Hinting to the attack on the governor of Nigeria’s Benue State in March, an incident that exposed the level of insecurity in the West African nation, Bishop Dachelem said, “If a governor who has all the paraphernalia of security at his disposal is also suffering from this, if we don’t do anything, we know that we are already heading for a doom.”
“Nigeria is indeed sick because it doesn’t carry the integrity of a federal nation; it doesn’t carry what a corporate nation should be. Nigeria is not okay, not what it should be, something is definitely wrong somewhere,” the 54-year-old Nigerian Bishop told journalists during the May 6 press conference at St. John's Cathedral Bauchi.
Nigeria has been experiencing insecurity since 2009 when Boko Haram insurgency began targeted attacks with the aim of turning the Africa’s most populous nation into an Islamic state.
Since then, the group, one of largest Islamist groups in Africa, has been orchestrating indiscriminate terrorist attacks on various targets including religious and political groups as well as civilians.
The insecurity situation in the country has further been complicated by the involvement of the predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen, also referred to as the Fulani Militia, who have been clashing frequently with Christian farmers over grazing land.
Against this backdrop, Bishop Dachelem told journalists during the May 6 press conference that citizens of the West African nation seem to have grown into a “culture of death by becoming used to death.”
“People no longer appreciate life because we have not decided to explore the true values and expound the gains of life. We have not exploited the benefits of life and gradually, there is a paradigm shift from the culture of life to that of death,” the member of the Congregation of the Missionary Sons of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Claretians) said.
He continued, “If you develop an attitude that is unhealthy, that becomes a culture. Right now, there is an inverted approach about life, people have paradoxically moved from the culture of life to the culture of death”.
“If you open the television, people want to know ‘where is the place that people have been kidnapped, who and who have died? How many? Where?’ This is the anxiety that people are attacked because we have acculturated ourselves with the culture of death and it is sad” the Catholic Church leader said.
He added, “If we are comfortable with the culture of death, one day, we will kill everybody and all of us will wake up and there is no Nigeria.”
