It is becoming very tiresome to listen to the negative stories of corruption. It has become fashionable to ask the question “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

No day goes by without the story of corruption and people complaining incessantly about the odious system. With all the gall and bitterness that Nigerians complain about corruption, no one has defined the entity called corruption.

Corruption here, corruption there and corruption everywhere but the Nigerian conveniently excludes himself as the purveyor of corruption. He is good while the other people are bad. His tribesmen are good because they are not in power. His barometer of corruption is always subjective.

Corruption is an activity done by others but never us. If we are to build a just society we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that if corruption is a bacteria, it cannot grow in a sterile medium.

To eradicate corruption, we have to examine ourselves and the role each and every one of us is playing to foster corruption in Nigeria. We should not aspire to have good leaders when we are not good citizens. The leadership we have now is an accurate representation of who we are.

Crying to God to intervene is not the solution. God learnt his lesson the last time he sent his son to a corrupt world. You guys crucified him. Someone said he only picked his pocket in a Moline. After all, he is the son of God while we are ordinary humans who are hungry.

We can eradicate corruption if we clearly define it and accept that we are the problems, not the leaders. The leaders are just representatives of us. We should not expect a good leader to come from amongst us when we are not good citizens.

When you look at the literature of other lands where corruption was a problem, you could see clearly these lands have master teachers who provided them with existential philosophy. China had Confucius and Lai Tao; the West had Descartes, Schopenhauer Nietzsche and the rest who examined the meaning of life. These people wrote and preached provocative ideas that woke up their fellow citizens from the slumber of unbridled materialism and careless existence that had no meaning.

Where are our wise men in Nigeria? They have all surrendered to gospels of foreign religions that extol materialism and hedonism that leads to the decay of our existence. We as a people have surrendered to life without meaning where the pursuit of materials is everything.

We are all in a brutal struggle to out ego our egos. Every institution that was erected to tame this corruption becomes a breeding ground for corruption.

Then another is set up to rectify the previous and it becomes a school of corruption. This is why we suffer. We shout and bellow that we are saints being oppressed by demons when we are the ones who built the altar of worship to these demons. If we can find a way to exorcise these demons from ourselves, we can begin to say we are ready to eradicate corruption.

Let us start by questioning people’s source of wealth. Don’t dine with them if they can’t explain it. Sudden wealth should always be questioned and interrogated. Failure to participate in this exercise is an indication where our loyalties lie or the hunger in the neighborhood has been weaponized against us.

Dr. Orette Writes from Houston, Texas

In all my writing, I have never said that Nigeria is a perfect society without any troubles. Nigeria should challenge us to proffer solutions that will work.

Choosing good leadership should be one of our solutions. The issue of terrorism has been there since the time of Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. Compared to that time, I can say, improvements have been made and a clearer picture of what is happening is there for everyone one to see.

It is disingenuous for anyone to use pictures of about ten years ago to paint today’s realities. The thorny locations in Nigeria today are the Northeast, Northwest and the Southeast. Did the Igbo soldiers forget to tell Trump that they cannot visit their homes unless under heavy army escort? Some of them use that to brag here as a status symbol.

Things were actually improving, when the United States invaded Libya and the region became flooded with arms. Libya is an example of an American invasion. How are the good people of Libya enjoying their new American freedom?  That is the freedom your Igbo brothers in the US army want for Nigerians. The Biafrans may enjoy it because anarchy is their staple.

Nigeria is still a young country and still experiencing growth and pains. It is impossible to see the progress when colonizers left their Trojan horses.

Imagine a child trying to walk and is struck by paralytic polio. How can he get his balance if his caretakers constantly tell him he will have another bout of polio? Balance will scare him and he may refuse to walk. This is what the Igbo and Fulani people are doing to Nigeria with their mutual hatred.

Unfortunately for us, these groups have managed to upend our collective struggles as they are fighting for their various masters. They will not allow the peace and rule of law that fosters development. Their document of union has stood the test of time. The founding fathers were very wise because they kept the emotive issue of religion in the private realm. These people were flawed but the document that runs America was a masterpiece of poetry that put dictators and monarchs to shame.

The American constitution has been described by people as a system of government that was designed by geniuses for idiots. No tyrant can take over America. Nigeria was barely being born when the Igbo people told us they had a better idea. Kill everyone. Since that time, Igbo people have never shown any zeal to engineer the document they destroyed. The whole of Nigeria has become the prisoners of Igbo haughtiness. The constitutions worked for America because they were wise enough to let their men of intellect craft it. The document is so simple that it has withstood 250 years in spite of war and turmoil. The most religious nation in the world has no room for religion in their founding documents. That is to be applauded.

In this our rickety journey to freedom, the Igbo people are again calling the world to destroy this nascent system. They wear blind folds and are deaf and impatient. The long process of the evolution of Nigeria is mired by illiteracy and religious bigotry.    They have the answers to Nigerians’ problems. All they need is weapons from America to turn Nigeria into a kingdom of anarchy that will serve them well.

 We must reject their duplicity. That great American document, today, made it possible for a Muslim to be elected as the Mayor of New York City today. Muslims in New York are less than 9%. The Jewish population is about 10%. No doubt, it is the greatest city in the World. You cannot help but love America. The mayor of Donald Trump’s hometown is a Muslim.  Trump told New Yorkers and his extreme right wing Christian Zealots that the guy is not qualified. He used every pejorative that his brain permitted except directly telling Yorkers that the new Mayor Mandan is the son of Osama Bin Laden. New Yorkers ignored him and cast their ballot for the Muslim guy. New Yorkers gave him a 10-point victory over Andrew Cuomo who was the former governor of New York and the son of a former governor of New York. You cannot be a New Yorker than a Cuomo. Cuomo can say his dad built the city and New Yorkers will agree with him. That Night New Yorkers told Cuomo that they are hiring a new decorator. Andrew Cuomo is a Christian.

While we kill ourselves in Nigeria for their religion, they are celebrating a victory together in New York. Muslims and Christians are celebrating this victory together in New York in a country where religion is not in the constitution. That is superlative. That is my America. Even the president could not stop the election of the guy he hates.

If you try to construct such a document in Nigeria, the two extremist groups that will oppose it will be the Fulani and Igbo. One takes direction from Rome and the other from Saudi Arabia. 

I made an allusion to this when I wrote about the similarities of the Igbo and the Fulani. In spite of our woes, we have travelled farther than America was when it was sixty years old. We are evolving. We must do more. No soldier from anywhere is competing to save us. All we need is love of country.  This evolution should make us see what is right and wrong with us.

As a Nigerian, I would like to address our issues without any external military threat. Love of neighbor and love of country are seriously in abeyance in the North and East of Nigeria. The hatred from these two groups has poisoned Nigerians. This hatred is what is pushing the Igbo people to invite foreign soldiers to come and kill their fellow citizens.

Are the Lucians better off today? The answer is no. Ask the Libyans who called Gaddafi the oppressor, and opened the gates of hell to their country, how they feel now.

“It is strange and oftentimes the instruments of darkness win us with honest trifles and betray us in deeper consequences “Shakespeare.

In my writing about the Igbo and the Fulani in Nigeria, I pilloried the Fulani, and I said people like Gumi should have no space to comment on public issues. I almost called him the devil incarnate when he suggested reformed terrorists should be admitted into the army. I was aghast that a man of that religious status could be that obscene. I was more furious when I learned he used to be an officer in the Nigerian Army.

What kind of education would make a man think that the army is a repository of criminals? This is a man who is preaching sharia law. The hypocrisy is glaring when you consider that sharia stipulates cutting of hands and limbs for stealing and this so-called religious bigot wants the Nigeria army to recruit rapists and murderers. When does he want them to join the Nigerian army? Is it before or after the amputations?

The Nigeria army should get ready for the Special Olympics. I have argued that the two religions tearing Nigeria apart are foreign religions. There are no African traditional religions that compel compulsion. Nigeria is the epicenter of the Islamic and Christian religion in the world.

Nigeria is a representation of what is happening in the Middle East. The struggle between the Christians and Muslims in Nigeria is actually the struggle between the Jews and Palestine. The Muslims are extremists for Palestine, and the Christians are extremists for the Jewish state of Israel. When Nnamdi was a fugitive from Justice, the first place he was seen was at the wailing wall of Jerusalem. That was a way of showing his allegiance to the Jewish cause. This is the undertone of the hostility between the Igbo and the Fulani.

As an African, I have my position. None of the quarrel between white people should be of any concern to me. There is nothing holy about these foreign religions. The Arabs and the European used their various religions to justify the enslavement and torture of black people. The fact that Africans are being used in their proxy wars is nauseating to me. The African elite are to blame for this. In the trauma that was visited on Africa, they confused their divinity with that of their various oppressors who captured and occupied the continent.

How can I pray to the same God as my enslaver? This is the spirit of some of those who were sold into slavery in the Americas. They never wavered in their worship of Orissa deity. Today, Orissa is the second or third religion in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and other South American countries. This is the God that saw them through the middle passage and the torture chambers of slavery. Majority of these people are from western Nigeria, and they come to Nigeria for the annual Orissa pilgrimage every year. You will not hear about it because Orissa, an African religion, does not command any of them to kill their fellow man to prove his manhood.

Stupid black people will kill each other because some gods from the Middle East want to show his erection. Why can’t he do the killing himself? What will Amadioha do?

Dr. Orette Writes from Houston, Texas

If we aspire to be a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society, we have to remove religion from the centrality of our politics. We must decentralize governance.

We have too many religious holidays and none of the religions is indigenous. Religion should have no place in our public lives.

The minds of our people have been seriously poisoned and corroded by religion. If we want to change our situation, we have to change the way we think. How can we think when the minds of the majority of our people have been corroded by religion?

What is happening in Nigeria is akin to mass psychosis. How do we extricate our nation from this?  I am tempted to say let us pray. There goes my brain. Religion short circuits any thought process and leads to arrested development. What is the point of thinking when God is in charge? This leads to fatalism that is prevalent in Nigeria.

The present way and verve which Nigeria embraces religion is destructive to a society that is struggling to render service to its people in a pluralistic society. If Religion is such a good thing, the benefits will have been everywhere by now and the colonizers will never give it to us for free.

In order to create docility, they forced the Chinese to consume the real opium which was medicinal in China at that time. The Chinese leaders saw the harm it was doing to the people and they picked up arms. This led to the Opium wars that led to the loss of Hong Kong and Macao.

Africa had no opium and the colonizers discovered religion could be more addictive than opium and they cultivated it as it was cheaper than the real opium.

Docility has always been the endpoint of slavery and colonialism. Nigerians are more docile and self-destructive than any group of people I know. They worship and nurture those who steal and vandalize their commonwealth and without a blink lynch a person who steals a loaf of bread to ward off starvation. This level of cognitive dissonance is only seen amongst drug addicts.

When I hear of foreign aid, I squirm at the thought of adding foreign priests and pastors to these orgies of abuse of Africans.

The most religious geographies in Nigeria are the most violent and destructive to the body politics of Nigeria. Religion is not about love. It is about power.  Since rulers around the world adopted religion to fortify their legitimacy, religion has always been a tool of power.

Every religion started with the founder having some private revelation. These revelations were not corroborated by a third party or done in the glare of the public. Someone said he saw God and we believed him. The king believed him and the king adopted the religion and the king became God and no one can criticize the king because the king is God.

In the prescientific world of yore, anything could be a miracle. Most early religious people directed their ire at the rulers. The wily rulers simply adopted the religion and usurped God’s power. The conundrum I continue to find is that none of the so-called founders actually set out to start a religion. These religions started many years after they were dead.

Moses criticized pharaoh and Jesus condemned the High Priests who were working in tandem with the Roman government in the occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.

In today’s world, the Pope who is preaching Jesus will be on the side of Rome.  Mohammad was not loved by the rulers of his time. Early prophets told the truth. Nathan told David about his lust. Nigerian prophets of today would collect their tithes and personally get rid of Uriah.

Why should the king bother with such little people like Uriah? Every great prophet was anti-establishment. The prophets of today, especially in Nigeria are the establishment. Whatever they say is not of God but from their selfish desires to covet what belongs to others. This is why religion is at the root of all corruption in Nigeria.

For Nigeria to be whole, we must excise religion from all our public interaction. Those who want Sharia should find another country.

Nigeria is an African Country. It has no relationship with Saudi Arabia. Any organization that condones the killing of Nigerians like those being ministered to by the likes of Gumi should be outlawed.

Our aspiration is to run a country with objective scientific principles that are objective and verifiable. Any religious gobbledygook must be rejected.

Religion has not developed in any country in the world. The poorest nations in the World are overwhelmingly religious. In Bangladesh, the average religious holiday is about 2 weeks.

The two regions that have religious extremism in Nigeria are the North and the South-East. If there is goodness in religion, we will see it in these regions.

What do we see? In the South East, we see violence, kidnappings, ritual killings and fake manufacturing of drinks and drugs that the good Christians there produced for their neighbors.

Every morning in Aba, Onitsha and the environs, the good Christians wake up early to prepare a poison that will be unknowingly consumed by their neighbors for a fee. Did Jesus teach that? In the North, violence, human trafficking, child abuse, child marriages and religious killings, raping and kidnappings that numbs the mind. This is what religion breeds.

Every Friday morning in Kano, Kaduna and Sokoto, the “good” Muslims lay their praying mats on the road oblivious to traffic and start praying. The road is blocked and others cannot engage in their activities of daily living. At the end, they rise up and sacrifice Deborah Samson to their Allah. Any person who challenges this barbaric behavior is subjected to vigilante justice. Is this what Mohammed taught them? Jesus actually referred to this kind of people as the Pharisees. Why do I have to know you are praying? Why is it necessary to obstruct my movement because you are praying? This is nothing but an exercise of power.

Religion is the devil but the priest has been able to convince their gullible and ignorant followers that the opposite is true. Most of the religionists in Nigeria will say they love God but will not blink as they kill their fellow man in the name of God.

From what is happening in Nigeria, it will be difficult for any of these religious gooks to convince me that they are not working for the devil. At times like this, I am beginning to think of Tom Payne, my Idol. If God is capable of these atrocities, then the devil has nothing else to do. The devil should join the Church or mosque and do what the devil does best: Destruction.

What I try to emphasize in my writing is that at this time in our history, we have to learn to live together as black people. If we aspire to become the hope of the Black World, we must learn to have allegiance to each other. It is difficult to do so now because the colonizers left their Trojan horses of religion which we have fashioned into Molotov cocktails to haul at each other every now and then.

We must learn to love each other. We don’t have to like each other but we can develop the capacity to evolve a society where our laws prevent us from hurting each other.  The religions that are creating these divisions are imported and are tools the colonizer used to make us pliant for servitude.

We need to learn how to remove these barriers that were created by those who came into our land for conquest. This needs the art of diplomacy and time. We have to understand we need each other to survive. Things will change when we start seeing ourselves in each other.

Europe lived through a period where they were intolerant of each other and the continent is gradually resuming some semblance of civility towards each other. The world war was actually intertribal and religious wars. Kosovo is still almost a war zone with animosities but life is getting better.

This is where I fault the proponents of Biafra. The quickness in which they want to resolve issues with violence or war is akin to people who have no experience with the devastation war brings. They are quick to issue ultimatums and engage in kinetic actions that will rally an opponent against them. This bellicosity and lack of diplomacy is due to the fact their societies never engaged in many wars as a nation, where serious thought is given to the consequences of losing. They made this mistake in the Nigerian civil war and they are at it again.

The Oyo Empire was one of the bloodiest empires in West Africa. The fall of the Oyo Empire led to the wholesale enslavement of the Yoruba people. The Yoruba people are the largest enslaved tribe in Africa. From Brazil to Suriname Cuba, the Yoruba language and religion are the norm. This devastation had an effect on the Oyo Empire and they learned from it.

This is the reason why the Yoruba people are very diplomatic about thorny issues. They have been accused of being tricky. They learned a lot from their history and a Yoruba man will never beat his chest to a man who has an AK 47 pointing to his chest. If a Yoruba man decides to go to war, I will not have many questions to ask before I join because I know he has deliberated about everything and he has no other choice and I know he will win because he also understands the opposition.

When Nnamdi Kanu threatens a Buhari who is a President, Kanu assumes that Buhari is an idiot because of Igbo man’s arrogance and limited education. Where is Kanu today? Buhari could have eliminated Kanu in Nairobi if that was his mission. His mission was to arrest and prosecute him. Notwithstanding his theatrics, Nnamdi should thank Buhari for not murdering him in Nairobi or through a calculated plane crash. He should learn that a good leader is not a blood thirsty vagabond who issues orders to kill people at will. He should respect our courts and follow the due process of trial.

Those who are asking America to invade Nigeria have the same infantile thinking. They think Trump will drop the bombs, the Muslims will disappear and they will have their Biafra and everything is over. This naivety led to the colossal failure of Ojukwu and the Igbos still call him the people general.

Please turn the page. It is titled the “Day After “For some reasons, the Biafrans don’t know that their book of dreams has a next page. Ojukwu forgot that page too. “After Biafra lost, they blamed everyone but themselves. The people who rejected the advice of Nnamdi Azikiwe, a seasoned statesman for the bellicosity of a renegade now tell us it was other people’s fault.

Warriors don’t brag about battles. They don’t even show us their scars.  They leave that for amateurs who have never seen widows and orphans. Hitler tried it the second time and the results were the same and more devastating. It is not necessary to repeat a class if all lessons are learned.

My submission is that we should learn diplomacy. The making of a nation requires this. Those who negotiate on behalf of their people should always avoid the temptation to think their adversary is an idiot.

America has not given us creative leaders lately. They have become used to antiseptic wars. Donald Trump coming to Africa to save Christian sounds like a 419 proposition for the racist religious right of America. He doesn’t need to spend much effort to destroy Nigeria or kill those causing the problem.

Let’s be more creative. He should tell Nigeria he is dropping 20 billion dollars in Lokoja for Christians and Muslims to share equally. He should then sit and wait. All the Muslims and Christians will arrive with their swords and AK 47. There will be a holy war as each side tries to claim this loot. The only ones who will be left alive are Nigerians who didn’t believe the story and those who have not been converted or sent away by their priests because they are not real Muslims or Christians. The Catholics will ask for confessions before any one is allowed to join the broil. By morning, America can walk in and take the rare earths and minerals without firing a shot. They can collect their money from the pockets of all the dead Christians and Muslims who were engaged in a jihad.

Where are the good Christians in Nigeria? They have been raptured. Where are the Muslims? They are in paradise with their 72 virgins. Religion has always been a lie, a big lie. Religion is an intoxicant invented by men of power. This intoxicant is the greatest purveyor of violence and cruelty in our world. The exceptions don’t make the rules. Prove me wrong.

What is so holy about a war that God has to take sides? If America defeats Nigeria tomorrow, does it mean America was right and God was on their side? No, they have better intelligence and technology. God wasn’t the referee.

Dr Orette Writes from Houston, Texas