Outsourcing To God BY TUNJI LARDNER NOW imagine that Nigeria is a viable business enterprise. Tough to imagine ... right? But please humour me and suspend reason and all empirical proof to the contrary and just imagine that Nigeria is a viable and ongoing business. Sometimes, businesses might decide for purposes of efficiency and cost reductions to ‘outsource’, which means contracting out an internal business process to a third-party organisation for a determined fee. Like in all business transactions, it is fraught with risks, and not the least being giving up the control of the process and outcomes of what is an ‘internal’ set of responsibilities to a third party. In this instance, it seems as if Nigerians have outsourced their singular and collective responsibilities to God. Thinking along as I write this, the rich irony of the metaphor of Nigeria being a viable business rings even truer when one considers that arguably the only viable business enterprise in Nigeria today is the business of religion. Every day through my window, yes, every day and night, I should add, I suffer the duelling cacophony of a church and a mosque in close proximity to my residence, advertising and marketing their services to their respective clients through strategically placed external loud speakers, each respectively trying to drown out the other’s messages of salvation and prosperity. This deafening daily fracas has degenerated to the point where respectively the fulsome expression of praise and worship and the solemn call to prayer have long ceded hallowed ground to the crass competition for ostensibly the hearts and souls of supplicants and new converts, but most definitely for their wallets. This business of religion in Nigeria has grown especially over the last three decades, to become a nearly ubiquitous and unquestioned presence in every aspect of our personal, social, business and national lives. I recognize that from here on out, I have to tread very carefully lest my curious enquiry be misconstrued as a direct attack on the practice of one’s faith or religion. Let me categorically state that this is not my intention for I also consider myself to be a man of faith, hope and charity. If indeed blame is to be assigned for daring to imposing reason upon faith, then you must blame the indoctrination of my secondary school whose motto ‘Pro Fide Et Scientia,’ which roughly translates into ‘for faith and knowledge.’ In the timeless arguments between the contending notions of faith and reason, an operational compromise seems to have been struck between the deep and necessarily subject perspectives of faith and the objective judgement of reason, based sometimes on scientific reasoning or empirical observation. To the clear thinking and rational mind, both tendencies can often be accommodated without too much rancour in the day-to-day understanding of how the world works and our respective place in it. However, it seems that over the last four decades or so, the collective Nigerian mind-set, conditioned in part by the woeful and dysfunctional leadership has come to totally abandoned reason for faith. The prevailing zeitgeist is the total abdication of reason, personal, private and public responsibilities as citizens for the deluded worship of an increasingly tribal ‘god’ that promises both personal salvation and material prosperity. While the practice of this curious delusion manifests differently in both the Christian and Islamic faiths, in my books it is the former that has refined this Nigerian business of religion to point where it is now fit for export alongside, Oil, Nollywood, Afrobeats and polio. While the practice of preaching ‘prosperity theology’ itself is not new, there was always the implicit logic that honest labour and hard work would be rewarded by the divine. Indeed according to the King James Version of the bible in Proverbs 12:11 He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread: but he that followeth vain persons is void of understanding.’ Or as put more clearly in the New International Version of the bible, ‘Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.’ In the Nigerian iteration of prosperity theology, the real deep and spiritual underpinnings of the teaching of the good book have been blithely ignored to instead serve up a secular and culturally freighted year-long offering of materialistic pursuits. The work-reward ethic as embedded in the Puritan work ethic ‘which emphasizes hard work, frugality and diligence as a constant display of a person’s salvation in the Christian faith, in contrast to the focus upon religious attendance, confession, and ceremonial sacrament.’ In Nigeria people practice their culture more than they practice their faith. And it is through this cultural lens that we must look through to fully understand this practice of outsourcing everything to God. Casting aside the sanctimonious certitudes of faith on display every day, Friday and Sunday inclusive, it is clear that we have become a befuddled frightened and immobilized people for whom our loud proclamations of faith and the constant invocation of Lord’s name for every trite and trivial challenge is really what psychologists would call ‘displacement activities.’ In effect we have displaced our own personal responsibilities and freewill in favour of a constrictive and deterministic worldview, in which we devalue and discount the powerful agency of our own vision, industry and national development. Ironically it is this national development typically expressed as material prosperity and having lots of personal money that we so crave and desire to have and enjoy without the hard work, frugality and diligence that is required to achieve these goals. We have come to totally believe the contrived intersession of ‘faith,’ specifically ‘blind faith’ in the preachments of some of our so called men (it is alas a patriarchy) of God, who promise instant salvation and the immediate remediation of our growing poverty, all for a small consideration of just ten percent of your gross income, and even more if you want your blessings to flow more abundantly. This business decision to outsource everything to God in the hope that blind and unquestioning faith is the surest way to procure personal material and pecuniary benefits alongside some salvation in my estimation is not working for Nigeria. Even as the expectations of the adherents soar, whipped up by increasingly sophisticated international multi-media marketing and advertising by churches and mosques, the reality is that Nigeria and Nigerians on a per capita basis are getting poorer and poorer by the hour. If you don’t believe this then check the vital statistics of the country, and walk this walk by sight and not by faith. So stepping back for a minute from this spiritually hollow carnival of religious theatrics, I must ask the question, if material benefits and cash are what we truly desire in this world as I believe is the case with Nigerians, do we really need a ‘god’ or ‘gods’ to fulfil this desire? If we look to the West, there is a partial answer in that this increasingly ‘Godless’ and intensely secular region have created stable political systems that generate tremendous material benefits for their citizens, all without this disingenuous liturgy of religious piety. Consider that we are one of the most religious nations on earth as well as one of the most corrupt. Someone please explain this paradox to me. To go back to the quote ‘Those who work their land will have abundant food, but those who chase fantasies have no sense.’ Clearly what is needed in Nigeria is the leadership in all spheres to shape the Nigerian mindset to the proud commitment to country ‘to work their land’ with the systemic assurances that they will in turn ‘have abundant food.’ As we were taught in primary school ‘heaven helps those who help themselves,’ If we continue to outsource to God, what indeed we can do for ourselves we continue to be like ‘those who chase fantasies (and) have no sense.’ Given the importance and sensitivity of this topic, I especially welcome reasoned and informed responses that can add value to this discourse. The good ones if any will be selected for publication in this column.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 15:33:34 +0000