401 - The Pearly Gates are Closing, as Citizens Go Hungry and Others are Shot or Deported

A Heavenly Ambition, and Nigeria

“I want to get to heaven if possible,” America’s orange-polished commander in chief told Peter Baker of the New York Times sometime in October. Admittedly, he also confessed, “I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole.” Prodded by Baker, he then admitted that he didn’t reckon that “there’s anything that’s going to get me into heaven. I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound.”

This was an extraordinarily candid conversation. But maybe it somewhat explains why Trump decided -- fresh from plausibly successful negotiating rounds in Gaza and South Korea (with Xi Jinping) to offer to attack Nigeria on behalf (supposedly) of Christians who were being targeted by Muslims and were allegedly not being protected by the government of Nigeria, Africa’s largest polity. Isn’t there anyone left in Washington in the State Department, the National Security Agency, or the intelligence institutions who can set our fearless leader right and persuade him not to act out on information from distorted sources like Sen. Ted Cruz?

Nigeria holds at least 220 million people and will soon swell to 400 million and then to 500 million at the end of this century. Muslim women are more fertile than their Christian counterparts, and in the northern half of the country, where multitudes live, populations are growing and Nigeria as a whole is teeming with young people. The median age now and for many coming decades will be around 19, eventually shifting upward to 21 and 22. Ninety million Christians live in Nigeria, often without fear and happy with their Muslim neighbors.

The real issue for Nigeria in this century, and therefore for the United States, is not religious violence. It is whether Nigeria can achieve a plausible demographic dividend. Can Nigeria provide meaningful employment to the coming 60 to 70 percent of its population who want to work and cannot find anyone to employ them? If not, they will inevitably turn to the informal sector -- washing windscreens and hustling for change in parking lots. Or to petty- and not so petty crime.

It is in part from these running packs of unemployed and largely unemployable (for they often lack exposure to formal secondary schooling or have failed their school leaving examinations -- a too-frequent South African occurrence) that the various militant groups plaguing today’s Nigeria are recruited. The longest running is Boko Haram, a fundamentalist Islamic quasi-religious jihadist movement that has attacked northeastern Nigeria relentlessly since 2006.

Haram means forbidden and Boko has been taken to mean education. The group’s original ideological claims were against modern secular education, not against Christians. And over the two decades and more since Boko Haram began to rampage throughout the Borno kingdom and province south of Lake Chad and the southern reaches of neighboring Chad and Niger, plus the northwestern borderlands of Cameroon, its warriors have almost exclusively targeted and attacked fellow Muslims who were deemed insufficiently Islamist in their beliefs and practices. Boko Haram has shot up mosques and schools, kidnapped Muslim girls and boys from secondary schools, and betrothed the girls and turned the boys into Boko Haram soldiers.

Boko Haram is not an anti-Christian crusade. Nor is the contemporary attempt in southeastern Nigeria to resuscitate the Biafra secessionist state that warred with the rest of Nigeria in 1967-1970. The twenty-first century Biafranists are all Christians fighting Christians, or at least Igbo Christians attempting to carve out a new Igbo nation from the current religiously-mixed and religiously-neutral government of Nigeria. Their cause is a losing one, just as it was in 1970, when the Biafra civil war ended with a victory by the army of the nation.

Southern Nigeria is traditionally Christian, with a very heavy Pentecostal penetration. Some of the biggest and wealthiest Pentecostal churches in the world are in Lagos and other southern cities. But Muslims also reside in the south and Christians and Muslims respect and honor each other’s faiths and live peaceably side by side. Trump and Cruz simply do not understand how a place like Nigeria functions. Its key problems overwhelmingly stem not from religious intolerance and persecution, but from incomplete educational accomplishments, health deficiencies exacerbated by Trump’s evisceration of USAID and PEPFAR, and corrupt dealings that infect all Nigerian institutions and leadership activities.

About the only part of Nigeria where Muslims may be attacking Christians, and sometimes (but not always) winning, is the Middle Belt. This is the vast region north of Abuja, the political capital, and south of the great Hausa and Muslim-majority states of northern Nigeria. Here Fulani herdsmen, who are Muslims, have for years been battling with settled farmers, most of whom are both Christian and animist by persuasion. Many are ethnically Tiv. The struggle here is over land, not over belief, and a result of population explosion and the movement of Fulani southward.

Cruz, if he is Trump’s compromised informant, may also have conflated ethnic battles between Hausa and Igbo (immigrants from the south) in northern cities like Kano and Katsina over trade and housing into religious pogroms. But, at worst, those would be exaggerated tales.

The bottom line is that Trump is both uninformed and allowed by his sycophantic staff to remain ignorant. Just as white Afrikaners from South Africa are hardly being targeted by criminal South Africans more often than black South Africans are targeted (and killed in much larger number), so Christians and Muslims in Nigeria are equally subject to discrimination, unwanted attacks, and heavy crime.

Does Trump really believe that he will open up the pearly gates by bombing Nigeria, a staunch ally of America? Does he think that admitting Afrikaners into the U.S. ahead of poorer and hungrier immigrants from, say the Democratic Republic of Congo or Honduras, will enable those gates to swing wide open? Fourteen million Sudanese are starving, and Trump says and does nothing. And what about the 42 million Americans, most nominally Christian, who are about to go hungry because, even with judicial orders, Trump is refusing to release SNAP funds to feed them? To quote the orange demon himself, “I am not doing well.” And “I’m not maybe heaven-bound.” But he could be. A few lessons in compassion could be instructive.

Those lessons are not demonstrated by demolishing the East Wing of the White House in order to erect a gilded ballroom, erecting a Napoleonic-arch at the entrance to the Capitol, or minting a new coin emblazoned with his imperial face. We should also ask why Trump restored a Civil War monument in Washington, D.C., that memorializes a Confederate diplomat, general, a Ku Klux Clan leader? Does USAID not deserve to be resuscitated, especially if there hopes of heaven.

Puffed up glory usually doesn’t qualify for a heavenly deal. Nor, we believe, does the constant abuse and violation of the Ten Commandments usually attract heaven’s favor. Adultery, theft, and falsification, plus most of the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, gluttony, and so on should be disqualifications as well.

If only Trump’s campaign for a pass to paradise would engage in good works and the uplift of humanity! Only then might the gates begin to creak in anticipation. Otherwise, perdition awaits. Think Dante!