Cardinal John Onaiyekan is the emeritus Archbishop of Catholic Diocese of Abuja. In this interview monitored on Arise Television, he speaks on the demise of former President Muhammadu Buhari, his legacy and controversies in office as military head of state and elected president, among other issues, ANAYO EZUGWU writes
What is your reaction to the passing of former President Muhammadu Buhari?
Very simple and a normal reaction, especially from a man of religion and faith. When we face death, we are reminded of what our whole life is all about.
We are queried once again to examine where are we going; what are we doing in this world. So, it is a time for reflection. We, who are religious people, we do a lot of burials.
Every now and again, you have requiem mass, you have burial, and every one of those occasions hits us personally, that look, here’s another one going and especially where you bury all kinds of people and different kinds of ages.
To come back to our late president, I join the majority of Nigerians, I would say, in saying we wish him God’s mercy, the normal, usual may he rest in peace with the Lord. We will also add; like we normally add, may God forgive him his failings, because nobody passes through this world without failings.
Our scriptures tell us, if you Lord shall mark our guilt, Lord, who would survive? But in the case of, since death is what await all of us, we don’t know the time, we don’t know how.
One thing is certain, however, unless you’re a big fool, if you’ve passed the age of 80, you should know that it’s about time. I’m over 80, so I have no illusions at all that I’m going to stand many more years in this world.
So, I’m constantly reminded that the end is about to come. I always tell my friends that I have my boarding pass in my hands. All that is missing on that boarding pass is the date of the flight.
I’m only waiting for when it will be. It would be morbid if you didn’t know where you were heading to, because my boarding pass already has a destination – paradise.
And for those of us who believe in paradise, we don’t wait for it with any trepidation, but rather with high expectation.
So, what I mean is that the death of President Buhari at the age of 82, we can almost say it is normal. At that age, people die, so there’s nothing really particularly shattering about it. If a poli
cian at the age of 40 died, then we can begin to talk. So, because of that, I would thank God for his life.
From one of the people who talked to him recently; one of the things he said is that he hopes Nigerians will forgive him if he wronged anyone, but that he did his best. What does that tell you about the way he summed up his leadership, and how much does it suggest that Nigeria is a very difficult country to lead?
This is a difficult discussion. It says that definitely it is impressive, when someone at his age and with all that he has done, would ask that those whom he has hurt should forgive him.
We can presume that he knew first that he must have hurt many people, but what we don’t know is whether he is asking for forgiveness because he hurt them deliberately, whether the hurt that he caused was really not true or has no guilt about those hurts. When you are a head of state, you step on many toes. Sometimes, you have to step on some toes.
It is neither here nor there, but it was wise of him to say, let Nigerians forgive him. I imagine I am taking that from the point of view of his faith or his religious position.
He is a man who believes that it is time to start putting your house in order with the almighty God. I think he has done that. We should learn from that.
Also, those of us who are still alive and those of them who are still expecting many years, they should learn that they have plenty of time to serve God and serve their neighbours.
Throughout his time as president, there was a consistent sense of frustration coming from you. Frustration with his style of governance and the things you said he failed to deliver…
I said it then and I meant it then. Now, that he has been buried, I really wouldn’t want to go into any more of that, but simply to wish and pray that God may rest his soul. Others have talked already about his legacy.
Maybe, time will come when the dust settles, we will have the opportunity to go into details about what he did and what he did not do.
We all have our good points and our bad points. But I don’t think today is the day to start assessing.
Today is more to take note of the fact that here is a dead body that has just been put into the ground in Daura, and we hope that God will receive him into his home.
That’s the point that is in my mind now, as well as condolences to his family and the very many people who are missing him
Did Buhari shift the needle for you at all in any way as President?
Let me go back to what I said about we always leading funerals.
One of the points I always make is: I would say that on this occasion, this guy in this coffin is talking to us, not we the preachers, who are talking.
In other words, when you meet somebody who has died, that itself is a sermon, and that is the part I really take more seriously.
We shall have plenty of time to talk about the legacy of Buhari, and I have known him for a long time, because I was already a Bishop when he was a military ruler in the early 1980s, and I had my own feeling about him at that time, and later on when he came back as a civilian head of state.
Like I said, for the moment, I’m just thinking about a person who has finished his race, and has gone to his maker, and may he receive a good welcome.
How much did you think his health condition and COVID-19 outbreak set him back, and how much would that have set anybody back? You are trying to make me say what I don’t want to say. Positive, negative, I don’t just feel that.
I don’t feel like doing it today, when he’s been buried. After that, I’ll have much more reflection.
From the point of view of Catholic dogma, and the way that the Catholics see the passing of a person into the other realm, what happens to a person when they take their last breath?
Fortunately, what Catholics believe about life after death happens to be shared by not only other Christians, but by almost every religion including my ancestors.
They believe that when death strikes, it’s not the end. Even most of the rituals at burial precisely express that there is more beyond it.
There is this great unknown that no one has gone there and come back except Jesus Christ, who died and rose after three days.
But somehow, while we don’t know what is there, there’s some clear feeling in the mind that this cannot be the end of it all.
But do you have doubts sometimes about that sense of continuity?
That’s the basic element of my faith that this is not the end. Not only that this is not the end of all, but that what comes next is going to be based on how we have lived this life.
I love very much chapter 25 of St. Matthew, which brings it to a very concrete term. When the judge will come at the end of the day and divide the human beings to left or right.
Those on the right are those who feed the hungry, who clothe the naked, who give accommodation to the homeless, who visit prisons, and come into my kingdom.
This whole idea of God’s kingdom is very clear. Not only in the Christian faith, it is very clear in the Islamic faith and in all the other religions.
It’s only those who say that they do not have any spiritual sense, who can doubt that there is something else beyond what we see now. Already as we are, we are not just body now.
We are both body and soul. Because it’s not just even in terms of our health, we don’t really take care of our bodily physical health. We need to take care of our mental and spiritual health, all of which are important to have a balanced life here.
Do you sometimes have questions not so much about the possibility or the probability of continuity after death but in the way that your faith interprets that continuity?
The Catholic faith interprets it, in my own opinion, in quite a not so concrete way.
We don’t think of heaven in any physical sort of way. We’ve learnt from early childhood to believe in life in the spirit, a spiritual kind of life. All that we know about the saints who have gone ahead of us, marked with the sign of faith.
We are familiar with that. Like we Catholics, we take very much seriously our patron saints, who died long ago, but we still somehow feel their presence in a way that our traditional culture had strong feelings about the ancestors, who have gone ahead, but who are still around.
Does it mean that you will retain your unique identity as Cardinal John Onaiyekan because you talked about our ancestors, who believed in reincarnation?
That is my interpretation of the ancestors. I have never had that feeling about my own ancestors. I always had a certain feeling that my ancestors have gone more or less in the same realm of the saints that I’m familiar with in the Catholic faith.
Once you go in the spiritual realm, there is enough space for everybody up there. It’s never going to be crowded, so to speak. I’m quite sure that I will retain my identity before God otherwise the whole thing doesn’t make sense.
One of my convictions about religion generally is that our Lord God is so vast that no religion can really fully grasp His essence, His being.
And each person accommodates the knowledge of Him to the best of his or her ability, according to the experience, kind of training and teachings you receive.
And it differs, like we have known, it differs from one religion to the other. But I think that the common point I see is that every true religion ought to be humble to realize that you don’t know it all.
And if you are humble and you know that you don’t know it all, then you can’t prepare that some other people may have some idea about this great God, which is not really accessible to you. But that doesn’t mean that what is accessible to you is wrong. It just means it’s not the whole.
No one has the whole picture about God. It’s not only your friend who went to space. The first people who landed on the moon, too, had the same experience.
One of them was a Catholic. Armstrong was a Catholic. He came back more determined about belief in the power of God compared to ourselves.
How do you think Nigerians should remember Buhari?
Honestly, I don’t know. As you know, human beings are very funny. Those whom you think people will remember well, they forget quickly.
And those whom you remember, you remember for a variety of reasons. It’s good that you pointed at the crowd. It would be interesting to know how each of them sincerely feels.
I don’t imagine that they all have the same feeling. And that’s why I said, the final assessment of Buhari, we have to wait.
Let him settle down, wherever he is and then we have time to think and to say, well, he did a lot whether as a soldier, military ruler, as a politician, and as an old man. He was older than me by one year. But that means that he has lived, he has done his part.
I don’t know how they will remember him. I am the kind who will want to remember only good things about people.
So, I’m likely to have a kind of selective amnesia of the things that I didn’t like about him because I’m naturally somebody who likes to believe the best of people.
And I must say very honestly, like I feel for every human person who dies, that I hope he will enter heaven. Where else do I want anybody to go to?
