Pulpitnomics of Alleluia, Allah Akbar and the N8 billion allocation — by Kelechi Deca

A country that is the champions of the Premier League of multidimensional poverty globally. Suffering severe human capital deficits, clearly manifested with the open sore of over 20 million out-of-school children, which contributes to over 25% of the global out-of-school population, should at least have considerate leadership.

A country with critically low budgetary allocations for both education and health, scoring a meager 5.8% for the right to quality education, marking one of the lowest scores globally, should carry itself with little humility.

Roughly two in three children lack access to organized early childhood education programs. Yet the federal budgetary allocation to education hovers around 5.4% or less, falling well short of international UNESCO targets.

And millions of children across the nation school in pigsty environments lacking in basic structural coverage from the elements.

This is a country with a doctor-to-patient ratio of approximately one doctor to 3,000 people, starkly worse than the World Health Organization recommendation.

A nurse-to-patient ratio of around one nurse to 2,000 people, and an average of roughly 7,920 citizens per single hospital facility nationwide.

Little wonder we have one of the lowest life expectancy in the world at roughly 54 years. And I just heard that foreign trained doctors returning back to Nigeria are facing hurdles of high induction fees. The law of the hammer in action.

Recently, the World Bank raised an alarm over the rate of unbudgeted expenditure by the federal government. Expectedly, supporters of the government drowned it with deflected dissemination reframing while the rest of us got carried away by the World Cup.

Interestingly, the World Bank did not even get the memo, as the latest information hints at non implementation of the budgets since 2024.

I have not had time to think about that though, but with the rate of contracts bypassing due process, I may have to agree about the fishiness of the whole thing.

While trying to get over that shock, I was hit yet with another backhand mental slap that the federal government allocated N8 billion to mosques and churches. N8 billion to religious institutions?

I would have been more circumspect deliberating on this if not that the Office of the Deputy Speaker of The House of Representatives came out with some clarifications which has put paid to the veracity of the claims.

We can now address it as fact. Tellingly, this allocation to religious bodies is not merely a fiscal misstep; it is a moral obscenity, a trait that is not foreign to this administration.

In a nation where the maternal mortality ratio stands at a harrowing 512 per 100,000 live births, meaning that for every 100,000 births 512 women lose their lives, one of the worst in the world.

A critical under-5 mortality rate exceeding 100 deaths per 1,000 live births, meaning that of every 1000 live births of babies, about 100 would not be alive to celebrate their 5th birthdays, driven heavily by malnutrition, malaria, and vaccine-preventable infections.

A country where stunting still affects about 32% of children under the age of five, and malnutrition acts as a direct or underlying factor in 45% of all under-five deaths, doling out a whooping N8 billion to Churches and Mosques is a grotesque prioritization of performative piety over palpable human need.

If you travel across Bende in Abia State, you will surely see primary schools or health centres in very deplorable conditions. But if there is none in Bende, come to Mbaise let me show you some, and how villages have taken over the role of government in both basic education and basic health.

Yet N1 billion is being allocated to procure musical equipment for churches, probably they want to set up a band that would eclipse the Grammy Award winning Port Harcourt Political Praise Singers?

To frame this as youth support is foxy, and to push the line of religious support is quite disingenuous. This is state-sponsored patronage, a cynical transaction designed to purchase the silence and endorsement of influential religious leaders.

By funneling public funds into places of worship, the government deploys a strategy aimed at effectively bribing the remnants of the moral gatekeepers of society, targeted mostly at those still swimming uninhibitedly outside the net they casted sometime ago.

Probably to ensure that pulpit rhetoric remains muted in the face of systemic corruption and administrative failure. They want to bring in all the sheaves under a single barn.

In their thinking, it is cheaper to build a cathedral than to fix a thousand primary schools as it is politically expedient to anoint a pastor than to employ a thousand teachers. Unfortunately the reality on the ground is Dickensian in every ramification.

Primary school pupils in rural areas sit under mango trees, their textbooks soaked by morning drizzling, with chalkboards propped against termite-eaten trunks.

The case with primary healthcare centers is not different. They function without electricity, running water, not to talk of essential drugs, forcing families to choose between a child’s fever and a week’s wages, a relatable manifestation of being caught in multidimensional poverty.

The N8 billion being disbursed to buy up sound bites from microphones at pulpits across the country could rehabilitate 4,000 dilapidated classrooms or fully equip 200 primary health clinics, saving lives and securing futures.

We all know that this has nothing to do with faith because it is clearly about fealty. It is the government’s tacit admission that it cannot deliver basic services, so it seeks legitimacy through ecclesiastical endorsement.

Unfortunately you cannot pray away a cholera outbreak where there is no potable water, and filth is littered across cities, the same way you cannot sermonize a child into quality literacy, even if he is reading the Bible daily.

What this government has done, which has been their classic modus operandi, is a betrayal of the secular contract and a theft of the common good dressed in the robes of religion.

They know quite well that whenever the issues of religion props up, an average Nigerian PhD is no different at the intellectual level, from the provost or order keeper at the local chapter of the National Union of Road Transport Workers.

But not everyone is fooled, some Nigerians see the altar for what some of them have become: a cashier’s desk for the conscience of the powerful and politically connected.