This book was presented yesterday as part of the ceremonies for the 80th birthday of John Cardinal Onaiyekan. I am an Ahmadu Bello University brought up which meant in my earlier years, I spent a lot of time reading the collected works of Marx, Engels and Lenin for their commitment to creating the public good. Now in my twilight years, I find myself reading a lot of the collected works of Onaiyekan which I find educative, inspiring and useful pointers to the pathway to achieving the collective good. As we wait for the next volume, the current one composed of 15 chapters is his collected works between retirement in 2020 and 2023.
I like Bishop Kukah’s description of his retirement. When your name is John Olorunfemi Onaiyekan, healthy, handsome, extraordinarily brilliant, well-educated, visible, silver-tongued, voluble, workaholic, avant-garde, a thoughtful and insightful scholar, then the word “retirement” is spelt differently for you.
The concerns His Eminence the Cardinal addresses in the collection is that Nigeria, and the world are tearing at the seams. Violent conflicts have emerged all over the world. has emerged in virtually all parts of the country. At the level of society, social cohesion is being undermined by hate and dangerous speech, a process that is deepening social, religious and ethnic divides. Successive leaderships have failed to provide an alternative discourse of hope and the value of staying together and building a Nation.
I am currently curating some of Cardinal’s work on Nigeria. He is concerned that public safety is spoken of as a national attribute that existed only in the past and that there is urgent need for the emergence of a leadership that can build the Nigeria that citizens seek. He believes that the pathway to a better future is already enunciated in our Grand Norm, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Nigeria needs a leadership that can place back on the table Nigeria’s national motto: “Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress”. We need to get the leadership with the commitment and the skills to give us a narrative on why unity is the way forward and provide content for the faith we say we have. We need a leadership that can provide the peace that would allow progress to return to Nigeria. The reality of our recent history however is that our political process, the modus operandum of our political parties and actors have so far blocked the emergence of such leadership. We must continue to struggle for such and as citizens with a commitment to civic engagement, the struggle must continue. Nigerians are a people with faith and part of that faith must lead us to continue to seek for a democratic system that serves the interests of all citizens.
Cardinal’s story of his origins is a treatise on pluralism. He explains he was born on 29th January 1944 into a community in Kabba Province in a family with Catholics. Anglicans, Muslims and practitioners of African Traditional Religions and his earliest memory is that they were all good people. His nuclear family was Catholic but as a boy, he could see all the others too were people of good faith. He was named Olorunfemi, God loves me and quickly learnt that God loves all the others too.
His Eminence recalls that in his Catholic Secondary School, there were Muslim students. He refers fondly to of them, Sabo Ago, who was a pious Muslim and had concerns that he would eat unclean meat. Sabo took it upon himself to slaughter the goats and rams provided for student meals in the kitchen. He had to do this so that he would not have to eat meat that had not been properly slaughtered: “If by any reason he was not available when the cooks needed to slaughter the animals and someone else did, it meant that my friend Sabo Ago would not eat from the common pot on that day because the meat had not been properly slaughtered.” This is the way people learn to leave together with their differences.
Cardinal was appointed to head the Church in Abuja in 1990 and became active in the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). He became the President of CAN and related extensively with the Islamic leadership of Nigeria under the umbrella of the Nigerian Interreligious Council (NIREC). It was in that context that he developed friendship and a good working relationship with Saad Abubakar, the Sultan of Sokoto. They formed an Interfaith dialogue group for Abuja, which opened up the whole idea of Christian and Muslim leaders talking together. His philosophy is that such engagement should encourage actors to go beyond tolerance, and go into respecting the pluralism of religion. Onaiyekan admits that it is not always easy for people who are convinced about the truth of their religion to at the same time accept that the pluralism of religion may well be a God given reality. His own conviction is that pluralism of religion is all within the plan of the Almighty God who is greater than any religion.
Cardinal argues that in the past, the missionary was thought to be someone who will do everything to make everybody follow his religion: “As Catholics and Christians, we have for long interpreted the mandate of Jesus <Go to the whole world and preach the Gospel to All Nations> to mean that we. Must aim at making everybody Christian, in such a way that we find it difficult to have any positive discussion with anybody who is not ready to be converted.” Many within Islam have the same attitude. He argues that dialogue does not negate or is not incompatible with our mission mandate. We can continue with our missionary mandate and at the same time make room to listen to others.
Religious pluralism naturally stresses the fact that we have different religions. Onaiyekan’s concern is that unfortunately, we emphasise our differences to such an extent that we tend to identify ourselves on the basis of these differences. “I am a Christian because I am not a Muslim,” and vice versa. In this way we are identifying ourselves not by what we are, but by what we are not, by how we differ from everyone else! There is therefore, the need to make the effort to seek, discover and celebrate the common grounds that exist between religions. The common grounds are many.
There are doctrinal common grounds. One of the most common elements of this common ground is the very belief in One God. We must insist that the Almighty God has made Himself known to the whole of humanity
Secondly, every religion talks about peace. Christianity believes in Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Islam says that the very word “Islam” means Peace. Therefore, one would expect that religion should bring peace.
To respect the fundamental human rights of Religious Freedom, we must accept the basic equality of every religion, even when it is a small minority. This is not an area where majority carries the day. Everybody must be allowed to follow God according to his/ her conscience.
The Cardinal is concerned about the spread of hate speech in the contemporary world. It is part of the long history of propaganda aimed at presenting others as enemies to avoid and/or to combat, to demonize, even to destroy and kill. In military jargon, the other side is called the “enemy” and treated as such. This is done for a variety of reasons, including to boost personal and group ego. It is prevalent in both politics and religion, and these elements often mutually reinforce each other. In the process, the priority place of TRUTH is lost. In religion, it becomes a problem when we absolutize our own access to God as the only true one, while all others are condemned as false. This is a major problem for the so-called Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam he believes. In Nigeria, we say in our Constitution that we are a Nation united in justice, peace and harmony “under God” but there is too much hate around. He argues that we have to find ways of making religion an asset to our nation, and not a liability.
To be concluded.
