Why Should God Listen?

BY NAIWU OSAHON

Nigerians must be the most pious bunch of Homo sapiens in the world right now, judging by our total surrender to prayers as the answer to all our problems. We are the only group of people on earth expecting God to climb down from heaven to run our government, business and domestic affairs for us. The vogue is to do nothing for ourselves because God will fill the pot-holes on our roads, provide us with regular electricity, create jobs for the jobless, put drugs in our run-down health clinics, and books in our empty university libraries, if we pray hard enough.

Some smart guys, capitalizing on our naiveté, have set up what is now the only viable and lucrative industry in our society. Unproductive and contributing nothing to our national product, but the religious leaders parade rosy cheeks, while their flock sinks deeper into abject poverty and squalor. Coup plotters, armed robbers, assassins, hoodlums, 419 crooks, all pray before embarking on their operations. Our rouge leaders, who divert our resources into their private accounts abroad, pray to succeed. Lazy civil servants pray for promotions in their jobs.

Our media is not left out of this God disease, or acute religious madness. We have the most unimaginative media in the world, stifling, demoralizing, uninspiring. Television and radio stations bombard us all hours of the day with religious preachments and garbage. The newspapers and magazines are without exception cheap and vulgar rag-tags, using alien religions to engender self-hate and self-destruction. Every sentence published is laced with God this, God that. Imagine the New York or London Times or the Manchester Guardian, being pre-occupied with God in the year 2006 CE, when their scientists are already building colonies on the Moon.

Our editors generally are now all clerics, and their editorials rely on quotes from the Bible or the Koran to make largely senseless points. They are not interested in scholarship or in challenging the world of ideas. So, for the intelligent person, the environment is not only numbing and suffocating to operate in, it gradually turns one into an illiterate from lack of intelligent mental engagements and challenges.

The schools are no better. Students, poorly prepared for their exams, pray to pass. Our kids spend more time on their knees praying than to sit and study. In fact, our children are at home at the moment doing nothing but praying for the Minister of education to see reason and dialogue with the aggrieved university teachers to end their several weeks old strike action. The Minister is adamant; he says, teachers are saboteurs out to derail the (protracted political) transition programme. If the Minister is wrong, is he defying God? He is about to throw the teachers out of their homes and jobs despite our fervent prayers.

We prayed desperately through the era of slavery and colonialism and we have remained on our knees since, praying. If it is change of leadership we have been praying for, a worse one seems to take over every time. Right now, we are the most wretched group of people on the face of the earth, not for lack of natural resources or trained manpower. Obviously, God is not a fool. One hundred and fifty million devils are praying to no avail.

During Abacha era, Gowon said he had received the blessings of Gen. Abacha to pray for our redemption. There is no doubt that Gen. Abacha is a very religious person. Now YarAdua as Nigerias President, when not in Mecca getting treatment or praying for our rescue, he is in bed at Aso Rock, fagged out from debilitating ailment.

Most African leaders leave governance to God while concentrating on supervising their open and systematic carting away of national resources into their private accounts abroad.

Heads or tails, the African masses loose all the time. They have no hiding place. Were the imperialist slave merchants to surprise us in the morning by apologizing for slavery and colonialism in cash or kind, their handouts would end up in the Switzerland private accounts of their agents ruling us, only for us to borrow the money back again and again at enormous interest rate to perpetuate our subjugation. It is a catch-22 situation.

Less than 3 in 10 people in the world claim to believe in or worship Yahweh or Allah, but their worshippers are the most vocal, because their systems dominate the worlds elite media. The worshippers range in social status from the absolute richest to the poorest of the poor of humanity, structured (with the help of the IMF and the World Bank) punitively and mercilessly along racial divide. The 1% rich use the bogey of God or Allah to perpetuate their exploitation of and stranglehold on the 99% poor natives of the worlds richest, most fertile lands.

Africa is right now submerged in absolutism carefully crafted and controlled by the G8 to force natives to turn to their God that is supposed to be outside human control for possible kinder laws and sanctions against our abusers, thieves, assassins, rapists, hoodlums, tormentors, and rogue leaders, praying to the same God. Natives turn to the rather simple, easily accessible, glamorized alien God or Allah at the most trying times of their lives out of helplessness and frustration. The reasoning being, it is the fad, (and it seems to be cost free) and if human laws can be so unjust and unkind, there must be superior laws to which humans can appeal for justice because something must be responsible for the order in the universe.

After centuries of alien religious brain washing, African victims cannot help seeing a being or spirit sitting up there in the sky, manipulating the affairs of the universe. Making people ill until they pray for forgiveness to get well again. Impoverishing people to get a chance to reward a few loyal ones and so on. That must be a very wicked and vain God indeed. Even then, such a God would be deaf or bored stiff by now listening to the supplications of even just a hundred million Nigerians, who use noisy loud speakers in places of worship, let alone everyone else on planet earth, our Milky Way, Galaxy, and the entire universe, begging without respite for Gods undivided attention in millions of diverse tongues.

God is probably not hearing us anyway.

Nobel laureate, Wangari Muta Maathai, in an interview in the Guardian newspaper of Nigeria on 20th November, 2005 said:

“For me, whether it is in Kenya or in the larger African continent, it is a matter of great concern that we, as leaders of Africa - many of us anyway - have not assumed our responsibly towards our people. We have not assumed our responsibility to get our people out of poverty, to get our people out of humiliation, to get our people out of disrespect that we encounter all over the world and to get our people out of ignorance, so that we get to know what is happening all over the world and to stop exploiting our people. I dont know what we can do for ourselves. I am talking like this because I am part of the government in my country. I dont know what we can do to ourselves so that we can truly have a responsibility towards our people, so that we can truly use the resources of Africa.

“Everybody knows, of course, that we live in a continent that is one of the richest but where we are projected – and we are indeed – one of the poorest peoples on the planet. And there is a contradiction there and it is really because we manage ourselves very poorly, we manage our resources very poorly and we have engaged in conflicts. We have preoccupied ourselves with conflicts, fighting each other, killing each other instead of promoting development and ensuring that the resources of this continent are used to elevate the well being of our people. The issues that I was fighting for and the issues that I was honoured for are major challenges for Africans and that is essentially the environment.

“If you were following the recent journey to space, by the shuttle, Discovery, you would have noticed that when the astronauts came back to earth, they held a press conference. The Commander, Irene Collins, said that as they came back to earth, they observed over Africa, a very big blanket of dust. Now, that was very significant because I dont know what they observed in the other parts; they did not say. But they said over Africa, they observed blanket of dust. They also observed that our rivers are brown with silt. They observed that there was a lot of deforestation and a lot of removed vegetation so that a lot of ground was bare. That was a very significant observation from space and that is something that the African leadership must take into consideration.

“African leadership, African Heads of States in the African Union, must prioritize the environment throughout the continent. Because if we allow, for example, the Congo basin to disappear, if we allow our people to continue de-vegetating our continent, this continent, may be in another 100, 200 years, will be nothing but a desert from Congo to the Cape. That will mean the complete alienation of the African people. If there is one thing that has been recorded to cause the disappearance of a people and their civilization, it is the destruction of their environment.

“People can destroy themselves by destroying their environment. This is something that our leaders need to understand and this is something that our business community need to understand and this is something that ordinary people need to understand and that is why I am very keen, as the leader of the process, to mobilize the African civil society. I will like the African people, the ordinary people, to understand that it is very important for us to protect ourselves from the biggest enemy facing us and that is desertification. That is the challenge.”

With the thick blanket of dust over Africa, God is probably not seeing us. He is perhaps not aware that we are catching hell here on earth. Thats what you get when you dont respect your own Gods and prefer instead, alien (i.e. Caucasian and Arab) Gods, that wish us hell?

 

NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader, World Pan-African Movement); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race;  MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip.I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M. Poet, Author of the magnum opus: The end of knowledge.  One of the worlds leading authors of childrens books; Awarded; key to the city of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, Countyof Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee; and a silver shield trophy by Morehouse College, USA, for activities to unite and uplift the  African race.

Naiwu Osahon, renowned author, philosopher of science, mystique, leader of the world Pan-African Movement.