The tragic incident of Friday September 12, in which a guest hotel in the sprawling compound of Pastor Temitope Joshua’s The Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) collapsed has become an international cause célèbre. Media reports have put the death toll at 115, including 84 South Africans.
In addition, more than a hundred seriously injured church guests were pulled out of the building’s tangled wreckage.
Perhaps stung by public criticism of Lagos State governor, Mr Babatunde Fashola’s ill-advised closed-door meeting with Pastor Joshua days after the incident. The Lagos State government has instituted a coroner’s inquest under Magistrate O.A. Komolafe. The inquiry is saddled with ascertaining the immediate cause of the collapse.
While welcoming the state government’s decision to set up an inquest, we enjoin the inquiry to discharge its responsibility with transparency and maximum dispatch. It is important that the complete truth about the collapse is revealed, and that the inquest does not become a legal boondoggle, a mere official pageantry that drains public coffers and distracts from the all-important task of establishing causality.
Given the history of previous coroner’s inquests in the country, cynicism about the outcome of this particular one has to be seen as legitimate, and it is up to members of the inquiry and the Lagos State government to prove the cynics wrong. The Lagos State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Rahman Ade Ipaye, is a man of honour and sound legal pedigree, and we take him at his word when he says that the verdict of the coroner “may form the basis of criminal constitutions depending on the evidence collected.”
Part of what has angered the public in Nigeria and South Africa about this incident is the perceived attempts by Pastor Joshua to fudge the truth about it. Such attempts include the initial highly improbable story about a mystery small plane, the puzzling denial of access to officials of the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) for urgent search and rescue, and the emergence of an incriminating audio recording in which Pastor Joshua apparently tried to financially induce journalists to communicate a distorted version of events. All these have left Pastor Joshua’s public image more or less in tatters, and while he remains innocent of any charges until proven guilty, the truth is that Pastor Joshua, with his actions, is the one who has furnished the material for his own flagellation.
It is right that he is the focus of intense public scrutiny; particularly for the unfeeling manner he has carried himself in the aftermath of an event of such tragic enormity. If he is found culpable by the coroner, the state government should not hesitate in throwing the book at him.
Nevertheless, for all the legitimate and pertinent scrutiny of Pastor Joshua and his activities, it is more analytically rewarding to see him through a sociological lens. Viewed through such a lens, Pastor Joshua is just another member- an influential one, truth be told- of a section of the Nigerian pastorate, a politically promiscuous and wealth-obsessed cabal, these days more likely to be seen pricing a Pajero than preaching the gospel. This section of the pastorate has emerged on the back of the sudden explosion of pentecostal christianity in the past three decades, and has continued to flourish amid the relative atrophy of secular institutions of authority. Its rank and file is for the most part theologically inept, and its social project amounts to nothing more than the radical production of ignorance.
To be sure, as noted earlier, the foregoing description does not extend to the totality of the pastorate, among whom we still proudly count some of the most nimble and sophisticated students of religion and religious traditions. But the precise tragedy of Nigeria today is that the voices of such earnest men and women have been drowned out by the dross of the majority. If indeed there is a poverty of morality in the nation today, it is both physically and metaphorically embodied by church leaders. To reclaim the moral center, Christian leaders across the country must urgently embark on a theological rescue mission. The first step in this process must be a frank assessment of the role of Christian leaders in politics, and what should constitute the Christian imperative in a country blighted by greed, corruption, and poverty.
Because of his apparent disregard for those who lost their lives in a presumably avoidable disaster, Pastor Joshua can seem particularly emblematic of the worst qualities of this emergent pastorate. Yet, he is too easy a target. The real culprits are the class to which he belongs, and the social forces which have connived to produce him.
