I am a Christian of Catholic denomination. For us, one of the four sins against the Holy Spirit which Jesus Christ said can never be forgiven in this world nor in the world to come is “presuming to gain salvation without meriting it”, which some people interpret to mean “hypocrisy”.
Throughout his three years ministry on earth, Jesus Christ had a running battle against a particular Jewish religious sect called “the Scribes and the Pharisees”. He accused them of living contrary to what they preached, and called them “hypocrites” and “whited sepulchres”, whose outer parts will look very beautiful and attractive, while the inside are full of rotten and filthy things.
Jesus Christ was a friend of sinners. He visited and dined with them, while he derided the Scribes and the Pharisees because they were pretenders who prided themselves as holy and sanctimonious, while they looked down on others as sinners.
The position of Jesus Christ was that the sinner was capable of repentance, and turning a new leaf, while the Scribes and Pharisees were hardened, and believed themselves to be righteous. No wonder, the Scripture tells us that the first person to enter heaven was a repentant thief!
Before the present administration came on board in 2015, they told us that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which had been in power at the centre since 1999, was a party of rogues or sinners. They accused the PDP of all sorts of malfascence and said that members of the party were responsible for all the ills afflicting the country, which was due to corruption, and promised to right all the wrongs, if we give them our votes.
They saw themselves as saints and presented to us a “Mr. Integrity”, “an Israelite who there is no guile inside”. They reminded us that even though the man had presided over the affairs of the country and had headed the nation’s money spinning venture a couple of times, yet, he could only boast of a few heads of cattle, one old house in his village, two residential houses, one in Abuja and the other in Kaduna, and yet, did not even have the money to buy his presidential nomination form, which was paid for by his friends.
They told us that the man was a saint, that he was incorruptible and a no-nonsese anti-corruption crusader, and that he had the capacity, the magic wand, to cure Nigeria of all her ills. We agreed and voted for the man.
But, alas, since months down the line, we were surprised, when the man constituted his cabinet, to see the same old faces, the same people who had looted the country blind, given key positions in the cabinet. We thought it was a mistake or an oversight, that Mr. Holy Man did not know what happened, until we began to see many corrupt practices going on in the system. When we pointed these out to Mr. Holy Man, he simply had ignored it, or looked the other way, until we began to see those who previously had been accused of corruption, but immediately they joined their political party, would have their sins completely wiped out, while the EFCC let them off the hook.
We had thought their regime was going to be an epitome, something to showcase. But we were disappointed at their many actions and behaviours. For instance, look at what happened during the just concluded primaries of various political parties, how the “saintly” All Progressives Congress (APC) had turned itself into a demagogue, with crisis everywhere. Parralel congresses and primaries were held in many places, which had resulted to protests and complaints about imposition of candidates on party members by the leadership of the party.
No less a personality than the wife of the President, Aisha Buhari, had openly cried out and protested against the injustices in the APC, while thousands of other lesser beings equally took to the streets to express their displeasure and annoyance about impunity in the APC.
But nothing has been heard from our “Saintly President”, who is the highest beneficiary of the APC fraud, since the party, in order to ensure that nobody challenged him for the Presidential ticket, had hiked the Presidential Nomination Form to N45 million.
Many people had thought that the “sinful PDP” was going to explode once it began search for its Presidential Candidate. Parading as many as thirteen solid Nigerias who were jostling to fly the flag of the political party for next year’s elections, the people predicted that it would simply be a matter of time before every member of the PDP went their separate ways.
But the PDP did a mea culpa, recanted or shown remorse for its sins. It had apologized to the people of Nigeria in whatever way it hado offended them during its 16 years rule. The PDP is now a “born again” party. It is a changed political party. It has turned a new leaf. That is why it has been able to organize a successful and transparent convention and there, elected its Presidential Candidate without rancour.
