If you are very observant, you would have noticed that, in Eastern Nigeria, there are people who sleep in the local markets when the shop owners have closed for business. In Lagos, there are those destitute who sleeps under the bridge. They live in squalor, in the dingiest of places. Few miles away from my house, there is a community of damaged ugly humans, clothed in rags. They pick metal scraps on the roads, dump-sites and from piles of rubbish, bent from suffering and battered by their condition of existence. First, I wondered why there were many church people, many churches, many doctrines, when all that humanity needs is a touch of human kindness. If the government has chosen to forgot the indigent, why also the church? The Exorcism of Poverty and Hunger in Nigeria In a country where eighty percent of the populace cannot boast of $1 daily, what is the sense in polygamy, uncontrolled birthing and, for that matter, marriage? There is no gainsaying the reality that the incorporation of ‘sharp’ and corrupt practices in the establishment is culpable for the vast degree of poverty that has literally bound the citizenry in fetlocks of misfortune. Truths cannot be argued. But that notwithstanding, there are some other factors responsible for the exponential growth of poverty, which, going by previous dilation on the subject by people who have analyzed the situation, seem negligible to us. The downright poor feed from hand to mouth, they scavenge to eke out their daily living and have no roofs over their heads. If you are very observant, you would have noticed that, in Eastern Nigeria, there are people who sleep in the local markets when the shop owners have closed for business. In Lagos, there are those destitute who sleep under the bridges. They live in squalor, in the dingiest of places. Few miles away from my house, there is a community of damaged ugly humans, clothed in rags. They pick metal scraps on the roads, dump-sites and from piles of rubbish, bent from suffering and battered by their condition of existence. Yesterday, while I was returning from my Community Development Service meeting, I had come across a weather-beaten, gaunt-looking, malnourished woman who tied a crying child with a ragged wrapper against her back and was bent over a heap of trash, rummaging through the refuse of the world, picking water cans and plastics, and safely putting them into a worn out Bagco sac as if she had found gold. The composite odour of badly incinerated waste about the place had filtered into my nose. I was moved to cup my nose with my palm until I had maintained a reasonable distance from that pile of rubbish. But this pitiable woman climbed the heap of waste even as a community of flies buzzed around that cesspit and the little child on her back cried out of discomfort under the stifling heat of the noon-day’s sun. Then I felt for the woman and her child. I went back to the woman, dug my hand into my pocket and when it came out, I had put an unprecedented smile on the poor woman’s sweating, miserably shrunken face. While I walked away, a myriad of disturbing things poured into my mind. First, I wondered why there were many church people, many churches, many doctrines, when all that humanity needs is a touch of human kindness. If the government has chosen to forgot the indigent, why also the church? It won’t be long before some misguided pundits would attack me for sifting out the church’s negligence of its major duty, the duty of coming to the aid of the down-trodden, and the miserable. The church is busy amassing and piling up wealth, erecting institutions that have clearly become the exclusive preserve of the rich. It would seem then, without any trace of contradiction, that the church has been carried away by the quest for material possession. Church principals and administrators erect massive parishes and very big cathedrals, expensive universities and, in some instances, control government secondary schools (which is the case in Anambra state) where they have moved with inexcusable thirst for accumulation of wealth to hike tuition fees beyond the affordability of indigent students. Many students have since dropped out of these government schools simply because the church has taken over the management of the schools for the state government. Those drop-outs are now touting in motor parks, pushing carts and wheel barrows in the markets. For some others, their parents have since leased them to business men who are based in Onitsha and Lagos to serve as apprentices for these men. You and I know that ‘boy boy’ is modern-day slavery. So far, this is how the church has been arresting the development of poor children after fleecing their parents in the church! It is now inescapable to state that the church aids the rich in getting richer, and the poor in getting poorer. Our people have thrown the body of Christ in crisis by turning the church into a money-making venture. The corporate body of Catholicism and Anglicanism are culpable of this and cannot, in the least regard, deny this fact or the accusation I have leveled against them. Private buccaneers and brazen criminals who parade themselves as pastors have taken a cue from them. The truth is that a lot of people see the church as a business opportunity. Since the proliferation of the Pentecostal miracle centers in the early 90s, many so-called Christians have not been thinking with their brains. Instead they reason with their anus. During the regime of Sani Abacha, things were so bad that Nigerians found God in a new light, thinking that miracles will solve the economic hardship that came with Abacha’s brutal dictatorship. Religion, then, ceased to be the opium of the masses and transmogrified into being the ganja of the masses, a situation that accounts for why there is much ado about imported religion in present-day Nigeria. Many of these churches that have sprung up lately in the nooks and cranny of the country have all invented new mediums and new tricks to disguise their crooked ways. From the names they go by, it is easy for a critical mind to fathom their guise. The church entrepreneurs know that small-minded people are junketing here and there desperately looking for prosperity and miracles and would do just about anything to see their illusion become reality. Little wonder churches outnumber schools by the ratio of 40:1. This has led to the destruction of the country’s human intellect by turning people into sheep that can be fleeced at will. Ever wondered the tremendous turn-around that Nigeria would experience if all the churches in Nigeria turned into factories, companies and colleges? Have you ever given it a thought? This is it. If all the churches in Nigeria turned into companies and factories, the problem of unemployment would be solved. Now, investment in religion has brought grave misfortune on all of us and now, we are possessed with poverty. But if all the money being channeled into the propagation of religion is channeled into the establishment of factories and multinational companies, we would not be doing humanity a disservice. By such noble means, we would have exorcised poverty from the body of the masses. Look at Northern Nigeria: the religion they practice allows even a man who has no hope of surviving beyond today to marry more than one wife and then manufacture a battalion of (Almajiri) children who, at a very tender age, are either sent off to the streets to fend for themselves or get dumped in Koranic schools to learn the scripture of Mohammed on empty stomach. Erudition never failed in reminding us that a hungry man is an angry man. Therefore, it is not very difficult for a Muslim teacher who preaches hatred and violence to incite these children against the society. They are taken in for special grooming and are possessed to believe that ‘education is sin’. They would rise against humanity with guns and bombs to pulverise us back to the Stone Age. Today, the country has been thrown into a decisive war with deep roots in the vicious cycle of poverty. Europe and America are economic world powers. We always wonder why. It is because they do not invest in religion. Whilst we invest in religion, they invest in human beings, education, science, technology. And the whole world is moving forward except Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. Let me remind us that religion arrests development. This is the reason why Karl Marx understood religion as the inability of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understood. I would, therefore, insist that organized religion is a very dangerous phenomenon and ought to be repudiated with the mild vehemence of intellect. The biggest inventions of religion are ignorance, poverty, and violence to which there is no end. Nigeria invested hugely in religion. Today we are contending with ignorance, poverty, insurgency, terrorism and a full-blown war which many people seem not to know about till this very moment. The recent splurge in Nigeria’s population explosion accounts for the reason why, after our economy has been re-based by financial experts and touted as the biggest economy in Africa, we are yet to feel the effect of that prodigious feat on our day-to-day living. The re-basing has not registered any visible effect on the common populace because, I feel, People just wake up one day and decide to get married without any form of basic family planning. So you find a man who could hardly boast of an annual income of N500, 000 (an equivalent of $3,200) fathering seven to ten children in a country where scarcity of food and hemorrhaging inflation have become a recurring decimal. Actually, the prevailing circumstances in Nigeria are hostile for the ostentation of having more than two children as an average citizen. Many people do not have savings, are in very bad debts, but still find a foolish way to impregnate their wives and produce children that will soon die poor like them, after making fruitless efforts to break the poverty line. For how can you even dream of getting an education that will land you a job if your broke parents are not capable of bearing up to the herculean responsibility of sending you to the best schools around, and which costs quite a fortune? It is in this regard that birth control, which was first proposed by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), as a means to the reduction of poverty-induced hunger, appears quite inescapable to us at this critical moment. According to Malthus, human populations grow exponentially while food production grows at an arithmetic rate. The direct consequence of this assertion being that, while the rate of food production grows on a series of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, to 20 and so on, population does not just grow, it rather explodes with a multiplier effect in the series of 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 and so on. And this is the case with Nigeria. I don’t even want to bring into the picture the recklessness with which the agricultural sector has been abandoned with all attention being focused on crude oil that would soon be depleted in the next couple of years. In the South, agriculture has been abandoned, even subsistence farming. It is solely responsible for the reason why a thousand naira cannot buy a decent three square meal beyond twenty-four hours. At the present time, it is wise that one average man should have only one child or, at most, two and the number should only increase uniformly with the strength of the man’s economic power. If, within a specific interval of time, the man becomes as rich as Dangote, it would be entirely unproblematic for him to acquire even more wives and more children. The pertinence of this proposal goes a long way in breaking the cycle of poverty in Nigeria, thereby exorcising this social monster that has continually ravaged the common man and arrested his transcendence into a rich inheritance, for if you have only one child, it is not in doubt that the child would be sent to the best of schools and empowered with a great deal of fortune upon which he could depend for a brighter future. On the other hand, how foolhardy will it be for a man to split his ‘minimum wage’ among six children? Where will he even start from? A man who earns twenty thousand and has many mouths to feed, clothe, and train in school has ultimately put himself in a tight corner, and has by this act, blurred the bright chance he would have stood with just one or two offspring to cater for. I do not want to mince matters about the factor of corruption in Nigeria which is the chief reason why people are suffering so much in the midst of plenty. We have been watching helplessly since the looting began in the second republic. It later matured into grand theft from 1999 when the reins of power were handed over to really bloody civilians. And what, in exact terms, has happened since 1999 if not chronic underdevelopment, unthinkable looting spree, endemically escalating graduate unemployment, ethnicity, chronic and absolute poverty, acute hunger, no water, no electricity, no security? The country jingles corruption! Corruption! Corruption! I know that people are too busy with survival struggle to confront this criminal government. The reason is simple: it is a total waste of time for an underfed man to confront an overfed criminal. But when people have controlled hunger and absolute poverty with a sense of emergency, through intellectualism, a rejection of religion and birth control, it won’t be long before we have a truly great country with a government of the people, a government truly erected and enthroned by the people and for the people, where the pursuit of happiness is sacrosanct, a government of welfare, a government with a human heart. Emmanuel Ifediata
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 17:46:27 +0000
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