In his convocation speech at the University of Benin last week, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, remarked that, “Sango is the god of lightning and thunder, but all the sacrifices made to Sango have not generated one kilowatt of electric power.” Let me make it clear that I understand the point Fashola was making within the context of the entire speech but his choice of which god to denigrate is a cowardly decision. Fashola could have referred to the gods that dominate Nigeria’s public space – the Christian and Muslim – and risk being ripped into shreds by their adherents. Instead, he reaches for a marginal god, one that has already been endlessly disparaged in popular culture by a tribe of ignoramuses. Sango does not deserve such a gratuitous insult from a national public official.
Why allude to Sango, whom no public official sacrifices to (at least publicly) when both the Christian and Muslim adherents are the higher consumers of public resources? Sango’s shrine is not the largest in the country, competing with his peers to homogenise the public sphere; Sango is not the one we worship in business centres that have now been converted to religious houses; Sango does not have enough followers who can contend for their representative to be appointed to public office. Nobody gets forex subsidy to visit Sango’s shrine but Nigerian Christians and Muslims have had no qualms using public money to fund their pilgrimages. Why not take down the actual sources of religiosity that impede social progress rather than use Sango as a rhetorical diversion?
Besides, Sango worshippers are not simple-minded dolts who expect him to bequeath them electricity. The Greeks, for instance, see Apollo as the god of Music but European/western culture did not wait for him to write their classic music scores. They also take Bacchus as the god of wine but they do not chide him for not running a winery. Diana is the goddess of hunting while Athena is the goddess of intellection but who actually sacrifices to them so they can give anything back? These are mythological figures around whom people build a cultural economy and from there enrich their imagination. We see how much this has benefited mankind and we should be borrowing ideas from there, not running down our indigenous mythology.

The Punch


While governing Lagos State, mind-boggling figures were spent on a website for his office(N78million) & the car-park of his official residence(N600million). He declared himself free of any impropriety, on the grounds that, he neither negotiated those contracts, nor signed the cheques. Now he’s talking about Sango. Is Sango running the power ministry with him? He should be delivering improved power supply, not waiting for Sango’s response to the sacrifice, of his adherents.