Fresh from the inauguration of Pope Leo XIV in Rome last Sunday, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kukah, was a guest on Channels Television’s Political Paradigm, where he spoke about his experience in Rome and the possible impact of the new Pope in Africa and the world in general. He also spoke about the roles of religious leaders, traditional leaders, and political leaders in modern Nigeria and how to ensure that everyone contributes to the growth of the country.
Enjoy the excerpt:
We saw a lot of leaders flock to Rome for the installation of Pope Leo XIV, and we saw African leaders as well. Now, the thing is that a lot of people may be in the dark as to what exactly it means to have African leaders or world leaders converge on Rome for the inauguration of the Pope. Can you explain the significance of this and what this means for Africa and perhaps the world in general?
I think the worry should be who was not in Rome and as you saw, I mean luckily I was in Rome for the burial of Pope Francis, and again something very dramatic happened because every square inch of that territory is a space for negotiation at the highest level. You saw, for example, after the Mass during the burial, (President) Volodymyr Zelensky (of Ukraine) and (US President Donald) Trump just securing a little space to have a conversation, that was very profound. So, when anything happens in the Vatican, everybody who is anybody wants to show up, there is always drama because usually, Vatican protocol is slightly different from the things you’re familiar with.
I remember the burial of Pope John Paul II when we had this drama of (former President Robert) Mugabe, for example, being beside the United Kingdom, Iran being beside Israel, and so on and so forth. So, because they are arranged in alphabets, sometimes the most unlikely people show up, including people who are not talking to one another and that’s why it’s a massive moral space, and that’s why you saw the kind of people that showed up. But even most importantly, it is that the Pope, any Pope, for that matter, that has been the story throughout history. It has always been the moral compass for where the world is going.
What moral implication does it have globally?
I think usually every world leader defines their moral relevance or even their relevance by how near they are to the Pope. So, it was not really for everybody to have had a chance to be invited, it was something to celebrate and for us in Nigeria, at least at the inauguration of a Pope, it is the first time that a Nigerian President will be there.
I was there at the burial of Pope John Paul II, and (former) President (Olusegun) Obasanjo was also there but this was a very special memory for us in part because as you saw some of the video clips, our President had a good opportunity to shake hands with the with the Pope and have even a bit of conversation because the Pope as you know was born in Chicago and the President also had spent some time in Chicago. So, it’s a good starting point.
Is it also palatable, so to speak, to hold on to the argument of those who say that there should have been an African Pope?
Well, let’s win the World Cup first. I think we still have a long way to go, I did write an article in the course of all of this and I remember remarking something that happened when Pope John Paul II died and the speculators thought that Cardinal Arinze came very close. But as you know, electing a pope is not like that, it’s not an ‘Emilokan’ scenario in which you say, ‘These people have had their turn, now it’s our turn.’ No, it doesn’t work like that. And then the pundits who think that this is like betting on a horse or whatever. You always notice that by and large when people begin to make their speculations, they are using human parameters of their calculation, and very often, most of those who make these calculations simply accumulate their data and suggest this is where it’s going to go. But always, people are shocked in part because the election of a Pope is not like any other election anywhere in the world.
What is that so?
What is very interesting about the election is that it is an election in which you know you’re going out to vote; you are both a candidate and a voter, so you are voting. I don’t think people vote for themselves necessarily, but it means whatever vote you cast, you know somebody else is voting for you because you also have a right to be chosen. What was even more spectacular about the election of Pope Leo was that there were 133 men (cardinals). They know one another but not in a very close way; I mean I was at the Synod and I met the current Pope Leo, he opened the door for me, but sometimes I look back and say, ‘Oh my goodness! If I had known he was going to be Pope, maybe I would have done a little bit more, but nobody saw it coming and suddenly, we went in there.
Is the election not an exercise carried out by people who are familiar with one another?
Every Catholic and every Christian believes that it is the Holy Spirit that does this because 133 people go in with name tags because everybody doesn’t know everybody, there are few people who have been friends, and Cardinals were made just at the last consistory. So, there are people who are just walking into this for the very first time; they’ve never had this experience before, and they don’t know one another. So, it’s not as if you’ve had any opportunity to lobby or to put a manifesto, anything of the sort, and then as now we have always believed and believe solidly or equivocally that the Holy Spirit has his way of aggregating what He wants. So, we are going to do what human beings do, but God already has an idea about what exactly it is that He wants of his church, and from the time of Peter till date, the Holy Spirit has not failed the church.
‘Nigerian Politics Not Pope’s Business’
Let me put it that way: when we look at the Pope, we see a man who has so much respect from world leaders and Africa has a situation where it requires a lot of assistance from Western countries or more developed countries. What do you expect of this Pope concerning how influential he could be on world leaders to offer the necessary assistance to Africa or in fact, to Africa’s development in general?
Look, I’m a very proud Nigerian. Nigeria is not Sudan; we’re not Gaza, Nigeria is not Syria, Nigeria is not Libya, Nigeria is not just any country, we are a heck of a country with massive resources that can take care of us and take care of our neighbours. So, for me, it’s not the job of a Pope to decide how the corrupt Nigerian state addresses the problems of how it manages its resources; it’s not the business of the Pope. Of course, maybe I shouldn’t say it was not the business, but I was in Congo when the Pope visited in 2023, I represented the bishops of West Africa, and of course, you remember what the holy father said, telling the international community to take its hands off Africa.
Now, those are the only kind of things that the Pope can say, but in the final analysis, it is not the fault of the Pope, and it’s not the Pope’s business to decide why Nigeria and other leaders in Africa have turned politics into a criminal enterprise, it’s not the business of the Pope. All the Pope can do is offer a moral guide and, of course, even when people talk about an African Pope or a Nigerian Pope, it might only just be so nominally, but like I say and I’ve often said there’s nothing like an African pope because if it is an African pope, Africans have to elect him and he has to only govern the church in Africa, but you can have a Pope who is an African, you can’t have an African pope.
What about that feeling of the Pope coming from a particular region?
But the point to make is, as you saw with Pope Francis, he never went back to Argentina, and there are video clips, for example, of this current Pope. I just watched the clip with him shaking his elder brother, you could see from the brother’s face — after he finishes embracing him, that is about the best he could get, he has to move on. So, he’s no longer a family matter. So, I don’t think that Africa should expect that it will have these kinds of advantages because we Africans like to make this projection, “The President is from my town, therefore, it’s our turn. The governor is from my community, therefore, my community will change.”
The Pope has a duty and a responsibility, but it depends on how Africans prepare themselves and how the leadership in Africa arranges because I can speak rather authoritatively. I think it’s very important to make this point that for Nigeria, a country of this nature, we’ve had two papal visits — Pope John Paul II came in 1982, he came back again in 1998, and what was very interesting is that in all those visits, Muslims were in charge of Nigeria, (former President Shehu) Shagari in 1982, and (the late General Sani) Abacha in 1998 before his death, and then now, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu. I think that speaks a lot to the nature of the sense of urgency that Nigerian leaders and Nigerian Christians and Muslims, the investment that we must make in avoiding the collision that is created in the name of religion.
This brings me to the question of the nexus between religion and politics because clearly, religion is impacting our politics and affecting development. What is the nexus?
You know, we are a postcolonial state. Before the British came, there was no Nigeria, there were kingdoms, and there were ethnic groups, and so on and so forth, and I think this is important to understanding whether it’s Boko Haram or whether is wherever we find ourselves today. Before the British, you had the empires, whether it’s the Benin Empire or whether it is Oyo but perhaps the most dominant was the Sokoto Caliphate, with a total land mass of about 250,000 square kilometers, which is huge because that’s about half the size of Nigeria. But then, in 1903, the British defeated the caliphate and that set the tone.
I think that anybody who is a student of religion and politics in Nigeria must come to terms with the fact that to understand the ongoing tension, to understand why Boko Haram is making the claims it is making, to understand why Muslim politicians continue to talk about living under Sharia law, to understand the mind of the average Muslim, especially in northern Nigeria, you must return to that point where people felt a sense of defeat and along with that defeat came the decapitation of the institutions of power.
So, for example, if you read Lugard’s speech, Lord Lugard said, “Now that I’ve defeated you.” The Sultan had the power to appoint Emirs, and his Emirs had power over taxation. The first thing Lugard did was to say, “I take the power to appoint Emirs away from you, I take the power to appoint, to generate taxes away from you.”
And that subordinated the rump of the caliphate, and the result is that we are still dealing with some of those issues, that’s why today, the appointment of a Sultan, the appointment of an Emir is the business of the state governor and the governor will choose whomever he wants to choose, not necessarily based on the kind of moral credential because no Emir needs to show evidence that they have a degree in Islamic Studies, for example.
Is that the same for Christianity?
Along with that, then comes Christianity, coming from a Western liberal. Of course, the mistake that many people make is that Christianity came with colonialism. History doesn’t lead to that conclusion, but you can see that whereas Islam tends to focus on building a theocracy, Christianity focuses on a liberal environment in which all of us can thrive. When they were debating what now became the United Nations Human Rights Declaration, the government of Saudi Arabia said no because we don’t accept the idea that people can be individuals, and we also don’t accept the idea of human rights. So, there are a lot of these healthy tensions; they’ve been with us. But one of the most tragic things that hasn’t happened in Nigeria is that the Nigerian state. I mean those who govern Nigeria, have not had the political will, you know, to set the tone to put religion where it ought to be and to put the state where it ought to be, because now we have Section 10 of the Constitution that simply says that no state shall adopt any religion as a state religion, but you know that is not the truth in practice. So, it’s a very delicate balance.
What then, should the modern state focus on?
The point I’m making is that many Muslims in northern Nigeria are still nostalgic about the caliphate that has moved on, but as you can see from ISIS and Boko Haram, there are still people largely political; science calls them Islamists, that is those who believe that Islam can now become the tools for building now that democracy has failed. But truth be told, the modern state must focus on the fact that Islam can be a source of law, Christian values can be a source of law, and African traditional rights can be a source of law. But all of us must become citizens under one law.
What leadership roles do traditional and religious leaders play here?
I’m reading a book now that I wish everybody should read; it’s a book written by the current INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood (Yakubu), excellent book, it’s about traditional rulers and politicians, and it’s an excellent book to read because the distortions are still basically the same. What were the issues? The colonial state simply corrupted the traditional institutions as junior partners, and the welfare and well-being of the average citizens became suspended animation. So, traditional rulers oversaw the collection of taxes. In exchange, they got a little bit of the action. The modern Nigerian state has not improved on that relationship and I don’t want to go into the debate because I don’t know how it’s going to function, whether a place for traditional law in the Constitution suggests we’re going to have it remove the signboard that talks of three-armed zones and have a four-armed zone, whether we’re going to have a replication of all this at the level of the states, and whether all that is going to displace all the Constitution, the amendments that have been made and that have placed traditional institutions where they ought to be.
Some people seem to have some level of spiritual reverence for traditional rulers. Don’t they?
I don’t know the politics but for me, many people mistakenly think about traditional rulers and collapse them into religious leaders. Traditional rulers are not religious leaders necessarily because, as I said to you, after 1903, that role ended. For example, I am a bishop, I’m a priest, and I have to produce my certificates to show that I went to a school of theology before I got to where I am. The traditional leader doesn’t need it; all he needs is the goodwill of the governor. He’s not the same person who leads prayers. I cannot be a bishop and not be in my cathedral leading prayers. So, the roles are different, but I think we’ve watched the contaminating and the toxic effect of politics in religion and the traditional institutions and I don’t know those who want to take that risk and what the attractions really are.
But it is a difficult thought to see how we can ride this tiger without ending up in his stomach. I was at a conference of West African bishops in Dakar (Senegal) only about a fortnight ago, and one of the bishops from Ghana said they now have 350 cases in different courts in Ghana relating to traditional institutions. So, I don’t know how, but I believe that maybe in their wisdom, the traditional leaders will make their case. Other Nigerians will make their case, but I just know that we have seen records of people being removed because of political affiliation or lack of it, and as I said, frankly, it is difficult for me because I don’t know what the attractions are.
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