CPC: Africa Thrust, Nigeria Bleeds

By: Boluwaji Daso

Once you're intelligent, brilliant or have the ability to grasp easily, you're in trouble and you might not know but it's a fact yesterday, today, and forever!

This insinuates that people who are considered highly skilled usually encounter difficulties perhaps because others expect too much from them, misunderstand them, criticize them, or feel threatened by them as this has always been the case in our society.

As our knowledge grows, so does the burden of what lies beyond it and that burden is what destroys us. In decades past, every kid wanted to grow, not just in age, but in understanding, in freedom, in the possibility of becoming someone greater than the circumstances they were born into. We longed for a better life because we believed adulthood would offer clarity, dignity, and a sense of belonging. Back then, the world felt simpler; religion, at least on the surface, seemed peaceful. It appeared to weave communities together, creating a shared identity, a collective story.

But now, those same children who once romanticized the future have grown up to taste something far different. The world they inherited is tangled with conflict, disappointment, and contradictions. Many have realized that the introduction of certain forms of organized religion to Africa through colonization, coercion, or manipulation, has functioned like an incurable disease, leaving lasting imprints on families, memories, and cultural identities. Religion became less of a spiritual compass and more of a tool sometimes of division, sometimes of control, sometimes of self-doubt.

Alertly, the country Nigeria “Unity and Faith, Peace and Progress”, has become “A country of Particular Concern: CPC”-Donald Trump said, as a result of the religious crisis proceedings involving Christian massacres! Perhaps Islamic children's Adoption from their academic environment for ransom. Maybe religion should never have been treated as a trait of heritage or something passed down unexamined, unchallenged, unquestioned, as though faith were DNA. Because what I’m beginning to conceptualize is not just religion itself, but the broader concept of life and how individuals, when overwhelmed by rigid beliefs or inherited doctrines, can unintentionally contribute to the collapse of peace and harmony across nations.

So why, truly, is religion a core problem in the world?

At its foundation, everything written in a religious book ‘may be’ a snapshot of someone’s experience, someone’s revelation, someone’s interpretation of a divine or existential phenomenon. Humans are naturally endowed with the ability to sense, to interpret, and to guess the intentions of others. That ability can create empathy but it can also create suspicion. It can build communities but it can also fuel conflict.

Religion claims to be a guide for good deeds. It asks us to serve a God that I know, that you know, that millions claim to know. Yet the moment one speaks the names JESUS CHRIST or PROPHET MUHAMMAD, reactions erupt defensive, emotional, and confrontational. Suddenly, conversations turn into debates. Debates turn into arguments. Arguments turn into wars. All over whose God is superior, whose truth is valid, whose path is the “real” one.

Why does religion provoke such reactions?

Why does something that is supposed to bring peace often ignite division?

Because a silent manipulation has been unfolding for centuries shaping what the world believes, how people behave, and how societies define morality. Faith became intertwined with identity. Identity became intertwined with pride. And pride, when challenged, becomes a weapon.

Religion, in many places, now functions less as a spiritual sanctuary and more as a battlefield of egos, traditions, and unresolved histories. The problem may not be faith itself, but the rigid frameworks built around it frameworks that demand loyalty, obedience, and exclusion of anything that contradicts the narrative.

Maybe the real question is not whether religion is the problem, but why humanity continues to let belief become a barrier instead of a bridge.

Worthy of note, this is a subjective reflection, not one that can be neatly concluded with a simple solution, but rather a call for each of us to learn, understand, and confront the realities behind the killings, abductions, and widespread crisis currently affecting Nigeria, Until you stand where abductees stand, you’ll never grasp the weight of their suffering. Nigeria is crying out in pain every single second. No single platform of ours can resolve these issues on its own. Real change requires deliberate, collective physical action to hold our leaders accountable for their responsibilities in their various offices. Until we take that step, meaningful transformation will remain out of reach.

In a similar vein, if change found your doorsteps, would you give it a chance for utilization? Abi the scary part of physical demonstration demands you all keep silent and admit there's no law to correct what's right from wrong? The change is here but the possibility of correcting right from wrong is beyond reach! May Nigeria Succeed.