When we say that Nigeria is a contradiction, the statement encapsulates the many manifestations
of the possibilities and limitations that Nigeria embodies in her sixty-three years of statehood.
One instance suffices. Nigeria is blessed with immense human and material resources. She is
presently a youthful country in demographic terms. This means that her youth bulge presents her
with a unique capacity to translate her development agenda. And yet, Nigeria has failed in almost
all human capital indices, from being the worst place for a child to be born to being one of the
most insecure places on the globe. Nigeria is currently the poverty capital of the world! And we
see the manifestation of Nigeria’s seemingly intractable underdevelopment on an almost daily
basis, especially when we listen to the news or even witness them ourselves.
I am forced to this reflective point by the recent Ilorin saga that has become a reiteration of one
of Nigeria’s national woes—and contradictions. As the narrative goes, a traditional priestess was
warned by an Islamic group to desist from going on with her proposed Isese or heritage festival.
And the reason is because it connotes “idolatry” in a context that is supposedly known for
Islamic religious purity. And the group obviously got the backing of the Emir of Ilorin who is
signing up for peace by sacrificing religious tolerance. This event drew the ire of the Nobel
Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka. And his missive to the emir is, as usual, a masterpiece of
enlightened awareness wrapped in cultural inclusivity.
Like most zones and regions, Ilorin in this context becomes a microcosm of the Nigerian state.
There is a lopsided federal constitution which decreed that there shall be no state religion, and
yet religious sensibilities constitute one of the foundations of insecurity in Nigeria. Various
religious groups wield the sword of fundamentalism that threatens the constitutional basis of
religious pluralism or ecumenical unity in Nigeria. The Boko Haram insurgents are one veritable
testament to the failure of the constitution to modulate religious relations.
And yet, as various social and political commentators have noted, Ilorin is a study in
sociocultural complexities that cannot be suavely reduced to the need for peace supervised by
Islamic threat of violence. That is the fundamental contradiction in the Emir’s response to Prof.
Wole Soyinka. The Fulani dynasty that was enforced on Ilorin met a Yoruba cultural heritage
that it successfully subordinated and eventually supplanted. And yet, that did not thoroughly
eradicate the remnant of that Yoruba culture from surviving and multiplying within the crevices
of the Ilorin Islamic “purity”. But no one is bothered by the cultural and religious hypocrisy of
trumpeting Islam and its piety while secretly appealing to Yoruba traditional practices and
mores. And thus, the religious narrative in Ilorin smoothen over a complex history of Yoruba
heritage from which the Fulani dynasty, represented by the Emir, is benefiting, and yet refused to
allow a traditional worshipper organize a programme which had no component that could
threaten the peace the authority is worried about—except that that peace is already threatened by
the Islamic group’s escalation of an innocuous cultural event!
I am a Pentecostal Christian by profession. And yet this does not prevent me from a critical
perception of the grievous harm done by fundamentalist thinking that seek to obscure Nigeria’s
rich sociocultural trajectory, and more importantly undermine her diversity capital. And I
concede the virulent role that Christianity—especially in its Pentecostal mode—has played in
undermining and negating African rich cultural heritage. A rough sampling of gospel music—a
la Tope Alabi—speaks to the rate at which what most of the singers dismiss, say, Ifá and the
babaláwo as powerless. This is despite even the Christian scripture recognizing the existence of
powers. The real point is that the two Abrahamic religions—Islam and Christianity—flouted the
tolerance code of the traditional African religions that made it possible for them to flourish in the
first place. This is what made it possible for the state to side with Islam in Ilorin, in support the
muzzling of an Isese event by a traditional worshipper.
Most readers are already familiar with the Ali Mazrui and the thesis of the Africa’s triple
heritage framework. Postcolonial Africa is now redefined, by historical circumstances, by three
religious and sociocultural traditions: Christianity, Islam and traditional African cultures. And
their ecumenical cohabitation was largely the function of how accommodating the traditional
African religious framework is. I am a witness to this cultural reality, and indeed to Africa’s
traditional religious accommodationist capacity not only to accept the foreign and the strange but to equally produce a syncretist mix that attests to its ecumenical spirit. Indeed, I believe
strongly, and most who witnessed this period in Africa’s history will agree, that I am a better
person—more open-minded—by the exposure to that triple heritage and its expansive framework
that allowed me to benefit from the best that the three religions could provide in terms of social
relations and ethical responsibility vis-à-vis other humans. I learnt the value and virtue of
empathy and tolerance, as well as the fundamental benefit of being open-minded and
accommodating of others who are different and other.
These are values that Nigeria’s plural circumstance would have benefitted also from the triple
heritage condition. Except that Christianity and Islam fail to abandon a triumphalist and
exclusionary disposition that criminalizes non-Christian and non-Islamic religious formations in
the name of a fundamentalist monotheism. There is only one God, and He is Christian or
Muslim! You are therefore either a Christian/Muslim or an infidel. There is no middle
ecumenical ground. The tolerance that Christianity or Islam preaches, as religions of peace,
becomes insignificant when dealing with an unbeliever or even another religion.
Let us return to history again. When Max Weber wrote about the Protestant ethic, he referenced
the relationship between the ascetic spirit promoted by Protestants in modern Europe and the
emergence of the dynamics of capitalism. Modernity, for Weber, therefore, has a direct
correlation with religion. In other words, Calvinists, for example, looked to worldly progress as
the sign of their being already eternally saved. Profit making therefore became the sure sign of
God’s favor. The same correlation could be observed in the relationship between the Confucian
ethical framework and the rise of the Asian Tigers, from Singapore to Taiwan. The values of
cooperation, self-cultivation, self-control, social obligation, education and consensus played a
significant role in adapting Confucianism into the trajectory of modernization that explained the
miracle of the Asian development narratives. For Confucius, the problems of civilization,
morality and politics are intrinsically tied in with the humans and the nature of values that define
them. Hence, Confucian humanism seeks a correlation between the human and nature, politics
and society. And no one has ever doubted the global impact of the Jews and the role that Judaism
has played in their sense of world-making. It is in this same sense that Ubuntu constitutes a
possible ideological framework for Africa in the world.
And yet, we lack that singular understanding of the role that culture plays in the development
agenda of any state. Culture matters because it provides the springboard for deploying the values,
attitudes, beliefs, virtues and those critical assumptions and dispositions around which human
progress is defined and achieved. These are the cultural elements that facilitate the capacity of
any people or state to rethink and reform its path to economic and political development. All this
leads to even larger concerns about national integration in a country that is finding it difficult to
achieve a civic nationalism that could serve as the launchpad for redefining a culture change that
produces the type of value—like the Protestant ethic—imperative for transforming economic
development.
But then, what is more pragmatic and beneficial than the collective value orientations of
Nigeria’s diversity collected into one cultural framework for honing our developmental
paradigm? Nigeria’s federal constitution possesses the potential to draw on the cultural strength
inherent in Nigeria’s ethnocultural diversity. Even more: Nigeria has the capacity to harness the
triple heritage of the African continent as the fulcrum for generating a cultural framework that
draws on Christianity, Islam and traditional African cultural heritage to process a vision of
human progress. As a Christian, I am convinced, outside of any absolutist and exclusionary
mindset, that the Ubuntu ethical framework can find complements in the Christian and Islamic
religious framework to modulate a relational value structure around which the modernization and
development of the Nigerian state can be facilitated. This is what the triple heritage thesis
promises; a promise that has been shredded within the intolerant furnace of religious
fundamentalism.
And it takes the transformation of the mindsets of the adherent of Christianity and Islam to
reflect that if out of three fundamental religions that operates in Nigeria, two are at each other’s
throat in their bid to assimilate God, then something must be worth borrowing in the tolerant
posture of the third religion. It is this openness to others that the Ilorin religious elites must
relearn as part of their genuine understanding of what religious sensibility demands in a plural
society. Eventually, knowledge is not only power, it opens the gateway for self-liberation and
societal development.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa
Retired Federal Permanent Secretary
& Professor of Public Administration
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
