Category: Opinion

The Eleven-Eleven roundabout in Calabar, Cross River State was named after the Armistice Day when World War I (1914-1918) ended at the 11th hour on the morning of the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918.

The Eleven Eleven Roundabout which was built by the Mr. Donald Duke administration and had on its sides, features which resemble Egyptian burials vaults, (mummies) was reworked in 2009 to remove those images which church leaders and most residents complained gave the impression that the State worships idols and replaced with a water fountain. But in November of 2012, it was torn apart again and reworked without much change to the previous one. Now Governor Otu has again, brought the roundabout down and replaced it with a statue carrying the Holy Bible with quotations from Psalms 27 and Psalms 127 with embedded fingers.

This is worrying for me and I will express my worries. I have never lived in Calabar since I was born, but I know Calabar well enough to understand that the continued remodeling of this roundabout isn’t born out of a desire to give the State capital any enduring aesthetic value but to draw attention to the parochial convictions of the remodellers.

The current statue now standing there, only depicts the religious persuasions and views of the current occupant of Peregrino House. No more, no less. But our people must be weary of governments that want to railroad religion as a State policy and there are historical reasons and empirical data to support this warning.

A century ago, Durkheim proposed that technological and socioeconomic advances come to displace the functions of religion: (É Durkheim, (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, K.E. Fields, Transl. (The Free Press, 1995). Whereas Weber contended the opposite, that monotheistic religion or the so-called ‘Protestant Ethic’, made the development of capitalism possible. (Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons, Transl. (Routledge Classics, 2001).

But data generated from recent and continuing research is interestingly revealing that, the growth in irreligiousity in any country is linked to economic progress. There are several studies that espouse this conclusion. One such study comes from the University of Bristol, (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aar8680), where researchers studied the trends in secularization for 100 years and determined that growth in secularism came before economic development. The researchers sought to answer the question of whether a boost in a nation’s economic development leads to lesser religiosity or if it’s the other way around. They discovered that, secularization did account for 40% of global economic development in the 1990s. Additionally, they also disproved the commonly held belief that education also leads to secularism.

Another research from Mississippi State University and West Virginia University, (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/abs/religion-productive-or-unproductive/4E84A5F30B499BE751E478DFC1305B12), also looks at the link between irreligion and productive entrepreneurship. Stunningly, the researchers found that all metrics of religion that they had tracked ended up negatively correlating with productive entrepreneurship, while irreligious variables positively correlated with it.

Further expanding on this, and taking a look at the correlation of daily prayers with a nation’s gross domestic product per capita (GDP per capita), the data reveals that, in nearly every country (except Middle Eastern states that were not part of the sample), with a GDP per capita higher than $30,000, adults pray less. For instance, the People’s Republic of China’s religiously unaffiliated population is 51.8% but China is the world’s largest economy in purchasing power parity terms.

This brings us back to my warning. Let us all be mindful of the fact that, the use of religion as a political tool to hoodwink Nigerians is legendary amongst our leaders. In the absence of meaningful economic development, our leaders have successfully waved religion as a succor to numb our collective thinking faculties and this has worked for them in the past decades. The duty of the State is to give us security and economic empowerment. Religion can be left for those who are meant to handle it. And I will tell you for free that the next Governor of Cross River State after Governor Otu, will still dismantle Eleven Eleven roundabout and waste more money to espouse his/her own belief.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

The Guardian Newspaper reported recently that more than 56,000 projects worth 12 trillion Naira have been abandoned in Nigeria since 1999, citing the Institute of Quantity Surveyors. These projects include the N18bn National Library, NIPOST headquarters construction, N39bn FIRS headquarters construction, N69bn Millennium Tower and Cultural Center construction, N7bn Ministry of Agric headquarters construction, World Trade Centre, N700bn Abuja City Centre, N4.3bn 220-Bed Utako General Hospital, $18billion Centenary City in Abuja, amongst many others scattered across the country.

It is nerve wracking to imagine that, year in year out, these huge sums are appropriated and in many cases, disbursed either in part or in full, and the projects are jilted without consequences. How this sort of financial rascality has seemingly become a matter of numb indifference to the population is even more appalling. We just keep moving on as if nothing happened.

But in this same country, when Third Mainland Bridge was built, it was the longest bridge in Africa until 1996 when the 6th October Bridge in Cairo was completed. The National Theatre, NITEL, NEPA, Nigerian Ports Authority, Military and Police barracks, East West Road, Kano-Maiduguri road, functional airports, Federal Secretariat, National Assembly Complex, Aso Rock Villa, Eagle Square, Courts, Stadia, were all built by jack boot regimes that we agree are unconstitutional and corrupt.

At the regional levels, Premiers of the various regions also left some iconic infrastructure that are still surviving till date and we talk about them with relish and nostalgia. And I have been asking myself what memorable functional projects have these set of democratic leaders started and completed since 1999 when democracy returned to Nigeria?

I really wish those who do these things will realize that our economic development is tied to these abandoned infrastructure. They should realize also that if we don’t develop, none of us, no matter how much you have amassed, will be safe from those who don’t have. The rich will continue to axle themselves within the city centers or ride perpetually in armoured automobiles with a bevy of armed security guards.

Our contemporary nations that have attained this realization are tying their future to infrastructure development and taking deliberate steps. The Indian ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH) for instance, has internally set a goal to construct at least 45km of highways a day in 2023 totalling 16,000km of roads. The ministry achieved a record 13,298km in the COVID pandemic-stricken year of 2020-21, at a rate of 36.4km per day. The road building target has helped to reduce travel time, connected new areas, stimulated commercial activities, and accelerated India’s growth story.

Someone should deliberately take the gauntlet and vow to leave us some legacy projects. It is not luxury. It is what we just have to do so we don’t perish. The stealing just has to be reduced at least. Massive infrastructure development will create a chance for young people to dust their pans and their shovels, and reduce crime. It will give our population the clefts of succour and sustained hope and provide us all some roads out of this national malaise.

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

In Old English, “Wicce” means “witch.” The word, “Wicce” further has its roots in the old German word, “Wicken.” While the word, cræft, is equally an Old English word originally meaning “power or physical strength.” Cræft could also be interpreted to signify possession of inexplicable knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness. The term is as well derived from the Old High German word, “kraft.”

So “Wicce-Cræft”, or witchcraft is not Africanized. It is not an African word. It did not originate from Africa. Rather, it has generic meaning not just to the Anglo-Germans, but the entire Europe and in fact, all civilizations. It is a cultural phenomena with evidential history cutting across all civilizations and epochs. All civilizations have their pre-religous ethos and practices. Europe has a pre-Christian era. The Arabs have a pre-Islam era. China has a pre-Bhuddist era. India has a pre-Hindu era. Every culture on Earth contains some aspect of symbolic gestures or ritualized behavior performed either by an entire group or by a select few individuals, before adopting their current religions.

In Europe for instance, the practice of witchcraft was the dominant culture until it was overtaken by global consensus on the belief in One God, as well as the burgeoning influence of the Catholic Church, which led to a craze fuelled wave of witch hunting and trials across the continent during the middle ages. For two millennia, European folklore and ritual have been imbued with the belief in witchcraft and till date, witchcraft continues to play a role in European societies and imaginations.

It was the Malleus Maleficarum, (Hammer of Witches), a 1486 treatise written by Austrian priest, Heinrich Kramer and German priest Jakob Sprenger, at the request of Pope Innocent VIII, which reigned as the second-best-selling book in Europe for more than two centuries, that united the Church and the State, in providing a framework for identifying, capturing, prosecuting, and punishing witches.

But since the 1940s, new witchcraft movements have emerged in Europe, seeking to revive and reinterpret the continents’ pre-Christian practices in a search for spiritual authenticity in a rapidly changing world. Wicca, an English neo witchcraft group, pioneered by Gerald Gardner, stands out as one of the most influential of those movements. Stregheria is an Italian sect that celebrates early Italian witchcraft. Its adherents say that their tradition has pre-Christian roots, and refer to it as La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion.

Religio Romana, is a modern reconstructionist religion based upon the ancient faith of pre-Christian Rome. The Asatru tradition is also a reconstructionist path that focuses on pre-Christian Norse spirituality. The movement began in the 1970s as part of a revival of Germanic witchcraft culture. Many Asatruar say their practices are very similar in its modern form to those that existed hundreds of years before the Christianization of the Norse cultures. Hellenic Polytheism, rooted in the traditions and philosophies of the ancient Greeks, is another path that has begun a resurgence following the Greek pantheon, and often adopting the religious practices of their ancestors.

It is in the light of this global resurgence in the search for cultural authenticity, and its imminence in Africa, that I will like to end by quoting, theologian, Dr. Mary Nyangweso Wangila, a J. Woolard and Helen Peel Distinguished Professor in Religious Studies at East Carolina University, from her book: “Witches” of the Twenty-First Century: Invoking the Relevance and Resilient Character of African Spirituality in Changing Times”, where she argues that, “the resurgence of practitioners of African spirituality in Africa and the African diaspora, commonly known to some as “witches” in the twenty-first century, as demonstrated in practices and lyrics of the millennials such as Beyonce, Banks and Nokia is not only illustrative of the ability of African spirituality to evolve and adapt, it speaks to the centrality of African identity in the African experience.

“Drawing from experiences of Africans in the sub-Saharan region and those in the African diaspora, I argue that the general assumption that relegating African religious beliefs and practices as “savage,” “primitive” and “uncivilized” and therefore destined to decline is disproven by resilient manifestations of African spirituality in modern society.”

She further concludes by acknowledging the, “disadvantage that these religions experience due to their lack of the proselytizing instinct that their monotheistic peer religions like Christianity and Islam possess, their persistence not only speaks to an Afrocentric character that is central to Africans everywhere, it is also an illustration of the basic fact that all social phenomena is bound to evolve and adapt. Resilient vestiges of African spirituality are indicative of how irreplaceable and un-erasable core African values are and how they speak to an identity that cannot be traded for another.”

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.

Five miles from the South Dakota border in the remote northern reaches of the US state of Nebraska, there is a small town called, Monowi, with only one resident and an abandoned church, whose empty pews are now filled with tractor tyres.

84 years old, Elsie Eiler, became the only resident of Monowi, after her husband Rudy, passed away in 2004. Today, according to the US Census, Monowi is the only incorporated place in the US with just one resident, and Eiler is the mayor, clerk, treasurer, librarian, bartender and only person left in the US’ tiniest town.

She pays taxes to herself, grants her own alcohol licence and runs a tavern where people come from neighbouring towns to patronize. As mayor, each year, she hangs up a notice in Monowi’s only business (her bar) advertising mayoral elections, and then votes for herself.

She’s required to produce a municipal road plan every year to secure state funding, and then raises about $500 worth of taxes from herself annually to keep the town’s three lampposts flickering and its water flowing.

Eiler explained to the BBC in 2020 that: “When I apply to the state for my liquor and tobacco licenses each year, they send them to the secretary of the village, which is me. So, I get them as the secretary, sign them as the clerk and give them to myself as the bar owner.”

She walks a few feet from her home to the tavern each morning at 9am to open the bar, except Mondays, when she gives herself a day off. She sells alcohol and also cooks hamburgers ($3.50), hot dogs ($1.25) and gizzards ($4). Most of her regular customers live within 20 to 30 miles but others drive 200 miles from Lincoln and Omaha to patronize her and Eiler doesn’t usually close up until after 21:30 when things quieten down.

Monowi is one of three incorporated towns in Boyd County, Nebraska, that has fewer than 10 residents. Monowi surpassed nearby Gross, Nebraska, with a population of 2 residents to become the only incorporated town in the US with just one resident.

Do you have the resilience of Mummy Eiler Rudy? Can you live in a ghost town and make sense of it and derive all the happiness you wish for? Can you run even your street residents association and maintain the legendary orderliness of Mummy Eiler? Ponder!!!

Yours sincerely,
Citizen Agba Jalingo.