Religious and Ethnic Bias: For How Long Are We Going to Feed This Monster? – Tomiwa Ayodele

Religious and ethnic bigotry, fuelled by prejudice, intolerance, and ignorance, stands as a formidable barrier to national development in many countries around the world.

These deep-rooted biases not only undermine social cohesion and harmony but also impede progress, economic prosperity, and overall well-being of a nation.

At the heart of religious and ethnic bigotry lies the dangerous notion that one group is superior to another based solely on their beliefs, traditions, or cultural background, this mind set breeds distrust, division, and conflict within societies, hindering cooperation and collaboration essential for sustainable development.

When individuals are marginalized or discriminated against because of their religious beliefs or ethnic origins, the full spectrum of their talents and contributions to society remains untapped. This stifles innovation, creativity, and productivity, limiting a nation’s capacity to compete on a global scale and address pressing challenges, this sadly is staring us in the face in Nigeria. I am really concerned and saddened to see how we have now dived deeply into this dungeon of ethnic and religious bias (I would never have thought we would get here anytime soon).

For someone like me who attended a unity secondary school (proudly USSOSAN), I have gained great friends and family from different ethnic across the country, in this my small life i have been to different communities to visit or celebrate with my friends and it is fun, HUMANLY and HOMELY. Also, coming from a community (Awo Ekiti) that has an equal population of both Christian and Muslim, I would never think we will get to a point where we fight each other heads over religion. Would you say my friends from other ethnic divides, my cousins, uncles and aunties should abandon me and my siblings because my mum got married into a Christian family? And I am quite sure that background is also applicable to many people.

Now seeing us fight each other blindly over religion and ethnicity makes me wonder at what point did we lose our humanity.

Either as Christian or Muslim, either as Igbo or Hausa or Yoruba we are the first human. We should make deliberate efforts to live, dine and relate with each other in peace, peaceful coexistence brings progress to any society. Religion and ethnic should not make us become each other’s enemy. We do ourselves more harm than good by doing this.

Even the Bible stated clearly in Romans 12:18 and Hebrews 12:14 that we should pursue peace with all men. (I did not attend a Quranic school, but I’m sure it is there in the Quran as well).

I strongly condemn all forms of religious and ethnic war. Enough of these wars we keep instigating from every corner over less important things. We have more pressing things we need to address in our united states. We should not turn ourselves to puppet in the hands of manipulators, Yoruba calls them ” Awon Arije nidi Madaru (apologies to my none Yoruba speaking friends).

We need to do better, really.

May NIGERIA WIN ALWAYS

Opinion Piece By Tomiwa Ayodele