If I were a praying man, I would be on my knees every minute of the
day for the next three months. And if I could be sure not to expire from
the inhuman sacrifice, I would seek to better God-the-Son by fasting
for 90 days and nights, hoping that the 492 wise men and women selected
to rescue Nigeria from the precipice of self-annihilation would not need
a day beyond 15 June 2014 to complete their task. I would fast, pray
and cast out the demon of corrupt and visionless leadership of our
luckless country every minute, since, it appears, Jesus never really
finished the job of conquering Satan, his declaration of victory over
two thousand years ago notwithstanding. I would be unmindful of the
lamentation by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in the poem “Easter
1916,” that “too long a sacrifice / can make a stone of the heart.” All
because as the National Conference, stripped of the crucial element of
sovereignty, begins in earnest in Abuja, the world capital of deception
and corruption, I find my mind drifting unrestrainedly to that Pauline
definition of faith that is the pillar of Pentecostalism: faith as the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Why, I ask my treacherous mind, do you turn to Paul, formerly known
as Saul, one whose piety and perversity were in near-equal measure and
too often deceived by a zealousness borne of the insatiable need of
atonement for his past of persecuting Christ? Because, the answer came,
you are surrounded by citizens praying night and day, who have all
become the Aladuras of Gabriel Okara’s unforgettable poem “One Night at
Victoria Beach”; because we are a nation of prayer warriors “fixed hard /
on what only hearts can see // “pray[ing] to what only hearts can see.”
Which means that you must interrogate Paul’s definition of faith. I did
and came to a secular understanding.
Faith, it seems safe to say, is a
primary condition of humanity. Believing things hoped for as if they
already existed or would be substantiated in due course has to be the
only other ingredient besides air, water and food that helps to sustain
life. There is something evolutionary, something inextricably tied to
self-preservation and the perpetuation of the species, in the abstract
quality called faith, the basis of religion. After all, the great hope
of all organised religions is that of immortality; a reality-defying
conviction that even after death, we shall live, in a new place by
whatever name called — ancestordom or heaven, it doesn’t matter. Faith,
then, is another name for hope and optimism. Early homo sapiens,
confronted by threats to life from every direction every minute,
fortified themselves with the belief that somehow they would survive.
That belief in turn inspired the ingenuity that would not only make puny
humans the greatest predators in the jungle but also lead them out of
the jungle and into society. The survivalist trait borne of that
experience had to be passed on and retained even when the conditions for
it had substantially changed. Threats to life still abound, anyway, and
in that sense massive and systemic corruption which denies such
life-perpetuating measures as jobs, good roads, well-equipped hospitals
and expertly trained doctors, etc., is the same as the wild beasts and
malevolent forces of our primitive history.
Thus, if Nigeria’s problems appear to be beyond human solution,
causing countless respectable citizens from the president to the poorest
peasant to call for prayers, there must be a point to Pauline faith,
founded as it is on a fundamental human attribute. The secular basis of
religious faith is evinced by Paul and Apostle James, both of whom agree
that “faith without works is dead.” Works in this case is good deeds,
the things that we do in the full consciousness of our shared humanity,
of the needs of our “brethrens” and “sistrens”; in short, actions
conducive to society as a whole. Those things are captured by a word
bandied about by pastor and pop star alike to the point of
meaninglessness: love, also known as charity. As in the commandment to
love one’s neighbour as oneself — masochists and psychopaths excluded,
of course! This utmost priority of love constitutes a categorical
imperative, without which there can be no ethical philosophy centred on
the common good. It is elaborated by Paul in the thirteenth chapter of
his first epistle to the Corinthians.
So to all the pious citizens who exhort us every minute to pray for
Nigeria, I say remember: even if you speak with the tongues of men and
of angels, and have not love, you are nothing but a “sounding brass, or a
clanging cymbal”; if you prophesy, claiming to have mastered all
mysteries and all knowledge, have faith enough to remove mountains, but
no acts of charity, you are “nothing.” Even if you were to give your
body to be burnt on the altar or blown up by a bomb strapped to your
chest or kept in the booth of your car, as a sacrifice to God, but lack
love, you would die in vain. Like James, I would ask the advocates of
prayer as the divine panacea to Nigeria’s human-made problems, What does
it profit us if we exhibit faith that moves mountains and have no works
to back it up? Can faith save Nigeria? I would prefer that whoever
would save Nigeria show me faith by their works, rather than their faith
without works.
From the need to radically redesign and rebuild the tottering
colonial edifice called Nigeria through the enthronement of fiscal
federalism, secularism and social justice, to the fashioning of an
ethical philosophy that would inspire loyalty and patriotism, among
other necessities, the “works” expected of us are very clear. And they
seem very different from raucous prayers to banish demons that only
hearts can see.
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