Wole Soyinka calls for taming of religion before it kills Nigeria
Religion, if not properly checked, would lead Nigeria to her ruin, Prof. Wole Soyinka has opined.
Several killings and atrocities across the country have been committed in the name of religion and the Nobel laureate has called for rational reasoning above extremism in religious practices.
He compared the effect of corruption on the nation’s development to religion.
“I would like to transfer that cry from the moral zone to the terrain of religion. If we do not tame religion in this nation, religion would kill us,” Soyinka said in Abuja during the presentation of a book, Religion and the Making of Nigeria, written by Prof. Olufemi Vaughan.
“I do not say kill religion, though, I wouldn’t mind a bit if that mission could be undertaken surgically, painlessly perhaps, under anaesthesia, effectively sprayed all over the nation or perhaps during an induced pouch of religious ecstasy,” he explained further.
“However, one has to be realistic. Only the religiously possessed or committed would deny the obvious. The price that many have paid, not just within this society but by humanity in general, makes one wonder if the benefits have really been more than the losses.”
Soyinka queried the reasoning behind using religious beliefs to cause bodily harm, as it opposes the “solace and the consolation of spirituality which many religions claim for themselves.”
He echoed Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo’s words that killing people for religion is an insane act.
“This is an attempt, an expression of deep frustration. It was simply an attempt to express what millions have felt with the same sense of helplessness. As for the custodians of religion, especially those called world religion, they cannot denounce the murderous tendencies of religion,” he said.
“For both the monk and the cleric or spiritual leaders, it is simply no longer sufficient to say this or that form of conduct is not permitted by this religion or the other. Or those who do this or that are not true believers of this prophet or that avatar or sage for the simple reason that others, who dissociate themselves from conduct, which universally is condemned, are themselves declaring themselves partisan of their own in contradistinctions to others.
“What, however, concerns the rest of us – no matter the internal wrangling, rivalries or controversies within any religion – what concerns us is that the innocent are often those who pay the highest price.”
According to him, religion is “simply the structuring of the unknowable to which human beings attach rituals, laws and taboos usually under a reverential relationship between mortals on the one hand and the unknowable supposedly supernatural on the other.”
Soyinka further condemned the ongoing massacre in Southern Kaduna which are believed to be religiously motivated.
Hundreds of people have reportedly lost their lives to invasions of Christian communities by Fulani herdsmen in the state.
“In this very nation, in Southern Kaduna, over 800 souls were brutally extinguished suddenly while the issue of grazing land versus farming is unquestionably part of the conflict. It is equally undeniable that religious differences have played crucial role in the conflict.”
He also stated that Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai’s declaration that funds were sent to those behind the killings proved how religious forces parade as being above the law.
“What astonished me was not the admission by the governor but the astonishment of others at such governmental response to atrocity. There was nothing new about it. Has appeasement to religious forces not become a Nigerian face of justice and equity; first lethargy and then appeasement?
“Wasn’t Boko Haram’s Mohammed Yusuf a beneficiary of appeasement in a similar fashion?”
“Religion in the history of this continent has been a disastrous venture, a disaster in many zones and continues to be even so today,” Soyinka said elsewhere in his speech.
