Between men of God and gods of men
Three days after the video where Mrs Busola Dakolo, accused Senior Pastor of the Commonwealth of Zion Assembly, Biodun Fatoyinbo of defiling her at 16, Premium Times, a leading online newspaper in Nigeria, published a story alleging that Habeebulah Abdulrahman, an Ede, Osun State-based Islamic cleric, had defiled a 16-year-old pupil of his qur’anic school.
Although the cleric insisted in an interview that the victim was his wife, that marriage contract seemed to have happened only in his imagination. The girl and her widowed mother were definite in the rebuttal of his claims.
The story goes that the man had, indeed, signified interest in marrying the teenage girl immediately after she completed her Junior Secondary education, she was said to have flatly turned down the proposal for two reasons. The first was the determination to complete her education, which marriage would truncate and the second reason was the age difference between her and her suitor. But of course, the cleric, who was said to have been infuriated to learn that his interest had the affection of a boy of her age, would not give up.
Premium Times informed in the story that: “On April 18, the scholar travelled to Ilaro in Ogun State for an Islamic lecture alongside the girl and two other male students. While the two male students were lodged in a separate room, Mr. Abdulrahman booked a single room for himself and the girl. He attempted sexual intercourse with the girl, but she raised the alarm and got the attention of the hotel’s receptionist.
The girl claimed the cleric eventually raped her that night. On their way back to Osun State, Mr. Abdulrahman visited his relatives in Abeokuta, where he again allegedly raped the teenager. According to the teenager, at Abeokuta, he forced himself on her in the absence of the two male students and the scholar’s relatives.
The teenager told Premium Times: “Before I knew what was happening, the whole house was empty. He told me not to make an attempt to run away because everywhere had been locked. The bed was stained after he had his way and he instructed me to go and wash his singlet that was also stained….” And so, it went down.
Curiously, this story did not get much traction possibly because of the heat that the Fatoyinbo saga had generated. This is more so because it was not the first time this fashionable man of God would be called out for alleged sexual indiscretion.
But there could be another reason or two why the story of the Muslim cleric has not caught much attention. The Christian faith in Nigeria is drawn to endless controversies. Its leaders have very often shown propensity for the commission of a series of real and sometimes, perceived misdemeanours.
The church, as they call it in Nigeria, is a house divided against itself. It is a huge composition of fiefdoms where ambition and self-preservation drive leaders into a cold and unhealthy competition that is not lost on their followers.
What is worse is that rather than deploy whatever spiritual gifts they are endowed with to build and develop members of their congregations to know God by themselves, some church leaders do everything to grow pews of minions whose whole lives depend on directions and directives from their “spiritual fathers.”
Therefore, even though the Christian faith is based on the very plain teachings of Jesus Christ, which unequivocally demand unity, you hardly find Nigerian Christians speaking with one voice about anything. And when one leader falls into stormy waters, as all humans would at some point or the other, those who subscribe to his ministry will defend him with all their might, while those who do not know will take sides with those who want his head on a platter. At such seasons, logic and mutual respect take flight as people get into the mob mood.
Muslims are generally a bit more circumspect as it concerns the escalation of the transgressions of their leaders. One should concede though that this may be due to the relatively conservative nature of Islamic leaders as opposed to the flamboyance, sometimes tending to the offensive part of leadership on the other side. That mien does not in any way mean that you do not find astounding atrociousness among Islamic leaders, though.
That said, however, there is one thing that ties leaders of the Christian and Islamic faiths in Nigerian together like the way the umbilical cord tied the foetus to the placenta. It is the stranglehold they have on their followers. A lot of those who serve as intermediaries between the Supreme Being and His creation have taken to promoting their roles in ways that tend to subordinate the almightiness of the One they serve. They crave recognition, display arrogant power and demand privileges from the same worshippers who have come to seek solace from the trauma of a political system that has perpetually turned their every dream into nightmares!
Unknown to religious leaders in Nigeria, their abdication of the divine commission to nurture and prepare more godly souls for the betterment of humanity ahead of eternal life is the harbinger of the prison that Nigeria has become. Their irresponsibility and selfishness is why this has become a society where logic has an anomaly and reasoning has become alien to most of the citizenry. It is the reason why rather than worship God, men and women have become worshippers of men and muddled up their relationship with God.
But there is a sense in which the people themselves are complicit. When they seem to deactivate their rational faculty and allow of this happens because a cleric does not preach the truth. Indeed, most of the false doctrines and the dogmatism that visit Nigeria on the religious plane these days, result from the failure of the faithful to take the personal responsibility of knowing more about the God that they serve.
For both Islam and Christianity, belief is personal. So is the day of judgment preached by both religions. The failure or neglect to appreciate that everyone has access to God without necessarily seeking the intervention of some other man, has pushed a lot of Nigerians to places where they have transferred the love, respect and fear of God to their spiritual leaders.
And when that happens, it becomes impossible to realise that spiritual leaders are as fallible as any other human being. This is the reason many followers would (just like we treat our political leader), neither hold their spiritual leaders accountable nor allow people who have the presence of mind ask very important questions.
It is also why people imagine that men of God cannot be tempted. Such error is why even after obvious display of low threshold of self-discipline, men and women still make themselves available for the exploitation of a “man of God.”
It is the fallacy that anyone who calls himself a man of God is more than human that would make a mother, not oblivious of the dubious intention of a cleric, allow her child train under this same cleric and even embark on an out of state trip with him!
Even in these days when it is obvious that the economic situation in the country, rather than God has called many of those who profess the name of God into ministry. So many of these guys have just found a way to put food on their tables through ministry and would do any and everything to sustain the lie.
In all, the adulteration of the essence of spiritual ministry by many leaders and the unwitting submission of their own will by the faithful have largely turned religion on its head in Nigeria.
And that is sad. When a society is falling apart like it is in Nigeria, when politics fail the people, when education has drifted, and the souls of men and women have become largely self-serving, religious institutions should be the hope for revival, social harmonisation and moral rebirth.
But the waters are muddled up and things will continue to go awry until the people are ready to firm up to their individual knowledge of God and separate the true men of God, (who are actually in abundance) from the gods of men.
Adedokun tweets @niranadedokun
(PUNCH)
