Tame religion now before it kills Nigeria — Soyinka warns

Soyinka.
Photo courtesy 

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, has warned that religion will kill the country if it is not tamed.

Soyinka stated this in Abuja on Thursday at the presentation of a book, Religion and the Making of Nigeria, written by Prof. Olufemi Vaughan.

He said President Muhammadu Buhari had said if Nigeria did not kill corruption, corruption would kill the country.

Condemning killings in the name of religion, the Nobel laureate stated, “I would like to transfer that cry from the moral zone to the terrain of religion. If we do not tame religion in this nation, religion would kill us.

“I do not say kill religion, though, I wouldn’t mind a bit if that mission could be undertaken surgically, painlessly perhaps, under anaesthesia, effectively sprayed all over the nation or perhaps during an induced pouch of religious ecstasy.

“However, one has to be realistic. Only the religiously possessed or committed would deny the obvious. The price that many have paid, not just within this society but by humanity in general, makes one wonder if the benefits have really been more than the losses.”

Soyinka said he often imagined what the world would be if religion had never been invented.

He said, “Can one think of any landscape without religious architecture?”

He wondered when and how religion became a killing machine, adding that the word religion in Africa often induced anxiety, leading to trauma “rather than solace and the consolation of spirituality which many religions claim for themselves.”