By Olakunle Abimbola

Just as well the holy fathers, pleading sacred exception, from holy arrogance, are blazing at the new CAMA, with holy ire — and fire!

The “new CAMA” is the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 (which replaces CAMA 1990), signed into law on August 7 by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Section 839 (1) and (2) of CAMA 2020 may well signal true karma for churches, mosques and allied holy racketeers, though the target is general thieving charities.  Any charity whose accounting is found wanting, risks a replacement of its trustees, under the new law.

But that piece of generic legislation has sent the holy fathers threatening, growling and roaring!

Indeed, why should sacred enterprises bow to profane laws, by a rude and irreverent secular republic?

But before you roast the seething spiritual fathers, peep at their secular cousins, and their sizzle over “hate speech”, in the Obadiah Mailafia-induced N5 million radio fine question.

Media Titans, high secular priests of speech and allied rights, clearly sympathetic to the smitten radio — a peer in distress — bristle over what constitutes “hate speech”, even if its basic meaning appears simple and clear enough.

Now, what’s this?  Spiritual and secular tag-bullies, ranged against a weak, prostrate and lowly state?  You’d be damned if the state stomached their pillorying!

Still, hollow exceptionalism, driven by empty opportunism, is one reason contemporary Nigeria stagnates.  It’s high time the authorities, therefore, faced down that crappy mindset.

Winners Chapel Bishop David Oyedepo’s whine-and-damn style wasn’t really unexpected.  You know the bishop would rail, any time public policy clashed with his investments, spiritual or temporal.

So, it was all a tale of the expected: when he launched a tirade against the new CAMA,  a deep rumbling-in-the-cathedral in tow.  His doting congregants, in captive roar, cheered at his holy bragging against the secular order.  The priest himself, flush with combat, awaited that day, when profane orders would appoint trustees over his sacred church!

But any attempt at thinking the holy bishop represented only the fringe of Nigerian Christendom quickly vanished, with the official response of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN).

CAN thundered at CAMA 2020: “The satanic section of the controversial and ungodly law is section 839 (1) and (2), which empowers the commission to suspend trustees of an association for some given reasons” — a veritable appeal to pity, which has no place in rational discourse.

Then, the flexing of supreme spiritual powers, over a prostrate secular order: “The church cannot be controlled by the government because of its spiritual responsibilities and obligations.  That is why we are calling on the Federal Government to stop the implementation of the obnoxious and ungodly law until the religious institutions are exempted from it.”  Again, nothing but cheap holy bluster.

Still, there you go!  After a racket of adjectives and frenzied name-calling, all powered by holy gas, the best CAN can plead is exemption!  In other words, while other charities, registered under the same set of laws, can be regulated, churches cannot — and should not?

On what pillar would such exemption stand, in the eye of the law — on the diktat of holy exceptionalism, solely and arrogantly defined, prescribed and imposed by CAN? How even fair, legitimate or logical is that?

Besides, what happens to the Christ Jesus’ sacred concept of being under authority?  Yes, churches are under the authority of their sponsoring missions.  But if those missions are not under the authority of the state (without invading their constitution-secured right to faith and spiritual freedom), why does a church have to register as a charity under the law, in this case, CAMA?

Didn’t Jesus, the Christ Himself, say give to God what is God’s; and to Caesar what is Caesar’s?  But then, that is taking up CAN on the logical front.  That is one area it isn’t willing to play, because it can’t win.

That explains its un-Christ-like arrogance and emotive blather; and its crafty, holy filibustering, instead of a logical marshal of its case — if any — in utter disregard, if not outright contempt, for others with which it shares the Nigerian space.

Still, CAN is right on one score: CAMA 2020 is “satanic” — but not in the self-serving way it wanted its message understood.  It would bring out the Satan in smart Alecs that convert God’s trove into personal and family treasures.  Those would be named and shamed!

Now, how can that be bad for any polity, spiritual or temporal?

But CAN and other religious lobbies are not the sole hustlers, shopping for exceptions to dodge responsibility.  Other secular bodies do — including the media, that push ideological fixation to fend off reasoned discourse.

A favourite rhetorical question, in Nigeria’s newsrooms and Editorial Board suites, is: “who determines hate speech?” — asked with a triumphant and deadpan finality, that signals “end of discussion”, to parody that popular street lingo.

The Mailafia affair, and the offending radio’s N5 million fine, by National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), has brought media folks posing that query with renewed vigour.

Twenty-six years after, people still flinch at the Rwanda genocide of 1994.  Yet, only a few, if any at all, seem to remember the “media slaughter” that powered it all: a Rwanda radio charging inflamed killers to “cut down the tall trees!”, a barely veiled code, for the tall and endangered Tutsis!

Incidentally, the Arusha, Tanzania-based International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, gaoled for life, Father Athanase Seromba, a Hutu Catholic priest, for his role in the brutal slaughter of some 2, 000 ethnic Tutsis, in the infamous Nyarubuye massacre.  That tribunal also convicted the killer radio’s sponsors, including presenters.

In the beginning (according to the Bible), there was the Word.  That word was God.  He created all.  In Rwanda, there was also the word.  But that word was hate.  It destroyed all!

Fierce Ideologues of free speech, who poker-face wait to define “hate speech”, miss the point.  Everyone should take responsibility for whatever they say or write.

After that, we are all better primed, to push against government abuse of citizens’ rights, in the liberty-control continuum.

Anything short of that is pursuing, on the secular plain, the holy gas CAN pushes on the spiritual sphere.  Dodging responsibility is an expressway that leads to perdition.