Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Most Reverend Matthew Hassan Kukah, has de- scribed Nigeria’s worsening insecurity, governance failures, and identity politics as a “theatre of lies” sustained by denial, lack of trust, and systemic hypocrisy.
Speaking on Eagle 102.5 FM, Ilese Ijebu, Kukah argued that Nigeria’s crisis is not fundamentally about religion, but about disobedience to moral values, state failure, and the erosion of trust between government and citizens, warning that the country is fast normalizing collective humiliation.
Drawing from decades of academic engagement, the bishop recalled that his doctoral research, later published as Religion, Politics and Power in North- ern Nigeria, had already anticipated the dangerous intersection of faith and governance. “Religion comes before politics.
The pulpit comes before the political podium. The problem is not religion interfering in politics, but politicians disobeying what they hear in churches and mosques”, he said. According to Kukah, places of worship are meant to function as “filling stations” for moral values, equipping citizens with the ethics required to build a just society.
Where conflict exists, he said, it is the result of citizens abandoning those values once they leave the pulpit. “Wherever you see conflict, it is a conflict between obedience and disobedience.” Reacting to the reported abduction of over 170 worshippers in Kaduna State, Kukah said the episode exposes Nigeria’s broken crisis management system and a deep credibility deficit. “Something happened.
People were abducted in a church. Government preferred denial. The church insisted it happened. That triangle of lies and truth explains why Nigeria is where it is. You cannot be embarrassed about the injury or death of Nigerian citizens. Covering wounds does not heal them.
It only shows in the way you walk”, Kukah said, warning that security agencies’ instinct to suppress bad news in order to “look good” has worsened public distrust.
Kukah dismissed official claims of “kinetic and non-kinetic strategies” as empty jargon, noting that no one has clearly explained what those terms mean, while kidnappings continue unchecked. He stressed, “I’m sure I’ll be surprised if somebody doesn’t name their child kinetic.
Because everywhere you talk, the security agencies say, oh, we are employing kinetic and non-kinetic methods of… Nobody has explained to us what kinetic and non-kinetic are. “How do you move 170 adults in Nigeria today and say you are looking for them? In the Arizona desert, a rat cannot move without being detected.
But I think, finally, it is to make the point that just yesterday we were talking about Papi, where all these children were kidnapped, and were kept somewhere. And then they came out looking as if they had just come back from a camp.
They had returned to us. We are all celebrating. That seems to have gone now. The question to ask ourselves is, how is it possible to move a hundred and seventy-something adults in a country like Nigeria, for goodness sake? How do you explain that? And now we are hypocritically saying we are trying to locate these people.
In the Arizona desert in America, a rat or a cat cannot run around without being detected.” Expressing his dismay further, Kukah said, “Name one African country where you say that they kidnapped ten people today, twenty people tomorrow, ten people. What really is going on? And then tomorrow these guys are going to come back, and we’ll all break into dance and celebration, rejoicing that only to wait for the next situation.
This theater would have been amusing if it weren’t about life and death. So, it’s shameful, it’s disgraceful, it’s embarrassing. No Nigerian, whether in office or out of office, can find an excuse for this collective humiliation. The international community is looking at us. People are reading all these stories on a daily basis.
Which country functions like this? Even if we were in an animal kingdom, if you take the child of a lion, can you get away with it? So, how would we be dealing with a situation in which ordinary people, people who have come from the cave, are the ones who are now literally dictating how life should be in Nigeria”, the Bishop said.
