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Within Nigeria’s presidential palace, there exists a peculiar kind of arrogance in the idea that a Catholic priest, this time Cardinal John OlurunfemI Onaiyekan, unarguably one of the most outspoken and courageous senior priests in the Nigerian Catholic community, and indeed, the Nigerian church, needs a lecture from presidential aides on the limits of his own vocation. That is precisely what has unfolded with Temitope Ajayi, Daniel Bwala, Sunday Dare and other members of the Presidency’s media apparatus, who have taken turns to accuse Cardinal Onaiyekan of “abusing clerical privilege,” simply for telling Nigerians the truth about a meeting that they are entitled to know the outcome of. The presidency’s savage offensive against Cardinal Onaiyekan is not just tactically foolish and absurd but comes across as an embarrassing exhibition of deep ignorance about what the pulpit is for. It will be unwise not to repudiate this advertised ignorance, else it passes as knowledge.
Let me be precise about what actually happened. On July 28, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN) met President Bola Tinubu at the State House. Therein, they conveyed, on behalf of millions of Nigerians, their alarm at the state of the economy, the deterioration of security, and the direction of the country’s democracy. It was not a personal audience granted to Cardinal Onaiyekan as an individual on non-disclosure terms. It was rather an institutional engagement between the leadership of one of the largest religious bodies in Nigeria and the head of the Nigerian state. The outcome of the meeting, presented from the press statements authored and released by the President’s media aides, indicated that the meeting was organised precisely so that the concerns of ordinary citizens could be carried into the corridors of power. And that was exactly what the Bishops did. To later claim that the substance of that meeting was confidential and off-limits to the public, whose suffering occasioned the meeting in the first place, is to misunderstand, or deliberately misrepresent, the essence of the encounter and what it was for.
The Bishops did not go to Aso Rock to keep secrets. They did not go there to entertain the president with platitudes about how greatly he has transformed Nigeria and collect bags of rice. They did not go there to shower him with praises and come out to ask Nigerian to intensify prayers for him. The bishops, as active participants in Nigeria and residents of this country, understand how distressed Nigeria has become and went there to speak for the voiceless and the oppressed people of Nigeria who have become dehumanised not by the divine will, but because of the unjust social system. Whatever they told the President is what Nigerians discuss every day in their workplaces and markets. They are also what officials of the Government of Nigeria talk about behind doors when they open up to themselves. Understandably, they don’t talk about it openly because it is bad table manners to talk while eating.
Therefore, the President’s aides must know that speaking for the voiceless would be meaningless if the outcome of such a meeting cannot be shared with the very people on whose behalf the intervention was made. What the cardinal did is the same thing as what the Presidential Media aides did when they issued press statements stating what transpired at the meeting, from their own perspective.
In tackling Cardinal Onaiyekan for speaking truth to power, President Tinubu’s aides reached for their very familiar weapon, which is to recast the Cardinal’s testimony as partisan mischief. Daniel Bwala insists that Onaiyekan “spoke for Catholics, not Christians,” and links him, by an imagined and invincible chain of association, to Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), who has become Bwala’s favourite punchbag. As it is, Bwala will blame Obi if the kickstarter of his car fails. What he has done is obviously a diversionary tactic intended to instigate religious sentiments against Obi. But that fails, as nowhere in Cardinal Onaiyekan’s interview on television did he endorse a candidate, campaign for a party, or ask Nigerians to vote a particular way. He simply described, in plain language, what millions of Nigerians already feel in their pockets and in their fear of the roads they travel, which is that the country is bleeding, that hardship has deepened, and that the President, when confronted with this reality by the bishops, rejected their assessment. Bwala failed to realise that reporting a disagreement is not the same as manufacturing one. If the truth happens to be inconvenient for a government’s preferred narrative, the fault lies with the state of the nation, not with the man who described it accurately.
Speaking truth to power is, in fact, what the priesthood exists to do. The prophetic tradition within Christianity, and within the Catholic social teaching in particular, has never been content with occupying the sanctuary and reciting liturgy while the people outside starve, bleed, or lose faith in their institutions. From the Old Testament prophets who rebuked kings to their faces, to modern clerics who have stood against tyranny across Africa and Latin America, the vocation carries an irreducible obligation to speak truth to power, not to launder power’s failures into something more palatable. It is this understanding of the social teaching of the church that gave birth to liberation theology, which was instrumental to the dismantling of communism and military rule in Latin America. During this period, priests lost their lives to government killer squads. However, that did not stop the Church from speaking truth to power. What that says is simply that the voices of presidential aides cannot silence the prophetic calling of the church. Remember King Rehoboam!
A cardinal who tells a struggling nation that things are fine because the President said so would be committing a kind of pastoral malpractice, dressing failure in incense and calling it grace. That is not what Cardinal Onaiyekan represents. As a shepherd, he answers to his flock and, ultimately, to his conscience and God. He does not require the Villa’s approval or the permission of presidential media aides to describe what he witnessed. Besides, Cardinal Onaiyekan owes the Presidency no performance of gratitude for a meeting whose purpose was to convey hard and painful truths.
It is also worth turning the Presidency’s own language back on itself. If there is such a thing as “clerical privilege,” it is not a gag order that binds bishops to silence about the state of the nation. It is, if anything, the opposite. It is a moral standing earned through service to the vulnerable that obliges the clergy to speak plainly when governments fail. To invoke “privilege” as a reason for Onaiyekan to have kept quiet is to weaponise a concept that was never meant to protect power from scrutiny. The real abuse of privilege is not the Cardinal’s candour but the government’s arrogant disposition in expecting religious leaders to bless its policies rather than to examine their consequences. When the pulpit becomes a stage for reciting the government’s talking points, when prayer is deployed to deodorise failure rather than confront it, that is the true betrayal of clerical office. That is exactly the temptation that Cardinal Onaiyekan faced. And that is the temptation he conquered.
Also, Sunday Dare’s complaint that the bishops abandoned “neutrality” by wandering into political commentary misunderstands the vocation of the priesthood. Here, Dare professed profound ignorance of partisanship. Telling a government that its citizens are poor, hungry, and suffering is not partisanship. It is instead the baseline function of any institution that claims to represent conscience in public life. If naming hardship counts as political interference, then the Catholic Church’s entire social doctrine, including its long record of speaking against corruption, insecurity, and misgovernance under governments of every type, would have to be abandoned. Was Dare deliberately amnesiac, forgetting that the Catholic Church confronted previous administrations, military and civilian, APC and PDP alike, with the same weapon? I think that what the bishops displayed at the Villa is consistency, not partisanship. And, the thread stretches from Cardinal Anthony Olubunmi Okogie in Lagos under IBB and Abacha’s military juntas through to the June 12 struggle to Cardinal Onaiyekan under civil regimes from Olusegun Obasanjo to Muhammadu Buhari.
The ferocious struggle by these presidential aides to discredit Cardinal Onaiyekan says more about the insensitivity to the situation that Nigerian’s live with under Tinubu than it does about any wrongdoing on the Cardinal’s part. A government confident in its record does not need to unleash venom on anyone stating what most Nigerians already know from their own household budgets and hospital bills. The energy spent attacking the messenger would have been better spent addressing the message, which includes concerns about the economy, insecurity, and the trajectory of the 2027 elections. For now, those concerns remain unanswered despite the hubris.
