A Prayer For National Amnesty ,By Abdulhamid Babatunde

Against all odds, it is a tragic irony that religious issues have maintained an aggressive domination of the national agenda, especially in the last two years of baptism by bombing. If only the prominence of religious issues had been hinged on faith rather than fatalities all could have been blissfully well with us, but it is now our fate as Nigerians to reap only the retribution for misdeeds while the soothing reassurance of salvation remains a distant mirage. This mangled status quo is the latest manifestation of our nemesis, erupting like a recurring national plague and casting darkness on the horizon of hope for peace, harmony, development and prosperity in Nigeria.
In search of the cause of this curse, we must admit the fact that we are not as fanatical about our faiths as our collective tendency for acerbic advocacy and aggressive defence of our respective religions might suggest. Like demented demagogues we are quick to jump at perceived infractions and desecrations of our faiths with alarming zeal but very much at home with the sickening social ills bred by devilish propensity. The issue of corruption is mainly seen from the angle of looting of public treasury by those entrusted with its safe keeping but the very kingpins of this scourge are our gleefully elevated into leadership cadres where they manage to keep a straight face as they swear to pious oaths of office and proceed to preach perfidiously against their game. Meanwhile even corruption cannot stand the hypocrisy and is fighting back ferociously!
If our ogas at the top are such incurable infidels we can only expect to witness perdition as the dividend of Godless rule. Thus, we live in towns and cities reeking with the original sins, most notoriously the oldest vice of prostitution. Wherever a seat of government is sited there your moral conscience will be assailed by so-called queens of the night, marauding the streets with shameless swagger as they fulfil the end-time profanity of chasing clients. In Abuja where the Presidency is perched, there is now a budget for prostitutes but none for the homeless. These are the banal by-products of a devilishly disoriented country that has also mortgaged its youth and its future to decadent indulgences of the uncultured Western world. We might as well be talking of Godless-generations yet unborn !
A nation whose leaders are all too busy gorging themselves from the public till can hardly spare a thought for the perilous plight of people, the overwhelming majority of whom have always been out of sight and out of hearing. Nothing could be worse than abandoning pensioners to the callous mercilessness of official corruption. The result is an epidemic of psychotropic escapism as the hapless join the hopeless in reveries of intoxicated refuge from such hell-on-earth existence, aided and abetted by the booming sinister business of brewing liquor and promoting it as the elixir of life. Now we are faced with the dilemma of frustrated youthful delinquents bringing all that high hype down to their level with a mind-boggling chemo-therapeutic menu that ranges from cough syrups to industrial glue. A forbidding present of dashed hopes is creating a forsaken future of wasted lives and opportunities!
These deplorable scenarios can only be sustained by injustice in an unjust society and we have been told in the Holy Scripture that God can never be with the unjust. Unjustified inequities created and imposed by rich and powerful elite to oppress their compatriots abound in this country as we have only recently been reminded by the ridiculous law that rewards obnoxious crimes like theft of pension funds with the lightest of sanctions while thousands languish in jail with stiff sentences or hefty fines for petty crimes. The life of the poor is worth peanuts and dependent on appeal funds and deadly consulting clinics in case of health challenge but the self-enriched, especially the public officials, heartlessly flock to private specialist hospitals at home and abroad. Same goes for education. Believe it or not, the poor man’s prayer is rarely in favour of the rich and powerful, except for the few among them who are humane and charitable. Indeed the rich and powerful have long ago adopted the world of vanities, leaving the poor to sway and swoon in the name of religion.
Yet God is still the Greatest and His worship through observance and allegiance to His Decrees remains the perfect panacea to peace in Nigeria and indeed the world. The contradictions of practice and preachment which bedevil the religious communities and spread like contagion to the entire nation can only lead to cycles of conflict and crises because it remains a fearful fact of life that evil will never triumph over good, though the confrontation lasts a lifetime. May the Bounteous Mercies of Almighty God save us from the catastrophic consequences of our seen and unseen misdeeds and grant us all a divine amnesty, amen.
ABDULHAMID BABATUNDE former Editor, The Democrat, now Media Consultant, wrote from Kaduna