COVID-19 and Religious Conmanship in Nigeria

By Chikwendu Christian Ukaegbu

Characteristic of her adroitness in journalistic communication, Comfort Obi posted a magnificent treatise in this magazine on March 29, 2020.  The piece titled, ‘COVID-19: Where Were the Clerics, Prophets, Seers?” x-rayed how the pandemic exposed the hollowness of the counterfeit religiosity and spirituality in present-day Nigeria.

She stated, “In the face of the outbreak of the Coronavirus, a respecter of nobody, there is a group of Nigerians who should bury their heads in shame. They should shut-up forever. This virus has exposed them for what they truly are-Fake. Exploiters. Blackmailers. Opportunists. ” That treatise which mirrored my longstanding objection to and disdain for the destructive religiosity and fake spirituality that prevail in much of Nigeria today deserves a sociological backing.

The high rate of poverty in Nigeria goes hand-in-hand with the rate of pseudo religiosity dominated by church ministers who hoodwink their congregations in order to achieve their rent-seeking objectives. Since the spread of the Pentecostal type of worship and preachers of prosperity theology, church ministers have used the opportunity of the ‘opiate character of religion’ to exploit the gullible poor to believe that giving their meager financial resources to the ministry assures them material success on earth and eternal bliss in heaven. Meanwhile, their pastors live in extreme opulence on earth. Not to forget that there are also rich people who patronize these churches. Sociologically speaking, Nigeria still is a theological society where recourse to the supernatural anchored in ethno-traditional belief practices or the received religions of Christianity and Islam, or both, dominate human thought and action.

Congregants do not question the fake miracles orchestrated by church ministers and their shameless collaborators whereby they use fake glossolalia (speaking in tongues) to mesmerize their congregations. In order to out-compete one another before their congregations and the public, flamboyant, rambunctious style of preaching prevails among pastors of these new-age churches and some priests called charismatics within the conventional denominations. Sermons assume cataclysmic, apocalyptic, and millenarian posture invoking the coming of Armageddon.

The Christianity of my generation in the Roman Catholic tradition taught us to shun, spurn, disdain, ignore and snub powers, principalities, demons and fetishes because they are incapable of exerting any effect on the person. But a lot of Christian ministers today including some Roman Catholic priests teach their congregations to fear these. Congregants are made to believe that all the problems in their lives–inability to secure employment, loss of one’s job, inability of young women to secure suitors, couples experiencing childlessness, bad marriage, failure in school, inability to feed oneself, family conflicts, and all manners of illness, are caused by demons planted around them by their enemies. Or that evil spirits find disfavor in some individuals and so inflict sufferings in them. In fact one of the counterfeit prophets proclaimed COVID ‘a demonic work’.

With fear come fatalism, defeatism, and irrational attachment to those who claim to be mediums between God and humans. The self-proclaimed mediums boast of answers to the imponderables of human existence. According to news accounts, victims, accomplices and eyewitnesses, many of these self-proclaimed ‘holy’ mediums that is, some church ministers, swim in deep swamps of immorality and crime yet their congregations continue to follow them as redeemers. This is because political leaders have failed to provide citizens the socioeconomic opportunities with which to escape from excessive attachment to the otherworldly. Escape from otherworldliness will expose them to the real source of their life troubles, namely, the elected and appointed political officials and their cronies who continue to swim in corruption, impunity, and incompetence that continue to harm the common people.  If prayer, sui generis, were the answer to personal success or national prosperity, people in the developed countries would be in prayer every moment of their lives. But that is not the case.

Nigeria has the highest self-report of daily prayer in the world with 95% of the respondents saying they pray daily. With the exception of China, people in developed nations pray the least. According to the PEW Research Center, the reasons why the U.S. has a higher self-reported daily prayer (55%) than other wealthier countries include the lack of government interference in religion and the resultant open religious “market” – where different religions enthusiastically compete for new members; and the relatively high levels of income inequality because societies with more unequal income levels tend to be more religious.

People in countries where certain religions require obligatory daily prayer, as in the case of Islam, are also more likely to report higher rates of daily prayer than those whose religions do not require such. That may be part of the reason for the very high report of daily prayer among Nigerians because a significant number of the population is Muslim. But prayer is prayer regardless of the religion. Most or all the countries in the Figure above out-perform Nigeria on the socioeconomic indicators used to assess the quality of life and the human condition, yet it is the most prayerful. Hence, Abel Olayinka rightly noted that: ‘While Nigerians and Africans were binding and casting Lucifer, Dubai went into massive infrastructural development. While we were praying, Singapore went into investment in technology. While we were speaking in tongues, Denmark went into education of its citizens’.

China where only 1% of the people say they pray daily aggressively pursues its national objective of massive industrialization and poverty reduction without recourse to religion or the supernatural.  Some years ago I had the opportunity to teach Chinese students in China. Most students in my classes told me they did not believe in anything not even in Buddha. Only the handful converts to Christianity said they believed in God. I came to understand why, apart from their monks, Buddhist Temples are filled more with tourists than the people of the community that house the temples. Yet China majestically marches to eliminate poverty by 2050. Therefore prayer and religiosity are not sine qua non of individual and national prosperity. Leaders of Nigeria who ask citizens to pray and fast for the betterment of the human condition in the country are lying, fatalistic and ignorant. They abdicate or outsource their responsibilities to the supernatural. Do not get me wrong. Religion is an important social institution with useful functions in society. But it need not neutralize personal responsibility, self-efficacy and rational thinking, essential qualities these fake prophets expunge from their followers.

Some Nigerian clerics live and preach in the world of reality, though. One of them a young priest who promotes payment of taxes over payment of tithes; he advises the federal government not to allocate funds for pilgrimage to Israel while health facilities in the country are unconscionably inadequate. There are other clerics in this category of which space does not permit here.

What has the above exposition got to do with COVID?  Why did the anointed men and women of God not see the impending destructive power of COVID in the first place? Ex-post facto, some of the ‘prophets’ predicted that the pandemic would end in March.  March 2020 ended a long time ago yet the number of Nigerians infected by the virus continues to rise. One of the ‘seers’ even declared that the pandemic would die just like the Ebola did. This false prophet can get away with this childlike declaration in a theological society with a stupendous number of poverty stricken people who are poor not because of their personal failings but because they are in a country where leaders do not love their citizens. Nigeria was not rid of Ebola by a wave of the hand or by an act of God.  Human agency, i.e. professionals in public health institutions with the right skills plus material and moral support from the government worked hard to rid the country of Ebola. COVID will exit Nigeria in the same manner, by efficient application of human agency. Bottom line, Nigerian religious leaders who dub themselves prophets are ‘Fake, Exploiters, Blackmailers, and Opportunists who should bury their heads in shame and shut-up forever’, as Comfort Obi rightly observed.

Chikwendu Christian Ukaegbu (Professor of Sociology & Global Development, Ret.)  [email protected]

For more, see my new book: In Search of Development: Human Capital, Entrepreneurship,  Politics, & Leadership in Nigeria, Goldline & Jacobs Publishing, NJ, USA: January 2020.