By now, you must have noticed how the APC hound dogs’ attack quickly turns into an echo chamber. For instance, one of them uses derogatory language, and others take up the refrain to resound it across multiple channels. In their case against Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, the accusation they settled for is that he is “partisan”. He drew their ire when he granted an interview with a TV station after he and members of the Catholic Council of Bishops met the President and presented a list of grievances they wanted him to address. Now, virtually everywhere you turn, there is a loyalist who must mention “partisan” when they talk about Onaiyekan on television or in print.
Watching the ever-irascible FCT minister Nyesom Wike—who always manages to sound like he woke up on the wrong side of the bed each time he makes a public appearance—hurl the same accusation is almost funny. Wike judges partisanship by the frequency of comments he considers “negative” versus supposedly positive ones. He wants critics to say nice things, in the name of demonstrating “objectivity” while criticising the government. Except that someone like Onaiyekan is too smart to not see through that. If you must preface a critical message with “soft words” so that a bunch of partisan hacks will not have to label you “partisan”, you will dilute your message and attenuate the urgency of the delivery.
This accusation of partisanship, somehow, always manages to come up every election year when politicians get jumpy that the opinion of religious leaders will witness against them. This time, they are throwing out the term “partisan” while they are hoping that the charge of “parochial” is what lands. But what does it even mean that a cleric is partisan? It is an accusation weaponised on both sides of the—that word again!—partisan divide. For instance, some months ago when the General Overseer of the RCCG, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, defended the President against criticism over insecurity, it was highly held in some quarters as a partisan position. Adeboye had stated that a president only issues a directive and does not execute it, drawing criticisms from those who thought he must have been politically compromised if he did not think that a president also has the duty to ensure his words do not fall to the ground. Adeboye too was roundly derided for being partisan. Just a few months later, the cleric with a contrary opinion is similarly criticised. What makes Adeboye’s opinion on Tinubu any less partisan than that of Onaiyekan that the presidency went all out against him? Do all partisan positions even have the same moral weight?
At some point, we will come to terms with the idea that there is perhaps no universally acceptable position a cleric can take in political matters. For some, clerics should not be involved in politics at all lest they compromise their moral authority when seen to take sides. The best they think clerics can do is limit their involvement to praying and advising leaders. For others, clerics should be involved in politics because it affects people. Staying away from the realms where decisions that affect life are taken, just so one can bury one’s head in prayers, is playing the ostrich game.
Also, the idea that religion can be separated from politics is not only naïve but also historically inaccurate. There is no time when politics and religion have ever been extricated. Either position has its merits and demerits, and each can be supported with relevant scriptures.
In this case, the Council of Bishops not only did the right thing by meeting the president and presenting a specific set of issues that affect the people but also updated the public on it by granting an interview afterwards. It is called accountability, a strange word for people who think they are above the people they allegedly serve. Does a perception of the bishop’s supposed partisanship invalidate any of the points they made? No, because there is no circumstance under which anyone who confronts political power will ever be non-partisan. We are all partisan; the difference is to what (a moral cause) or to whom (a political personality). The APC attack dogs are so deeply guilty of the latter that they lack the concept of the former.
It is cheap to criticise Onaiyekan for holding a persistently cynical view of the government when very little they do inspires either trust in their integrity. They want Onaiyekan to see the positive sides of what they have done, but they cannot keep their own stories straight. One day, they tell us that they have reformed Nigeria and things are looking up; another day, they acknowledge things are bad. Recently, presidential aide Bayo Onanuga bluntly admitted he was blind to the predicament of Nigerians. He said he has not “seen” this legendary hunger that Nigerians are said to be going through, and his blindness persists even though people shout “ebi ń pa wá o!” at them in public. While still going through his five stages of denial, the first lady concedes that things are so bad that the richer Afrobeat artistes need to step in and help the government lift the poor. In the meantime, she too would be giving women some pittance to sell àkàrà and kúlíkúlí. So, which report should we believe?
The other day they had an election in Ekiti State, and the APC openly bribed the voters with loaves of bread and five to ten thousand naira. Think about it: if Nigeria is working as well as they would have us believe, people would not be so cheaply buyable. They will either be well off enough to reject the money entirely, or the bribe would need to be upped. If people are still collecting bread loaves and less than $10, it means their material conditions are those of abject poverty and unrelenting impoverishment. So, yes, Onaiyekan and the bishops were on to something that none of the data being hastily circulated by the president’s men to contest their position can match.
Another gimmick they devised is to say Onaiyekan represents only a subset and does not speak for the entire body of Christians. Such laughable idiocy. Even the president, when he takes a stand on issues, ideological or otherwise, does he also not speak for a mere subset of Nigerians? Has there ever been a time we collectively agreed on anything? Neither the president’s opinion nor that of anyone else can be considered representative of all the constituents that inhabit the country. In a highly fragmented polity like ours, hardly anyone has or can assume a universal mandate.
The way the presidency responded to the Council of Bishops with a tantrum, for some reason, reminds me of Jehoiakim, a king in the Bible who taxed the poor, enriched himself with stolen labour, and hurt the nation. God sent the prophet Jeremiah to him with a list of warnings written on a scroll. But what did he do when he received the scroll? He shredded it into the fire, making the fundamental mistake of confusing the message with the medium. God asked Jeremiah to rewrite the message, and this time add even more judgment against the haughty king (which eventually came to pass). There is a parallel between Jeremiah and Onaiyekan that the APC guys want to immolate for doing his duty as a man of the cloth. Here is the thing: that the medium that brought the message is destructible does not mean the message itself will go away. If the words of the bishops irritated your bowels so much that you rushed out to empty their innards all over the media, then perhaps you should take the message seriously and just repent.
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