RIGHT HONOREE, WRONG MONUMENT

This is one piece I wish I did not have to write.  But our penchant for feferity and spectacle at the highest reaches of our public life leave me no choice.  As long as this obtains and I have breath in me, I hope I do not fail to call us to account when this penchant gets the better of us.  Even if this does not resonate for many of us at the present time, my hope is that the future would at least find a record of dissenting voices insisting that we do right by ourselves and our posterity.

I woke up this morning in central New York State to the spectacle carried live on TVC News—thanks, TVC—of Akinwumi Ambode, the governor of Lagos State, flanked by the usual retinue, performing the unveiling of the new statue of Obafemi Awolowo.  The new statue replaces a previous one that stood at Allen Avenue in the state capital, Ikeja, that had been torn down.

I congratulate the governor and his executive on honouring Awolowo’s memory by commissioning this public monument.  More Jeleen to their elbows.  And had I not proceeded to read newspaper reports of the ceremony, specifically, Ambode’s address to the gathering, this piece would, perhaps, not have been written.  The main points of the speech reported in The Nation newspaper, online edition, are at variance with what I believe a proper monumentalisation of Awolowo should look like.  In other words, we have the right honoree, but, sadly, the wrong monument.

Public, physical monuments do not teach history.  All the things that would enable Ambode and his fellow leaders in the western part of Nigeria he exhorted in his speech to do the things that would really advance Awolowo’s legacy beyond material embodiments in statues are precisely what I find lacking in repeated celebrations and invocations of Awolowo in our public life.

I have nothing against statues but I am convinced that a world in which there are more plaques commemorating Awolowo than schools, research centres and organisations studying his ideas and enshrining them in the imagination of future generations and the leadership they will furnish; or scholars, not hagiographers, dedicated to studying his ideas, is a world in which Awolowo’s memory is dishonoured and his ideas ignored, if not abandoned.

A word of caution here.  However much we love plaques, we must not forget that it is a homonym of the plaque that our dentists are dedicated to removing when they afflict our teeth.  All it takes is a parvenu, culturally illiterate future governor to tear down this or any other monument and remove the plaque just placed on it.  It has happened before and, in light of our political culture, it will happen again.

But certain things are invulnerable to removal or the excesses of uninformed executives in public office.  Indeed, the deeper the roots in the imagination, the more committed the workers in the vineyard of Awolowo’s ideas and their continuing relevance to the history of ideas, the more likely it is that future parvenu governors will have a difficult time toppling statues and removing plaques.  Even when they do, more people will continue to live under the inspiration of those ideas and, therefore, be less agitated by the vagaries of a monument that remains forever vulnerable to the weather and human shenanigans. 

I would like to use two excerpts from Ambode’s address to make the core point of this piece.  According to him, as reported in The Nation, “Thirty years after his death, his thoughts and ideas on a wide range of issues relating to the economy, fiscal federalism and education among several others, are still relevant today as they were back in time.  His legacies and landmark achievements, particularly in the Western region including Lagos colony, had endured and remain a source of inspiration and benchmark for progressive leadership in the country.”  Further, “the vision of new generation leaders like us, is to consciously rise up to his ideals and principles.” [http://thenationonlineng.net/leaders-imbibe-awo-ideals/ (27/09/2017)]

In the two quotes, certain words stand out: “thoughts and ideas” and “ideals and principles”.  If Awolowo’s thoughts and ideas as well as his ideals and principles are not only relevant but are also supposed to inspire “the vision of new generation leaders like [Ambode and others]”, one is welcome to ask where they—governors, civil servants, journalists, etc.—who dominate our public life and discourse are learning those ideas and ideals from.  I am sure they are not receiving their inspiration from mute and inert statues.

In case Ambode and his colleagues need a reminder, ideas are not free floating like air to be inhaled from the atmosphere.  They are to be nurtured, cultivated, and carefully disseminated.  Given that Awolowo left us a sterling legacy of significant writings, one would think that those who are really motivated to be inspired by him would do the needful, especially if they are leaders and in control of the direction of the society, and invest in platforms dedicated to the study, development, diffusion of ideas and principles for which Awolowo is justly celebrated.

On this score, forget our universities.  What think-tanks or similar institutions exist where those who are interested in Awolowo’s ideas and principles can go and be edified?  Who are the experts and scholars, interpreters for the rest of us, of Awolowo’s recondite ideas, that the leadership in Awolowo’s backyard has trained, whose research it has supported and whose intellectual products have been disseminated, if only in the schools and institutions located there?

Mr. Ambode, whatever happened to the Obafemi Awolowo Institute for Governance and Public Policy located in Lekki and which was meant to do exactly the kinds of things that are sure to make Awolowo’s legacy available to future generations and make those who pass by the new statue better informed of why that new statue matters and become more appreciative of the ideas that are really the soul of the cold stone on a pedestal? 

Yes, the Awolowo Institute is exactly the kind of monument that would ensure the prolongation of the legacy of Awolowo; the new statue will not.  I went back to check the website of the institute before I started writing this piece and it is a shame to the memory of one of the foremost thinkers of the last century. 

If you were totally unaware of who Awolowo was and you are looking to be introduced to why his ideas matter—not just because he was a preeminent Yorùbá leader, a knock, if there is one, on his global status—that apology of a website for a state-sponsored think-tank is a sure turn-off.  A stone image can only complement a legacy; it cannot be a substitute for it.

As for Awolowo’s thoughts and ideas being a source for current goings-on in the administrations of his self-appointed successors in our part of Nigeria, only one who is ill-informed would even think that, beyond mouthing platitudes and mimicking raiment, anyone, repeat anyone, of them has the foggiest idea of Awolowo’s philosophy of anything from management to statecraft to education to culture. 

Who among the governors can claim to have any familiarity with Awolowo’s federalism, the subject-matter to which he devoted a substantial percentage of his writings?  If they are, what would explain their recent canvassing of a return to a 1963 Constitution that Awolowo made clear fell short of what federalism should be; that was used cynically by his opponents to excise the Midwest while (1) leaving the northern behemoth untouched and (2) pretending to be solicitous of the rights of the minorities in the Western Region but not anywhere else in the country?

I hope that no one believes that Awolowo was uninformed of the merits of the 1963 Constitution.  Yet, he called for its substantial revision both in Chapter 3 of Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1966) and in Chapter 10 of The People’s Republic (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1968).  I know at least one Nigerian political leader who was also an intellectual who turned Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution into a constant companion in his struggle for the emancipation of the Ogoni.  Does anyone remember Ken Saro-Wiwa?  That was one man who took to heart what Awolowo’s theory of federalism entails.

There is no way that any serious student of Awolowo would permit her/himself to embrace the illiteracy that informs the so-called debate on restructuring in Awolowo’s backyard right now.

Have our governors in the West studied Awolowo’s philosophy of education?  Have they studied Awolowo’s management strategies?  These are not rhetorical questions.  How many “model schools” did Awolowo build?  Could as many of us as benefitted from his educational philosophy and policies have done so had he settled on building a handful of “model schools”?  How many schools did Awolowo merge or vacate for other uses?

Do our new generation leaders know anything about decentralization, local government, and empowering those units not for donating boreholes and handing out Christmas and Sallah rice, but for providing agricultural extension services by graduates of Schools of Agriculture; health services by graduates of Schools of Hygiene and Health Technology; education through Local Authority Schools Boards; and so on?

I make bold to say that it is because the transmission chains for knowledge from previous to succeeding generations have been broken that the current generation of leaders are often found wanting when it comes to performance.  It is why a South-South governor would think that he has made a discovery in his grandiose announcement of a collective farming scheme modelled on the Israeli Kibbutz system.  Had the Obafemi Awolowo Institute for Governance and Public Policy and similar outfits been doing their work of guiding and supporting serious engagement with Awolowo’s ideas, that governor would have known of the Farm Settlement Scheme, the role of Modern Schools in the programme, and how those settlements were integrated into governance and the economy. 

Additionally, he would learn of the role of the Cooperative movement, introduced to Nigeria by Awolowo, supported and informed by a whole intellectual bureaucracy atop which sat the Cooperative College—state institutions, by the way—the Cooperative Bank and the panoply of Cooperative Thrift and Credit Societies, that ensured economic expansion to the remotest of areas in the old region.

I would like to congratulate Ambode, again, on raising a statue to Awolowo.  But we need monuments of a different kind, sir.  If you really want to build monuments to the man, build monuments that need no plaques on them, that cannot be toppled by future vagabond executives, that will ensure that his ideas and thoughts, ideals and principles, are shared, expounded, debated, criticized, and widely diffused through all the institutions where minds are molded and the future is prepared. 

Make resources available for scholars, young and old, wishing to study and write on Awolowo’s ideas, supporting the publication of books and journals of significant academic merit dedicated to critical engagements with Awolowo’s and similar ideas.  These can be in form of fellowships, residential and nonresidential, regular conferences, and huge material support for academic publications. 

From the vantage point of an Awolowo scholar, those are the monuments that would please Awolowo, even if they do not bear his name.  I can only hope that I am not mistaken.

A BREAK FROM GOD

Two years ago, I published a piece titled, “God Don’t Love Africa and Africans”, [http://www.pambazuka.org/governance/god-don%E2%80%99t-love-africa-and-africans].  For whatever reason, the piece never made it to the pages of any Nigerian publication, print or electronic.  This piece is a sort of follow-up to that earlier essay. 

Nigerians need and must take a break from God.  The God from which I ask Nigerians to take a break is the monotheistic, vengeance-seeking centerpiece of Islam and Christianity.  As far as I know, like other old religions characterized by pan-theism, Òrìsà, indigenous Yorùbá religion, was not a proselytizing one; the gods were infinitely interchangeable and, except for their priests, did not require total abdication of responsibility for their own lives from their adherents.  Furthermore, there was no profession of faith and whichever god seems to work for you is the one that you go with.  On this score, the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were very similar to our ancestors.

Now to the business at hand.  Nigerians need to take several steps back from the widespread God-intoxication in which the entire country is mired.  Put simply, Nigerians need a break from God and this they should do peremptorily so that their God-addled brains, damaged by a certifiable God-addiction, can begin the arduous business of recovery.  This recovery is requisite if we are to reclaim the dominion that both dominant religions claim to be our direct inheritance from God. 

We see a scientist like Albert Einstein uttering what to many in our country today would be a singular blasphemy when he declared that the object of his scientific exertions was “to know the mind of God”.  And our own Obafemi Awolowo did declare that when we call upon God to do for us what we can do for ourselves, something sure is amiss.  According to Awolowo, “because we can do it ourselves, why then do we call upon God to do it for us?  This is stupid.”  I am sure that no one would dare designate him an atheist.  But he took very seriously the injunction that only those could expect help from heaven who are prepared to help themselves.  A benefactor of many churches and a steadfast congregant in quite a few of them he was, nonetheless, clear that there is a reason that we were created with a brain.

When I was growing up, we went to church on Sundays; we were out by 12:00 noon and definitely not later than 1:00 p.m.  Our parents went to Bible class after work, mostly on Tuesdays, and the only real demand on your time was if you were a member of the choir or you were taking classes for your confirmation.  Church was a sliver of life, not all of it.  Work was more important than church.  Home life and other elements of living were more important than worship.  The prelates were well trained and, given the leisure they had during the week if they did not have pastoral visits, we had a reasonable expectation that they would be fresh on Sunday and the chance that they would have worked on a solid sermon for the service was quite ample.

There were consequences for the economy and they were no less salubrious.  People’s lives were dominated by productive engagements and I have no reason to believe that we did not find favour with God.  Indeed, some of the best schools and hospitals back then were mission-owned, both Christian and Islamic.

Back then, places of worship strove to be worthy sacred spaces.  Their architecture sought to “declare the glory of God” and the accoutrements of worship proclaimed God’s majesty.  We had serious theologians and even the literalism of African-instituted churches did not completely shun intellectual engagement with scripture.  Ditto for various Islamic denominations.  The Ahmadiyya Movement-in-Islam, before a section of it, under pressure from Sunni orthodoxy, styled itself Anwar-ul-Islam, competed with Christian denominations and other groups to exert themselves in the uplift of their congregations without demanding that their members abandon their life strivings, the deployment of their talents for the betterment of themselves and their progeny and, instead, leave everything in God’s hands and await whatever God has in store for them.

This reckless abandonment of reason, this criminal handing over of lives to a God that already gave you, if scripture is to be believed, dominion over all things; this vacation of our ability to take charge of our lives and add stature to ourselves in spite of our radical insufficiency as humans is the ultimate blasphemy!

No thanks to this handing over of control over our lives, we follow the reckless tale of a Daddy G.O. who spun a tale of driving a non-electric vehicle without gas over a considerable distance.  I hate to think how many hapless, ordinary Nigerians have come to grief in the stupid belief that their unroadworthy vehicles would miraculously get them to their destinations.  We have charlatans who prey on the separation of our people from their senses by asking them to come to services for the characterization of which they have an inexhaustible store of hyperboles and catchphrases.  The country is literally drowning in an ocean of meaningless but catchy slogans announcing “delivery”, “salvation”, “overcoming”, “mountain of fire”, “latter rain”, “winning”, and the like. 

Worse still, these marathon harangues in the guise of services are held on workdays and during hours when our people should otherwise be at work. What God asks you to abandon the means of your upkeep, lie to your employers about where you are when you should be at work earning your keep, shut down your private business while you are busy falling into false ecstasies under the direction of latter-day sweet-talking fakers dubbed “soul-winners”?

Of course, our spurious but nattily-dressed windbag predators-taken-for-shepherds have to keep the flock addicted to God so that the latter would have no respite, no quiet moments when life-changing questions pop up in our heads and make us come to doubt about the tenor and direction of our lives.  The God noise must be continually dinned into our ears such that the possibility of considering alternative ways of managing our lives would never have room to present themselves to the front of our minds.  Worst of all, because most of the activities associated with this exponential expansion of God in our lives are of a brutally unproductive type—what tangible products can you make at a revival service on a workday or at a night vigil?—our economy has not witnessed any concurrent expansion.  The only guarantee we have is the sapping of the productive energies of our common folk often to the detriment of their families, especially children.

No thanks to this God-addiction and the simultaneous abandonment of the capacity for a self-driven life, only goodness knows how many Nigerians have been killed by “Not My Portion” and how many more are going to succumb to needless death because they would not accept their portion, whatever it is, and steer it in the best way possible for them and their loved ones.  Disease, illness, misfortunes, accidents are all, without exception, part of the human portion, however you cut it.

The two religions under reference in this piece that are ravaging our people hold that we—our very humanity—were created in sin.  And it is a consequence of our having lost our ever so fleeting divine identity that toil, disease, hunger, pain, and so on, became defining elements of our inescapable portion.  Only a god\God, never any human, can be without this sorry aspect of its portion. 

So, why do these crazy prophets and prophetesses keep telling us that what makes us human, under the very definition offered by their scripture, is not our portion?  This can only be part of an elaborate swindle for, as theology, it is demonstrably false.  If I read my bible correctly, God’s grace is not for the asking nor is it for purchase by good works and the capacity to pray for hours non-stop.  Nigerians should stop behaving like children and cease believing false nonsense from too-clever-by-half, self-designing, power-hungry holy men and women.

Meanwhile, the originators of Islam spend good money building some of the best hospitals in the world.  Have Nigerian Muslims followed goings on in Saudi Arabia, lately?  For Saudis, whether or not they are well is not “Allah’s will”, per se.  Only after they have put into gear the best care money can buy do they resign to their fate.  When the immediate past guardian of the holy places in Mecca was battling ill-health in the dying years of his rule, he did not summon the best marabouts from the Islamic world.  He headed on several occasions to that nest of godlessness, the United States, to be treated.  Their hospitals are staffed by the best-trained personnel that money can buy from anywhere in the world regardless of their religious orientation.

Israel, to which we are happy—remember we are “a happy people”—to transfer a nice chunk of our patrimony to pay for some ill-advised pilgrimages of dubious religious value, has never pretended that the Negev is not a desert or that the challenge posed by this fact was not its portion.  Instead, it turned the desert into a breadbasket.  Surely, it did not do this with prayers nor did it do so under the influence of a band of self-styled prophets and prophetesses and “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” who are on first-name terms with God.  Yet, it is home to all the original holiest shrines of the two rampaging religions in our land.  But Nigerians with their God-addled brains prefer to spend their children’s inheritance in fake acts of piety that can only make God continue to view our kind with utter contempt. 

There is more.  Our airwaves now are saturated with brain-killing noise, exceeding ugliness, mind-numbing drivel, and absolutely stunted language in the form of religious broadcasts, ministry announcements, and mediocre music in the name of gospel singing.  Our cities are now visibly blighted by posters, billboards, signposts, all proclaiming the availability of dial-a-miracle centres, funny-looking “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” peddling snake oil in the guise of deliverance, salvation and sundry other outcomes that are designed to ensure that the preachers’ wants—and those wants can be obscene in their excessiveness—are met “in Jesus’ name”, no less!  Private jets for ministry, anyone!  My mother, a Christian herself, in utter disgust, recently remarked to me, that the followers of a certain Daddy G.O. are now certified blasphemers who are more inclined to obey their leader than obey God!  As the Yorùbá would say: “Wọ́n ti gba wèrè mẹ́sìn!” [They have mixed worship with lunacy!]

Our creative juices no longer flow.  Our language and diction now reflect the accursed stiltedness of an unimaginative religiosity.  Our bookstores are more than two-thirds filled with a whole library—a veritable assault on our dwindling forests—of pretentious garbage, much of it I am sure plagiarized from their Euro-American equivalents who pioneered this path to get-rich-quick schemes founded on the bent and broken backs of unsuspecting ordinary folk.

Our education system is now captive to this blight the perpetrators of which do not even know the inspiration for their interminable proclamation of the virtues of “religious education”.  For those who do not know, the insistence on giving Africans religious education did not come from a noble place.  I can say it with authority that it did not come from that original missionary cohort led by Samuel Ajayi Crowther who were more concerned to move Africa to modernity. 

It came, instead, from the warped mind of Lord Lugard, the one we still lionize by having one of our governors proudly operate from a house named in his honour.  He it was who said that British colonialism in Africa should not repeat the mistake it made in India where it gave Indians “education of the intellect”, as he styled it, which they later used to undermine British rule in their land. 

In Africa, he insisted that, given what he called the African’s natural proclivity for lying, the only education fit for Africans was a religion-inflected one that he called “character education”.  To think that in the 21^st century we would still be carrying the bag for our racist colonizers is the ultimate indictment of our God-addicted intellectuals and policy-makers.  We are still reaping the fruits of this unfortunate direction. 

The irony is that the more God-intoxicated we have become, the further removed we have become from our moral compass.  The cruel outcome is that we are doubly shortchanged: we have neither morals nor knowledge.  India is preparing a mission to the moon and now gives us alms.  Simultaneously, Nigeria, indeed, Africa, are headed for perdition afflicted with a terminal case of God-addiction.

I would not like to be misunderstood.  As someone who spent 22 years teaching at Jesuit institutions in the United States and a product of a mission school in Nigeria, I am well-placed to appreciate what excellent education religion-inspired institutions can produce.  But they do not offer religion-inflected or religious education.  It is why some of the topmost research institutions in the world are religion-derived or religion-affiliated.  But their business is education, not what goes on behind the closed-doors of their adult students’ dorms. 

Unfortunately, such is the reach of God-addiction that even the denominations that used to do what I just said have joined the ranks of miracle summoners.  Their educational institutions have become citadels of mystification.  The universities founded by these God-peddlers are more notorious for invading the privacy of their students, violating their personal dignity, and treating them like children, all in the name of ensuring that they are equipped with morals than they are noted for their giant strides in research or producing first-rate graduates who will change the world.

Why bother to organize your sports?  God will take care of it.  Just pray harder.  Why care about your healthcare system?  “God is in total control.”  In any case, whatever disease you may have cannot be real: it is not your portion.  By the time you come to terms with your portion, the condition can no longer be managed.

Nigerian adults reserve the right to throw their lives away.  Indeed, the world would most likely be a better place with such a thinning of the herd.  But it is a crime to incorporate our children in this mess.  It is for the sake of the children and thereby the future of our race that I ask that we consider a break from God.

The two religions under reference in this piece that are ravaging our people hold that we—our very humanity—were created in sin.  And it is a consequence of our having lost our ever so fleeting divine identity that toil, disease, hunger, pain, and so on, became defining elements of our inescapable portion.  Only a god\God, never any human, can be without this sorry aspect of its portion. So, why do these crazy prophets and prophetesses keep telling us that what makes us human, under the very definition offered by their scripture, is not our portion?  This can only be part of an elaborate swindle for, as theology, it is demonstrably false.  If I read my bible correctly, God’s grace is not for the asking nor is it for purchase by good works and the capacity to pray for hours non-stop.  Nigerians should stop behaving like children and cease believing false nonsense from too-clever-by-half, self-designing, power-hungry holy men and women.

Meanwhile, the originators of Islam spend good money building some of the best hospitals in the world.  Have Nigerian Muslims followed goings on in Saudi Arabia, lately?  For Saudis, whether or not they are well is not “Allah’s will”, per se.  Only after they have put into gear the best care money can buy do they resign to their fate.  When the immediate past guardian of the holy places in Mecca was battling ill-health in the dying years of his rule, he did not summon the best marabouts from the Islamic world.  He headed on several occasions to that nest of godlessness, the United States, to be treated.  Their hospitals are staffed by the best-trained personnel that money can buy from anywhere in the world regardless of their religious orientation.

Israel, to which we are happy—remember we are “a happy people”—to transfer a nice chunk of our patrimony to pay for some ill-advised pilgrimages of dubious religious value, has never pretended that the Negev is not a desert or that the challenge posed by this fact was not its portion.  Instead, it turned the desert into a breadbasket.  Surely, it did not do this with prayers nor did it do so under the influence of a band of self-styled prophets and prophetesses and “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” who are on first-name terms with God.  Yet, it is home to all the original holiest shrines of the two rampaging religions in our land.  But Nigerians with their God-addled brains prefer to spend their children’s inheritance in fake acts of piety that can only make God continue to view our kind with utter contempt. 

There is more.  Our airwaves now are saturated with brain-killing noise, exceeding ugliness, mind-numbing drivel, and absolutely stunted language in the form of religious broadcasts, ministry announcements, and mediocre music in the name of gospel singing.  Our cities are now visibly blighted by posters, billboards, signposts, all proclaiming the availability of dial-a-miracle centres, funny-looking “Daddy and Mummy G.O.s” peddling snake oil in the guise of deliverance, salvation and sundry other outcomes that are designed to ensure that the preachers’ wants—and those wants can be obscene in their excessiveness—are met “in Jesus’ name”, no less!  Private jets for ministry, anyone!  My mother, a Christian herself, in utter disgust, recently remarked to me, that the followers of a certain Daddy G.O. are now certified blasphemers who are more inclined to obey their leader than obey God!  As the Yorùbá would say: “Wọ́n ti gba wèrè mẹ́sìn!” [They have mixed worship with lunacy!]

Our creative juices no longer flow.  Our language and diction now reflect the accursed stiltedness of an unimaginative religiosity.  Our bookstores are more than two-thirds filled with a whole library—a veritable assault on our dwindling forests—of pretentious garbage, much of it I am sure plagiarized from their Euro-American equivalents who pioneered this path to get-rich-quick schemes founded on the bent and broken backs of unsuspecting ordinary folk.

Our education system is now captive to this blight the perpetrators of which do not even know the inspiration for their interminable proclamation of the virtues of “religious education”.  For those who do not know, the insistence on giving Africans religious education did not come from a noble place.  I can say it with authority that it did not come from that original missionary cohort led by Samuel Ajayi Crowther who were more concerned to move Africa to modernity. 

It came, instead, from the warped mind of Lord Lugard, the one we still lionize by having one of our governors proudly operate from a house named in his honour.  He it was who said that British colonialism in Africa should not repeat the mistake it made in India where it gave Indians “education of the intellect”, as he styled it, which they later used to undermine British rule in their land. 

In Africa, he insisted that, given what he called the African’s natural proclivity for lying, the only education fit for Africans was a religion-inflected one that he called “character education”.  To think that in the 21^st century we would still be carrying the bag for our racist colonizers is the ultimate indictment of our God-addicted intellectuals and policy-makers.  We are still reaping the fruits of this unfortunate direction. 

The irony is that the more God-intoxicated we have become, the further removed we have become from our moral compass.  The cruel outcome is that we are doubly shortchanged: we have neither morals nor knowledge.  India is preparing a mission to the moon and now gives us alms.  Simultaneously, Nigeria, indeed, Africa, are headed for perdition afflicted with a terminal case of God-addiction.

I would not like to be misunderstood.  As someone who spent 22 years teaching at Jesuit institutions in the United States and a product of a mission school in Nigeria, I am well-placed to appreciate what excellent education religion-inspired institutions can produce.  But they do not offer religion-inflected or religious education.  It is why some of the topmost research institutions in the world are religion-derived or religion-affiliated.  But their business is education, not what goes on behind the closed-doors of their adult students’ dorms. 

Unfortunately, such is the reach of God-addiction that even the denominations that used to do what I just said have joined the ranks of miracle summoners.  Their educational institutions have become citadels of mystification.  The universities founded by these God-peddlers are more notorious for invading the privacy of their students, violating their personal dignity, and treating them like children, all in the name of ensuring that they are equipped with morals than they are noted for their giant strides in research or producing first-rate graduates who will change the world.

Why bother to organize your sports?  God will take care of it.  Just pray harder.  Why care about your healthcare system?  “God is in total control.”  In any case, whatever disease you may have cannot be real: it is not your portion.  By the time you come to terms with your portion, the condition can no longer be managed.

Nigerian adults reserve the right to throw their lives away.  Indeed, the world would most likely be a better place with such a thinning of the herd.  But it is a crime to incorporate our children in this mess.  It is for the sake of the children and thereby the future of our race that I ask that we consider a break from God.