What religion is a bomb? -By Festus Adedayo

On Sunday last week, a middle-aged man was said to have been caught at the Sabon Tasha branch of the Living Faith Church (Winners Chapel) in Kaduna, Kaduna State, with what initial information claimed was an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). He was said to have made several attempts to detonate the explosives but couldn’t as at the time security operatives present in the church premises got him apprehended. The man, who claimed to bear the name Nathaniel Samuel, has got Nigerians arguing back and forth on the propriety or otherwise of a Christian bombing a church. While the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) claimed that Samuel couldn’t have been a Christian but a disguised name, some faithful of Islam claimed that trying to Islamize the identity of the so-called Samuel was an attempt by Christians to give the religion a bad name so as to hang it.

President Muhammadu Buhari also nailed the conversation last week when he urged Nigerians to come together, stating that 90 percent of people killed in insurgency in Nigeria were of the Islamic faith. This statement has received morbid criticisms from Christians who say that this statement from the president was unconscionable, reminding them of the cadaver comparison made by same Buhari when he went to Taraba state a few years ago, where he claimed that the “so-called” number of people killed by Fulani in the state was not as much as the Fulani killed in Benue State.

What links these two mindsets is dogged and unconscionable attachment to religion, rather than humanity. In the Kaduna bombing, would Christians have been happier that the “Samuel” was a Mohammed and would Moslem have been happier if indeed, the attempted bomber was a Samuel? Does that reduce the severity of the pains? Isn’t a bomber a child of Mephistopheles who deserves our collective harangue and his religion immaterial?

On Buhari’s numerical fixation to the dead, this is another of the no-no that we have to grapple with in our president. Does it make him more satisfied, and thus makes him deserving of a trophy, if his Islamic religion is on the defensive or offensive? The truth is that, we have got to a deplorable point where crime doesn’t matter but the religion of the criminal and their religion defines our totality. Crime should be crime and the perpetrator should be given the back of our tongues.