200 deaths too many in a country that claims not to be at war —Cardinal Onaiyekan

Biola Azeez provides excerpts of an interaction with Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, who was at the first international conference of the inter-religious council of the University of Ilorin. Onaiyekan spoke on the recent killings in Plateau, 2019 elections and the way forward for Nigeria.

Recently, it was reported that more than 200 people were killed in Plateau State. What is your view on the development?

Two hundred people dying is 200 persons too many in a country that claims not to be at war. Nobody else in the world will believe that such a thing can happen without a government knowing who they [perpetrators] are. And I do hope that our rulers know that nobody believes them anymore. Nobody believes them anymore, because it’s not possible that 200 people would be massacred with nobody seeing them, no one  arrested or nobody called to order. It saddens my heart. Now, this is a very typical case. Whether those killed were Christians or Muslims, that’s not the issue. That 200 human lives were destroyed is the point here.  Similarly, I don’t really care about identities of those who are killing; but whoever they are, they should be stopped and they should be prosecuted.

 

The 2019 general election is around the corner. With the political waves in the country, what are your expectations?

In Nigeria, we’ve turned elections into crisis. Nigerians don’t know, for example, that in other countries you wake up in the morning, you go and vote and go back to work – even government officials. Schools keep running; teachers just leave classrooms and move to election centres and go back to class. No police sirens, no soldiers everywhere. Last weekend, it was only the APC convention that took place at Eagle Square, and the whole of Abuja was under siege. And I asked myself, what’s the problem? Who’s attacking whom? Why do we need a whole army of soldiers because a political party is holding its convention? And if it’s like this in the greenwood, what will happen when the woods are dry? No, we have to change. There must be something else in this election that you and I do not understand. If it’s just a question of picking somebody among volunteers who are going to serve us, do we need all these? There must be something else behind it and they should, please, confess and tell us. What’s it that they are killing themselves over?

ALSO READ: We’ve lost 20,000 cows but we didn’t kill anybody in Plateau —Miyetti Allah chairman

In your paper that you just delivered, you called for training and retraining of religious leaders. Why is that?

Let’s be frank with ourselves. We all grew up in this country with Christianity and Islam in stiff competition, even rivalry. And the result is that in our early years, we were taught that Muslims were XYZ and Muslim children were told that Christians were ABC. We have to change all that. And it’s not easy. It’s not easy. Let’s go back to the catechism we used at the schools. We have to rewrite them, if you really want to teach children to grow up with a conviction in their own faith that will accommodate others. I speak about children in schools and I also speak about worshippers in churches. Every Sunday, the people gather in the church, and the priest preaches to them. We hope that the Christian clerics keep preaching Christianity. In the mosques, every Friday, Imams are also preaching. We hope they are preaching positive things too. But for them to do that, they must be well trained. I know where my pastors are trained and we do our best to cater for this in our seminary.

 

At this point in the life of Nigeria’s polity, there seems to be so many expectations. What would you say is the way forward on religious harmony and nation building?

I wish to propose here two ways forward: one theoretical and the other practical. The first and theoretical way forward is to seek and celebrate the common grounds we have in our faiths, despite the non-negligible doctrinal differences. When we make the effort to discover such common grounds, it is often a great surprise to see how much we have in common. Without reducing dogmatic issues to easily measurable matters, I believe that we can safely say that between Christianity and Islam, what we have in common may, after all, outweigh what separates us. It is a pity that we are so used to defining our identities by what makes us different that we often have no eyes for the things that we have in common. Is it a small matter that both faiths believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, whose providence guides human lives, and before whom all will stand in judgment on the last day? In the area of morality, both faiths largely agree on what is right and wrong on the basis of certain moral principles and shared values. We are not really that much strangers to one another.

The second and practical way is even more accessible. This has to do with jointly tackling challenges and problems that affect everyone, irrespective of religious belonging. For example, at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, when many lives were being lost through fear and ignorance, the joint action of religious communities went far into many areas not reached by government services. Similar success was registered in the inter-faith action against malaria. Inter-faith groups of women are putting their heads and hands together to address public health issues of great concern to women, like ante-natal care, infant mortality, immunisation of children, and even social issues like the basic rights of women in the society.

Some youths in Abuja have found inter-faith football tournaments very effective for promoting religious harmony among these often volatile groups. We are still to find an effective way of deploying the power of inter-faith action among religious leaders in the great national challenges like the war against corruption, peace building and conflict resolution, and the needed sanitisation of our political system.

This is long overdue. Let me conclude by saying that the issue of religion and nation building has been a constant subject of discussion in many forums. There is no lack of ideas. What we need is effective action to change attitudes and way of doing things such that will bring about the type of change that is necessary for building a truly strong and united nation.

There are many topics that one hopes will be treated. Among such issues one can mention the relationship between politics and religion, the still vexed issue of the place of the Islamic shariah law in the legal system of our nation, the scope and limits of freedom of religion. If this conference is to register any progress on the issues mentioned above and similar ones, there will be need for an open mind and academic rigour that we have learnt to expect from this centre of excellence, the University of Ilorin.