By Fada Oluoma
Peter Obi has always trended in Nigeria’s public space. What’s fascinating about the current one is that he has courted the ire of a group of people who constitute the highest number of his support base; Christians.
He made a statement about Night vigils and churches, and how time should he used for productive enterprises. Many Christians are offended. I am not.
A typical Nigerian Christian or Muslim is a perfect description of what Aisha Yesusfu twitted: “they fight God’s battles and leave their battles for God”. Nothing could be truer than that. Our cerebral bishop Hassan Kukah said Nigerians can die for religious issues but will not lift a finger against social, political and economic injustices.
I don’t know how FAITH works in Islam or is explained in it, so I will focus on Christianity that I know. Nigerian Christians live in the illusion that FAITH will solve all their existential problems, they ignore SENSE(intelligence, guption,cognition and all it’s components). Sadly enough, what many of them have isn’t even FAITH but EXPECTATION, and both are quite distinct.
Faith is not Expectation, it is way more than that. They do Night vigils, marathon fasts and prayers, exciting religious activities because they have the expectations that things will be fine from those things. Things that COMMON SENSE should be applied, they apply FAITH or EXPECTATION. You can’t use FAITH to build earthly kingdoms. Every kingdom of this world was built by Common Sense( or it’s natural equivalens). It is the heavenly kingdom that you “build” by Faith. Jesus said “my kingdom is not of this world, if it were, I would have asked for a battalion of angels…”
Nigerians are just funny set of people. God gave them mango tree for food, they cut it down, use the wood to build gigantic and elegant temples where they flock to pray to God for food and prosperity. Tell me what’s more absurd than that.
Your government squanders millions of Naira for poor people to go to Mecca and Jerusalem every year for pilgrimage, and to return to their poverty thereafter, it doesn’t outrage you, but you are outraged because Peter Obi said something that is obvious to people with common sense. Nigerians lack both faith and common sense, it is a tragedy, maybe a tragicomedy.
Rev. Fr. John Chinenye Oluoma, known as Fada Oluoma is a Priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja
