PASTORS AND PANDEMIC NARRATIVES: THE LINES GOVERNMENTS ARE MISSING – PART 1

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SAM ELEANYA

Pastor Chris Oyakhilome of the Loveworld Incorporated (aka Christ Embassy) has somehow found a way to break the monopoly of COVID-19 over the news cycle, even if he did it by tiger-riding the pandemic. Using his ministry’s cable TV platforms and several hours of TV time purchased from independent stations, locally and internationally, Chris has gone about making his voice heard on every issue regarding the origin and management of the deadly pandemic that has crippled the economy of many nations, corporate bodies, families and individuals.

Known primarily as a Pastor, instead of as a credentialed or notable science enthusiast, his focused pandemic media-outreach has riled, consternated and cheered in disparate degrees different stakeholders. His fingering of 5G telecommunication technology as complicit in the origination of the COVID-19 elicited different reactions: many offered interested and even agreeable ears; others felt sufficiently agitated as to scorn him with the slur of a ‘conspiracy theorist’ with some going as far as call for state sanctions against him for potentially undermining public health effort with ‘debunked or unproven’ assertions as well as, perhaps, inspiring the destruction of public infrastructure connected with the 5G technology currently dominated by China-connected corporate entities, two of whom are headquartered operationally in Wuhan, the global ground zero of the COVID-19 virus.

Recently, the United Kingdom, through its Office of Communications, OfCom, censured Chris’ Loveworld Limited, which runs the Loveworld channel that can be viewed in the UK, “after a news programme and a live sermon included potentially harmful claims about causes of, and treatments for Covid-19”. Ofcom claimed “Loveworld News included unsubstantiated claims that 5G was the cause of the pandemic, and that this was the subject of a ‘global cover-up’”.

Additionally, Ofcom was concerned with Chris’ broadcast questioning the motives of certain groups/individuals spearheading the aggressive hunt for vaccine for COVID-19 as well as their narrative that vaccines were the only reliable way to ease out of the near-global lockdown and get back to normalcy regardless of any mutation the virus may undergo. While asserting its respect for controversial views in a democracy, OfCom insisted that there was a duty on those using regulated media platforms to “put into context” views relating to public health so as not to undermine trust in public health authorities among the citizenry. Knowing the penchant or taste of Nigerian authorities for ‘imported policy and legislative insights’. it won’t be surprising if the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC chimes in with its own censures and sanctions , suitably garnished with local content, in the nearest future.

The foregoing raises many vital issues one of which is the duty, if any, that a religious leader, adherent, platform or professional, hereinafter simply identified as a religionpreneur, owes to a ‘democratic’ government (under a constitutional scheme which guarantees a fundamental right to religious freedom) in the maintenance of the preferred view, narrative, theory or propaganda that government entities believe would help to advance public health objectives relating to a new disease/pandemic which critical details are still not settled.

This premise is unassailable legally: that a religionpreneur or religion-professional isn’t required by law to tailor their preaching and activities as to advance government policy priorities, nor for that matter, bring about upright civic citizens as approved by government. As awkward as it sounds, the reverse is actually the truth: a constitutionally democratic government, under a fundamental rights scheme, has a duty to create a space where persons, who for religious reasons may regularly disagree with government policies and priorities can live freely and thrive as much as their dynamic allow.

Even where a government turns such policy positions into ones protected by state sanctions via criminal legislations, a citizen is not rendered criminally liable by holding such views privately or communicating or proselytizing it publicly It is still critical to actually show that a known crime has been attempted or actually committed. Or a conspiracy to do both exist.

That’s why the difference between prosecution and persecution is critical.
In persecution, two things happen. One, a person is wrongly maltreated using the force and platform of the State even where it cannot be shown the actual laws the person broke, really because there is none. Two, a person is also persecuted when a law is retroactively created to target and set them up for state enabled oppression due to conducts that were not originally and inherently illegal.

In prosecution, a person is dragged through the legal mill by the State for conduct that was illegal at the time it was committed. Period. It doesn’t matter whether the law was draconian, immoral or not. A missionary to China or Iran or Rivers State would not be suffering persecution if prosecuted for any preexisting law they ran afoul of, substantively or procedurally. Where it becomes impossible to honour God in any place legally, three main options await a religionpreneur: flee to the next jurisdiction; openly engage in peaceful civic disobedience with readiness to go to Prison at all times; and creatively walk on eggs , with great circumspection, wisdom and prayerful diligence to progressively change the system from within with every small opportunity available.
In a democracy in contradistinction from authoritarianism, being a contrarian isn’t a crime. A democracy is after all notable for its ever-in-a-flux majority conception.

That’s why they all have stand-by representative legislatures ever ready to craft into law or amendment, the latest consensus of the latest emergent majority on any subject matter. Those latest consensus can only conceivably emerge because individuals within the country are allowed and indeed encouraged to hold contrary views as to existing law, to communicate those contrary policy views and to seek to build a majority around it through proselytizing other stakeholders within the State.

That is not available in China, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran and increasingly, Rivers State. Even then, to echo the state as religious leader will be to make every religious person in China an atheist according to the creed of the ruling Communist Party. To do so in Iran or Saudi Arabia will be to render every religious person a Muslim by default. And in Rivers State? Perhaps, thugs (clarity is still evolving)? That there are still theists in China and non-Muslims in Iran and noble people in Rivers State is evidence that to some small degree, freedom not to echo the government in legal policy preferences still survive, even if vestigially in religious commitments.

Thus, a democratic space is one that envisages that religious expressions would not always, if followed to their logical conclusions, produce expressions or preachments that align with the legal statements or policy preferences of the government of the day, in any thing, including Pandemic management.

This is also noteworthy: that how a religious adherent or indeed any citizen interprets information or advisory from government entities, lawyers, civic society advocate or preachment from pulpits leading to the committing of a crime remains the criminal responsibility of that citizen, except the government can prove the elements of conspiracy against the voices that allegedly inspired them. That some religious or other expressions may be interpreted by some people as a call to commit a crime does not make the expression outlawed as a matter of course, if it is lawful in essence under the law, as they certainly are under the Constitution of Nigeria.

Specifically, religionpreneurs ‘minister’ to their fold as their raison d’etre depending on the active needs of their fold – not the law enforcement or international relations imperatives of governments. Whatever a religious Shepherd’s fold is afflicted with comes directly under their ministerial engagement, whether it is nuclear science or COVID-19. They do not need government’s licence or regulatory oversight to assume that ministerial position. It is a private sphere between the Minister and the specific adherent or their family if a minor.

The day government allowed that virus to afflict ordinary people with religious commitments under an overseer that had been catering to their wellbeing howsoever defined, was the day their religious overseers, became vested with jurisdiction, to assail the externalities of the COVID-19 Pandemic with whatever competency and eccentricities that was available to them.

And every other day the government continued to send ‘text messages’ while bumbling around screaming about the deadliness of the unseen midget of Wuhan, the more they abdicated in their roles and exposed religionpreneurs along with family leaders, willy-nilly, as a critical line of defence.

How religionpreneurs assume that defence of their charges is not for government to review, with mechanistic regulatory precision, having failed to provide the cover in the first place with mechanistic regulatory precision.

For when you expose a preacher to don the lab-coat of a virologist, he could see 5G where you see face-mask. In emergencies where government with its monopoly of ‘scientists’ project lethargy, confusion, ineptitude and a sense of being completely overwhelmed, the role of a religious shepherd, like a parent, becomes essentially primal and perhaps feral: instinct mixed with common sense.

Hence, fealty or fidelity to government approved narrative or propaganda as to the mode or platform or content of expression to be deployed against COVID-19 becomes the least of the worry to religonpreneurs. What they care about is beating the virus, the same way they do not preach about paracetamol for headaches but rather pray, anoint, lay hands etc when their poor members who can’t access primary healthcare turn to them. That, is not committing a crime or instigating its commission. That, is caregiving (which is distinguishable from healthcare).

A resourceful regulator is one who can see in the grating vibrations of the religionpreneur, (even where the predicates of the preachments are wrongheaded or run counter to those of experts maintained by or approved by government) an effort to address a buck which has slipped to their table because where, it was supposed, government’s desk, has become a slippery slope of uncertainty, inaction, bewilderment, ineptitude or procrastination. tackle COVID-19 which onslaught continue to befuddle every government and scientist: not primarily as a rebellion or an incitement to commit crimes against government.

A hardnosed regulatory authority over the broadcast media space in this pandemic season is one, therefore, that can keep its head long enough to escape the unhelpful hysteria that leads to derelict treatment of constitutional guarantees like religious freedom. For when a regulator refuses the easy lure of the pigsty of constitutional desecration once seeming emergencies appear, as has been the first choice of weak-minded or power-grabbing regulators globally during this pandemic, the result is that a choice, a great choice, appears.

That choice is the very satisfying but difficult path of winsome grappling with the problem deploying, creatively and circumspectly, options which are already embedded within the interstices of lawful and legitimate realms of any legal order. Options that err on the side of not trampling on or tampering with, or derogating from the rights and freedom of citizens as a matter of course. That tack mobilizes relieved citizens onto the side of government and makes voluntary surrender of freedoms and rights a matter of course, instead of a matter of law or coercion.

In a medical emergency, that policy tack or thinking will help a regulator retain the common sense to distinguish between contrary medical opinions from awkward opinions of religious voices forced to intersect the domain of public health discourses in the service of their charges.

A foolish regulator is the one that will parse the legally protected expressions of religionpreneurs and ascribe to them the worst case scenario imaginable as its motivation: instigation of crime. And then the mobilisation of the coercive powers of state to go head-to-head with the expressions, to dismantle and punish it as if a protected expression is a criminal in essence – instead of working to deflect the entrenchment of that expression by saying, on credibly ascertainable grounds: “here is the reason for the disease and here is the cure as was my duty to provide or pinpoint from the get-go. You can double check if you please”.

For instance, if the Nigerian government was not busy smooching with China at the expense of the freedoms of livelihood of its citizens, it would perhaps have been at the vanguard of a third force movement, disconnected from US’s rivalry with China, that can apply pressure, diplomatically, on China through the United Nations for an independent review of the source of this pandemic as has historically been the norm, and was followed during the last Ebola scare.

If that was being done, Chris Oyakhilome would have gained little traction with his 5G theories – except it is found that he was right. For, thinking people want to and need to know the source of this COVID-19 since origin is always at the heart of both epidemiology and religion. So, government is failing every single day it peddles fear but not answers to those basic issues about the Pandemic. And so long as that void exist, into it will other influencers feel pressed into to bail out government and/or the citizen’s need or right to know – even if the effect is to advance other motivations of the influencer channeling the effort.

Another key point government seems to miss is this. When two doctors disagree, you ask two of them to marshall forth their positions for peer reviews, or to tender verifiable outcomes they tout for independent validations. When a religionpreneur intersects the scientific space, to apply the same standards of validation is to be foolish or naive. Proof or validation based on five senses isn’t what they are inherently about. Every day people appreciate that. A government entity that behaves as if it doesn’t gains private ridicule and neglect.

If a religionpreneur says the earth is flat and the government says the earth is geoid, it is nothing more than a debate: a clash of two theories. Not a clash of a ‘conspiracy’ theory with a ‘consensus science’ theory: just a clash of two theories from two different sources. Period. But if government mobilizes the scientific resources to go to the moon and from there provides a picture of the earth showing definitely its shape, the government’s view is now established as a fact: not before, even if the government parades the consensus of a coterie of well-credentialed or well-regarded experts simply saying: “Aye, aye, true that!”

As any legal fiction reader, not to say litigation lawyers, know, for the right price a superbly credentialed expert can be procured to say under oath just about anything that actuated the payment, no matter how outlandish, and then pull rank during cross-examination, parrying questions with effortless ease safe in their familiarity of the architecture of the space being explored relative to the competency of the interrogating lawyer.

When government has no such solid facts, all government has in its own right is the deployment of its massive but alternative media platforms to advance why the scientific conclusions of the religionpreneur is not as sound as government’s version is. When government does that credibly using its outsized resources, religionpreneurs may exit that realm, become redundant or even discredited if they persist and do not recant. That will of course demand that government get serious about playing ‘government’ in the engagement of real problems: not dictators.

So when democratic governments, like the United Kingdom, cowardly allow China to put its thumb on the scale of information available to the rest of the World, and with a sickened Prime Minister start stumbling about in near darkness using spurious public health management ‘Models’ only to reserve their fury, when they can catch their breath for a minute, to demand that anyone who tries to light a candle to the affliction is wrong and should be legally upbraided, they look silly and weak. That’s plain wrong

[Sam Eleanya, poet and author is the publisher of lawnigeria.com. He is a legal strategist dedicated to the realms of Religious Liberty, Healthcare, Agriculture and Food, Housing, Children’s Issues and Governance Ethics. He is married to Jesus]

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