The church has a prophetic role to play, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, Nigeria’s high commissioner to Canada, told church staff, Nigerians and former missionaries at the church’s national offices in Toronto on Oct. 5.
“The church should see itself not as superior to the political society, but as our Lord Jesus Christ has ordered the church to be: to be the salt of the earth. The Holy Spirit is urgently needed in our nation,” he said.
Ojo Maduekwe is the son of a minister, and both he and his wife, Ucha Maduekwe, are elders in the Nigerian Presbyterian Church. He was appointed high commissioner to Canada in June.
In his comments, the former minister of foreign affairs focused on Nigeria’s “tremendous capacity for conflict resolution.” As a former officer on the side of the Biafra region, which tried to split from Nigeria during the country’s civil war, he said he has worked with many politicians who fought for the other side. And as a Christian, he has worked with many Muslim politicians in a country torn by violence between Muslims and Christians.
“The 10th parallel is the area where the two historical religions of Islam and Christianity are in competition for control, for dominance, for relevance,” he said. “I don’t want to go into too much detail as to the history—it is sufficient to underscore that it is both an opportunity and also a danger. … It is an opportunity because if a country like Nigeria, that is the largest place in the world with an equal number of Muslims and Christians, can show that their common traditions taken from the monotheistic values of Judaism have a lot more in common than appear to be the basis for confronting each other, then the world will be a safer place.”
The situation can be addressed through leadership, he said, and by balancing law enforcement and conflict resolution, education and employment.
“I understand why he has to put the most positive spin he can on Christian-Muslim relationships. I’m glad to hear there are positive things to be said,” observed Marjorie Ross, a missionary to Nigeria from 1962 to 1969. “But in a talk like this I don’t think he could really get into all the factors that I know are part of this Muslim-Christian friction.”
Violence between groups from the majority Muslim north and mostly Christian south has worsened in the past decade.
Echoes from the 1967-1970 civil war, anger, deaths, destruction of property, retaliation, and economic tensions between the oil-rich south and the north continue to fuel violence.
According to a report prepared by a joint Christian-Muslim delegation from the World Council of Churches and the Jordanian Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, many factors contribute to the tensions including: an “imaginary North-South ‘fault line,'” religious leaders endorsing violence, a lack of “universal rule of law” and “wide-spread injustice by judiciary, the executive, the police and military,” and vast disparities of wealth, education, healthcare and employment between the north and south.
The delegation concluded the current conflicts are “not inherently based in religion” but, it warned, if religion comes to overshadow the more complex social, political, ethnic and economic issues, the idea could “become a self-fulfilling prediction.”
Nigeria is home to an estimated 170 million people, half of whom are under the age of 18. It is also home to more than 250 ethnic groups and over 500 indigenous languages.
Members of the Nigerian Presbyterian congregation, encouraged by the Presbyterian Church in Canada and led by Rev. Augustus Oku, along with former missionaries to Nigeria and staff at national offices were present at the gathering.
Oku’s congregation celebrated their first anniversary on Thanksgiving Sunday.
