people he leads in grave danger.
No one, he added, would have imagined that the Buhari government “would be marked by supremacist and divisive policies that would push our country to the brink.”
The Bishop was emphatic that the President has displayed the greatest degree of insensitivity in managing the nation’s rich diversity, subordinated the larger interests of the country to the hegemonic interests of his co-religionists and clansmen and women, thus creating the impression that to hold a key and strategic position in Nigeria today, it is more important to be a northern Muslim than a Nigerian.
If you think the Bishop will stop there, just wait for this. For in affirming that despite running the most nepotistic and narcissistic government in known history, he insists there are still no answers to the millions of young children on the streets in northern Nigeria where the president comes from, and where he actually favours those he feels have been loyal to him in terms of national appointments as against merit.
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Poverty, as a matter of fact, remains high in Nigeria due to its dire social service delivery outcomes and lack of basic infrastructure, all of which are a result of bad governance.
And as it were, the north which still has the worst indices of poverty, insecurity, stunting, squalor, and destitution, has continued to account for the largest percentage of poor people in Nigeria.
In fact, and according to a recent report of the World Bank, the North accounted for 87 percent of all the poor people in Nigeria in 2016.
Titled ‘Advancing social protection in a dynamic Nigeria’ and released on January 28, 2020, the report clearly shows that social protection measures implemented by the government in Nigeria had not been able to address the high level of poverty, as well as the negative impact of conflicts and natural disasters in the country.
Notwithstanding that Nigeria is richly endowed, the country has since been named home to a larger proportion of the world’s extreme poor people than any other nation, most of who are found in the North.
The North-West, where President Buhari hails from, for instance, is home to almost half of all the poor in the country. Weak governance, lack of basic infrastructure, poor quality of education, and poor social service delivery, were among factors identified as reasons for the high level of poverty in Nigeria.
A country with all these negative indices of progress, in addition to harbouring the highest number of out-of-school children of primary school age in the world, is just a time bomb waiting to explode. Nine million children are said to be out of school in Nigeria!
So, unless something is done, and quickly too, Rwanda or Sudan may just be a child’s play as to what might become of Nigeria soon.
And Bishop Kukah believes that President Buhari is the only one that can stop the carnage in the land, which has the capacity of tearing the nation apart.
