By Fr. Anthony Adetayo

Dominicans for Justice and Peace Nigeria & Ghana is an NGO managed by the Dominican Province of St. Joseph the Worker, Nigeria and Ghana. They organized an online (zoom) discussion themed “The Church and State: Policy making in Nigeria”, on Friday 10^th February 2023 at 7:30pm Lagos time.

The moderator; Aniedi Okure, OP welcomed every panelist to the online discussion and directed the the session. Notable panelists include Femi Falana SAN, Fr. George Ehusani, Prof. Adenike Emeke and Prof. Teresa Okure SHCJ.

While the discussion was in its heat, Fr. George Ehusani insisted that networking, advocacy and lobbying need a structure that is properly funded by the Church in Nigeria so that such efforts can have the benefit of well researched papers upon which CBCN make their statements. For him, “some statements released by the CBCN do not capture fully the sentiments of the present political predicament. This means their releases must be preceded by well-researched papers on the polity. They should network with civil society organizations that are involved with issues of the poor, human rights and education”.

Furthermore, he said “a lot of our leaders in the church are not aware about the alienation between the leaders of churches and their followers. The phenomenon of ‘palace priests’ is bad, when a Governor or President invites pastors and priests to his house for prayers and such man of God is placed on a salary scale. With this arrangement, they do not hear the truth.”

Professor Adenike Emeka joined the conversation by saying “If you don’t take care of politics, politics will take care of you. We need a policy in the Church that can mold people through our schools to be brought up with a conscience.” She emphasized the need for the church to take back her schools. “Some schools have been returned but what is the church doing to get back the others?” She said we have not exhausted our options. Noting further, Prof Adenike said “as Nigerians, we need to make ourselves literate citizenry. We don’t know the extent at which policies infringe into our rights. We have a duty to be literate enough and interested enough to know what is happening in order to make the needed change for the society.

The popular Human Right Activist, Femi Falana SAN made a couple of interventions. He said “The church should speak against those elements among her that use miracle centers to shift the focus of the larger body. The church can promote liberation theology so that we can liberate our people from poverty and illiteracy.” In matters of politics, Mr. Falana said the Catholic Church should not only encourage Catholic to go into Politics but should give them guidance before they go. “We should not just ask Catholics to go to politics. We must set a social contract for them so that they can be evaluated with it whether they represent our values or not. A line of faith must be drawn for them”

Before he concluded, he maintained that the Church can make a maximum use of the services of Catholic lawyers to fight injustice among us. “Lawyers in every parish must come together to attend to the aid of their parishioners and those in their communities. Our people go through problems all over the place, unjust arrest, harassment, intimidating, extra judicial killing etc.”

Other people made contributions during the Q&A segment and there is a proposal already for a serious follow-up on the submissions of this panel discussion into practicable and executable bits and pieces.