Is Fr. Mbaka Really the Nigeria’s Problem?

FROM FR. STAN CHU ILO, ENUGU

As the Church in Enugu Diocese and in Nigeria grapples with yet another self-inflicted crisis emerging from the activities of Rev. Fr. Ejike Mbaka of the Adoration Ministry, it is important that both the Catholic Church in Nigeria and the wider Nigerian public do not lose focus on the main problem facing the country right now.

The main problem facing us today in Nigeria is how to free ourselves from the monstrous and failed presidency of our Islamic supremacist President, Mohammadu Buhari, and the architecture of violence and the structure of injustice on which this nation is built. 

The Nigerian state rumbles on a shaky foundation, whose violent labyrinthine capillaries touch and taint everyone and everything in our land. Those who fear that Nigeria might descend into war, fail to realize that Nigeria is already fighting an asymmetrical warfare with more casualties than the failed states of Somalia or Central African Republic.

The only difference is that we do not know who the enemies are, we do not know who the combatants are and your killer might be a police officer or a soldier or robber or kidnapper or a hired assassin or someone who sees you as a threat or a rival.

Nigeria has become the biblical land that devours its inhabitants.We are all dying in Nigeria. This is because what is beautiful and admirable about each of us and our cultural and religious diversity have all been distorted, destroyed, denied, and damaged by this systemic and structural violence.

All these have conspired to bring us all to our knees, humiliated us, and emptied us of the true greatness to which we are all capable of as individuals and as a group. We all are held in fear, and a national ennui of suspended animation, and different kinds of conspiracy theories.

Nigeria is on edge and we thus cry out hopelessly to God like marooned seafarers in a long night of storm and turbulence waiting for the light from on high to break upon us on this darkling national voyage on a pathless and perilous sea. Nigeria is facing some structural and systemic problems and challenges today that have a long history beyond what is happening today.

As a result, Nigeria’s problems cannot be reduced to a single causative factor, a single person or a single bad state or church actor. We must pay greater attention to our corrosive and toxic national environment and the concatenation of social, political, cultural, religious, and economic conditions and factors in our land that give birth to these bad actors.

Some of these bad state actors like Buhari are shameful external representations of a deeper systemic issues within our national life and even are the collateral damage of Nigeria’s lost glory within the wider global structures of neo-liberal capitalism vis-a-vis Africa’s failed modernity project. 

Thus, even if we removed the bad actors today just as Nigerians removed Abacha and IBB in the past, unless we embrace a systemic and structural change in Nigeria, what will emerge after Buhari, just like so many bad leaders before him, will be a new iteration or integument of violence, misrule, oppression, violence, and corruption which like an amoeba will take on a different shape.

This is because this nation is built on an unworkable structure of injustice and falsehood that requires more than a change of personnel, but a change of our national structure and our sinful and destructive dysfunctional value preference, stinking national culture of corruption, impunities, greed, and selfishness.It would thus be a grave mistake on the part of the Church in Nigeria to focus solely at this point in time on what Mbaka said or did or what his angry, frustrated and hapless followers did.

While, the Church must courageously confront the excesses of an errant priest, I contend that this new case involving Mbaka challenges us to embrace the project of reform and renewal of the Church in Nigeria to be better positioned to meet the challenges of our times.

Our churches may be as corrupt as the state and one cannot give what one does not have. This reform and renewal of the Church in our land must begin by addressing clericalism in all its forms, priestcraft and its associated aberrations and excesses in Nigeria, and the pastorpreneurs, and episcopreneurs syndrome that has turned some of our houses of worship into a den of thieves and money bags.

The main challenge facing us all as a Church in Nigeria’s social context today is how we can prophetically address the suffering, insecurity, and near collapse of the Nigerian project with the leaven of the Gospel.

In addition, we must find a way of accompanying our people in their suffering and bandage the wounds inflicted on them by the Nigerian state and false religious messages from false religious leaders who lead God’s people astray.

One of the ways we can do this is by becoming a poor and merciful Church. We need to deepen our religious commitments and witnessing in the public square through a faith that is built strongly on a rock. We must reject the kind of faith that is built on big daddies and thick madams of a Big God.This phenomenon has privatized Christianity and often lead our people to see faith in God as a transactional exchange with God effected through these men and women of God who claim to help people to win divine favors.

This has also led to the multiplication of religious devotions, vigils or novenas, building of pilgrimage centers and religious enchantments and different abuses and excesses without the needed discernment and quality control by local religious leaders. We need faith in action; faith that does good works; a Christian hope that is built on the Lord Jesus and anchored on pragmatic solidarity. This is one way out of many through which we can accompany the masses of our people, some of whom are wandering like sheep without a shepherd in both church and state today. 

A Church which speaks to the pain and pathos of our people through simple and credible church leaders whose lives, words, priorities and practices point to the Lord and capture the deepest cultural and spiritual imagination of the people will bring soothing balms to heal the wounds and brokenness of our people. A Church which preaches Jesus, the Lord and His kingdom through her priorities and practices, and the makes common cause with the poor and the weak through the simple lifestyle of her leaders will win many souls to the Lord today in Nigeria.

Our churches are too distracted with empty shows, worldly pursuits and wrong political alliances and missteps, and preoccupation with fraternizing with politicians, the rich and the mighty. As troubling and painful as these desecrations and violations by Mbaka’s followers might be, there is the need to look at the larger picture and the wider context of today’s Nigeria and to ask the question: What is it about us as Church that these kinds of reactions, desecrations, and violent protests are carried out in the name of God by our so-called Catholics and Christians all because people wish to defend a priest? What is it about our clerics and religious that they seek validation and relevance through association with politicians? Why have our priests, bishops, and religious, directly or through their surrogates become beggars at the doors of state houses, and the gates of the high and mighty of our society? Why do we believe that our church institutions and agencies, our gigantic cathedrals and structures need to be built through this ecclesial mendicancy at the courts of some of these corrupt and insensitive politicians? Why is that our church leaders believe that they cannot function well without seeking every means and channels for influence peddling, financial donation, gifts of cars, contracts, and attracting projects for themselves, their churches, reference groups by hobnobbing with politicians?

It is so easy to condemn Mbaka based on the ‘revelation’ from Aso Rock, but we must also examine how the relation between the church and the state has played out so far in our land and how we have compromised our faith and prophetic commitments through these unholy alliances for filthy lucre. The reason our words no longer carry weight and the occasional statements from our bishops and priests are barely remembered or referred to is that they are mere words that are often not validated through authentic and credible witnessing; we do not often practice what we preach. These statements are often circulated widely on social media, but nothing changes because the politicians know us.

Nigerian politicians know that we are a beggarly church, and that materialism like a cankerworm has eaten deep into the fabric of the Church, and our Church leaders have lost the evangelical passion for reform and conversion of life all in the name of building structures. Money is what rules in the Church particularly in Igboland and those priests who can bring in the millions to the diocese or the religious order are usually the highly favored.

Those who have access to the president, governors, senators and influential politicians and wealthy people are hailed as great priests and are often beyond reproach. What this means is that there is a little of the contract-seeking Mbaka in many of us; there is a little of the healing and charismatic Mbaka in many of us; there is a little of the influence-peddling Mbaka in many of us. The current situation, therefore, calls all of us to go beyond condemning one man or casting the first stone to examining our consciences and the way we have run our churches and the nature and quality of the priestly ministry and priestly life today in Nigeria. 

The same could be said of our young people today who flock to the Adoration Ministry and other sites outside of their parishes in search of healing, hope, wealth, and solutions to their problems. The young men who went on rampage to the bishop’s house and the cathedral are the faces of our frustrated, hungry, jobless, and exploited children. These young people, driven by a neuralgic messianic quest, find in Mbaka and his likes an alternate ecclesial site of hope and do not seem to have much respect and affinity to the institutional Church at least from their acts of hooliganism. 

These fans or ‘umu ikuku’ are contumaciously latching onto Mbaka’s every word and spiritual map as the only unshakeable promise and pathway that can steady their flabby steps when everything around them is showing signs of instability and decay. Their faith commitments and desires could only lead them to a splurge of aggressive animus against church authorities when they could not find their missing ‘daddy.

’What kind of foundation and catechesis did they receive and how have they been formed to think along with the Church and her ordered ranks of leaders at all levels of ecclesial life? This sad reality sheds a prismatic light on the patently vacuous doctrinal and ecclesial formation most of our young people receive today and the facetious answers and solutions being offered to them. This kind of formation has not adequately equipped them with the right response of faith to the challenges that the life and context of Nigeria throw onto them today. These young men and women who were marauding the streets of Enugu in search of their daddy remind us through their electric glit of insane eyes and untamed and ragged leer of unnerving brutality; and their readiness to destroy and desecrate the church and the chancery that we are sitting on a religious tinder box because our Catholic youth are becoming a motley crowd suffused with a ragtag assortment of false religious doctrinal porridge of mess.

We have failed our young people by not feeding them with the milk of the true faith, nourishing them in the deep wells of divine truth, and giving them the light that comes from the Gospel to prophetically engage with the forces of darkness cast on our land by our rulers. Our leaders have robbed our young people of any future and deprived them of any ladder of social mobility, while normalizing the pauperization of the masses of our people and pulverization of our national wealth and hoisting on us a cultural deficit mode and a high deprivation index across the board. 

In the light of the above, there is the need to look at the bigger picture of the current situation without simply jumping into the conclusion that the problem is what Mbaka has said or done. The problem is actually the social condition of the country, and the lacuna created by the waning of the prophetic Church in Nigeria. 

We make statements that no one takes to heart; we give sermons and write beautiful essays that people circulate multiple times on social media but it does not change anybody. I do not know any single policy change or any social or economic program for the poor that has been adopted in the last two decades in Nigeria as a result of any good homily, statement, or public lecture of any of us church leaders.

Why is it that our words carry no more weight as they did in the past? The reason is that Nigerians are tired of statements and good homilies from bishops and priests who are friends of politicians and who are seen dining and wining with corrupt men and women who have destroyed our nation.

Nigerians are no longer moved by wonderful lectures and essays from bishops and priests who have benefited immensely from their association with the same politicians who have created the very vicious cycle that holds us in thralldom today. Nor are people moved anymore in Nigeria by essays from those of us who are living abroad without boots on the ground because we are away from our people.

Our young people are listening to Mbaka because he is perhaps in the thoughts of many a poor substitute, even a subaltern in a sky with few stars in the vast ecclesial constellation. Those of us at home live in safely protected rectories and chanceries in many cases, and are shielded from the vagaries of the heart wrenching condition under which our people live.

The credibility of the Church today is severely undermined by the corruption within our ranks, and the way we have compromised the faith and sold our consciences to money, materialism, and immoral living, while cheapening our faith, liturgy and sacraments in such a way that God’s people are not being led deeper into the mysteries of the divine life. 

In spite of all these, our people are still willing to follow the Church. This is because they have a deep hunger for the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our people need God and follow their pastors and daddie seven when the truth-value of our doctrines have been undermined by the pentecostalization and charismatization of the faith, even when our ancient and beautiful rituals have been replaced with bizarre and meaningless drama in paraliturgical and liturgical celebrations; and even when our moral, spiritual, and Catholic social teachings have been abandoned and replaced with shallow or non-existent social commitments.

We must, therefore, dig deeper into the complexity of the problems we face which, in my judgement, have a long history beyond the present crisis and opportunities presented by the latest chapter in the unfolding drama of Mbaka’s Adoration Ministry. The future from here for the Church in Enugu and the rest of Igboland and Nigeria is to go back to the missionary mandate—proclaiming and enacting the good news not through pathological performance, but as a prophetic commitment to realizing everyday in the lives of our people and in our social ecology the priorities and practices of the Lord Jesus.

We must courageously hold on to the truth of the Gospel while contextually reenacting the glorious spiritual, moral, intellectual, prophetic, and social traditions of the Church in our very challenging social context today. The Catholic Church has everything within her in our land to meet the challenges facing our country if only we can remain faithful and true to these traditions.

We must lead our people deeper into the mysteries of divine love and life. This must go beyond any shallow faith, complicity with the evil men and women who have turned Nigeria into a necropolis where death and destruction are being parceled out in small and large dosages to the masses through structural violence and ‘stupid deaths.’

All these have been brought about by preventable and treatable diseases, modifiable social determinants of health and human wellbeing, insensitive and oppressive policies and programs of our Islamic supremacist President Buhari leading to suffering, insecurity, and insouciance that have turned our land into a vast desert of desolation, social misery, deaths, violence, fear, restlessness, starvation, suffering, and crimes. 

As John Campell the former U.S ambassador to Nigeria wrote in a recent book, Nigeria and the Nation-State, Nigeria’s elites—and I will include religious leaders both Christian and Muslims—are competing for access to oil and gas revenue, the fountain of wealth and power in Nigeria. Nigeria, I argue, is a typical extractive state led by extractive leaders and their acolytes whose sole aim is to syphon our national wealth. 

In this sinful extractive mission, the religious and ethnic divisions do not matter, this is why you can find an Islamist President like Buhari, and a Christian prophet like Mbaka negotiating for some form of quid pro quo to benefit both sides. The Nigerian state is weak, and so the non-state actors like religious movements, militant organizations, traditional ethnic configurations and cultural groups, civic societies, powerful religious leaders like Mbaka, Gumi, Zakzaky or Bakare to name but a few serve in different ways as channels through which elite contestations are enacted and negotiated for better or worse in the battle to gain access to Nigeria’s oil money, lucrative government salaries, jobs, contracts, and projects and even in a few cases (Sheikh Gumi) in negotiating with terrorists and kidnappers.

The Nigerian government and her gate keepers no longer control large swathes of our land. Nigeria is thus ‘like an archipelago of islands in a sea of ungoverned spaces’, but the government does control the oil wealth through international oil conglomerates and a few Nigerian gate keepers of the oil blocks subcontracted to foreigners. Nigeria is a weak state and this weakness has given many non-state actors greater role today in complexifying our situation and turning our land into a necropolis—a land of deaths and destruction.

In Nigeria, armed robbery, kidnapping, banditry, epileptic social services, bribery, murders have all become acceptable inconvenience. At the same time, the predatory practices of the state and the few thin top layer who have sole access to the resources of our land have become normalized. The rest of the people are clients to the state operatives and their reference groups, and the Church in our land have lined up as clients of the state in this terrible prebendalist social framework that reduced Mbaka, the crown in our jewel, to a contract seeking prophet at the doors of power. This is shameful and scandalous.

Mbaka must immediately embrace the path of conversion and adopt an immediate course-correction for his own eternal salvation and the salvation of God’s people.

Finally, we can apply the same framework for analyzing the Nigerian state to the Church in Nigeria today. Our Church has become weak and compromised; our institutions are not strong and dynamic, and our social commitments and prophetic traditions lack any clarity or depth in both theoretical and theological development and pastoral design, delivery, and intervention. This desideratum has created the opening for alternate ecclesial sites like Mbaka’s, all of which claim to offer to the people more than what they can get through the formal pastoral structures and designs of either the diocese or the parish. 

The good news is that Holy Mother Church has learned through her long history how to discern and integrate the gifts or talents or the charism of her members in the service of the kingdom of God. However, the Catholic Church in Nigeria has not developed the proper framework and canonical principles fordiscerning, and accompanying priests like Mbaka, an immensely gifted priest, so that he can develop properly and serve the people faithfully and credibly within the formal structures of the Church and in fidelity to her mission within the local church.

The tension between charism and authority is what is emerging now in Enugu diocese and we pray that the Holy Spirit will guide the bishops, laity, clergy, and religious of the diocese in this needed process of discernment and renewal.

Even though, a more proactive pastoral accompaniment should have been introduced by his local ordinary in guiding Mbaka’s ministry long ago, the amiable Bishop Onaga has maturely resisted the temptation of litigating this internal ecclesial tension in the court of public opinion. He has been patient with Mbaka because he recognizes Mbaka’s enormous gifts and the need to help him to use them to help in bringing about the eschatological fruits of the reign of God.

However, Bishop Onaga must now come out publicly not hiding through written statements and speak directly to the local church, the nation and the world. Three things must be done right away: First, the Adoration Ministry must focus on its core ministry—a spiritual center for Eucharistic spirituality and an oasis of hope for those who seek a deeper encounter with the Lord Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Second, the Adoration Ministry must now be administered through a diocesan team not through a self-referentializing priest, who may be reaching a point of diminishing return, through the old foe of hubris or pride of self that can lead one away from God and the church. We must be aware of Shakespeare’s quip, that even the devil can cite the scripture for his purpose.

There is the need to test all things and hold on to what is true and good (1 Thes 5: 21). There is a fine line that needs to be drawn between Mbaka’s ministry as one located within the pastoral mission of the diocese and the Church, and the freedom he needs in order contestations are enacted and negotiated for better or worse in the battle to gain access to Nigeria’s oil money, lucrative government salaries, jobs, contracts, and projects and even in a few cases (Sheikh Gumi) in negotiating with terrorists and kidnappers.

Third, in my last essay on Mbaka, I made it clear that Mbaka is at his best when he speaks of God and concentrates on his core competence—preaching the Word of God, and singing of God’s many works in our lives. Mbaka has the gift of composing songs from the time he was in the seminary and his earlier songs like Gozie mu (Bless me, God) still lifts me to the margins of heaven. However, he is a green horn in politics and lacks the language, the strategy or the political sagacity required to engage with wily Nigerian politicians. 

He should desist from visiting any state house without a grave reason. If he wishes to make any intervention on issues of politics, he must pass it through a team of experts and when he is arranging to visit or speak to politicians, he must seek the wise counsel of the team and his bishop and such a visit should be public and not private or secret. But he does not have any business visiting any state house; he should stay with his people and with God as he does often before the Blessed Sacrament. Those who need him will come to him.

All in all, we cannot simply dismiss Mbaka’s ministry or even contemplate banning him or placing a gag order on him. He might need to take a break to retool and refresh after this latest episode. However, truth must be told that Mbaka is renewing the Catholic Church in Nigeria. He might not have done this in the most effective way, but his limitations should not blind us to what God has done through this weak vessel, and what God can still do through him when he and all the ecclesial authorities involved listen to what God is saying to us at this moment.

There is the need to focus our attention on how we can strengthen our church structures and pastoral agents to fight the forces of darkness brought upon us by the Islamic supremacist, Buhari. The wrong strategy for the Church will be to fight ourselves internally which will dissipate our energy in fighting the real enemy of the people today—the current leadership in Nigeria, the Islamization agenda of Buhari, and demonic and destructive systems that a few Nigerian elites have run through the two leading political parties in Nigeria, the APC and the PDP. 

We must focus our energy on fighting this rot in our land and the associated sinful stratagem of the APC and the PDP. These two political parties have turned the poor against themselves, given some of our religious leaders poisoned chalices that have made them laughing stocks and have divided and destroyed the country in the name of a false democracy.

They have wasted our national wealth and parceled out our national heritage among themselves, while the majority of our people continues to live and die in penury, pain, and gut-wrenching social misery, destitution and passing long nights of tears in prayers to a God, who has done more for Nigeria than God has done for any country in Africa. 

(Stan Chu Ilo is a Catholic priest of Awgu diocese, and a research professor of World Christianity and African Studies at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, DePaul University, Chicago, U.S.A. He is the coordinator of the Pan-African Catholic Theology and Pastoral Network, and one of the editors and directors of Concilium International Journal of Theology.)