STEPHEN UBIMAGO in this piece writes on why the leaderships of churches in Nigeria have been on edge since President Muhammadu Buhari signed the re-enacted CAMA into law.

 When the leadership of the Christian Association Nigeria (CAN) began to agitate against the new Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) 2020, it was partly against the backdrop of Buhari’s antecedents as a selective anti-corruption warrior whose aims ought therefore to be met with a healthy dose of suspicion. After-all the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. 

It was also partly against the backdrop of the fact that the move to officially regulate and contain the churches in Nigeria has a history that is coterminous with Buhari’s inauguration as president. This history cannot be divorced from Buhari’s signature anti-corruption policy. 

It would be recalled that early in 2017, the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) suddenly came up with a policy that required not-for-profit organizations or Charities (to which churches belonged) to be treated indeed and in truth as Incorporated Trustees. For that is what they are under the law. 

In this connection, their founders were to be clearly distinguishable from the churches’ accounts and their books periodically subjected to government’s scrutiny. 

Partly due to how glibly the church founders or General Overseers (GOs) were wont to convert the accounts of their churches in brazen breach of the law of incorporation, this move was not only met with great angst, reprehension and resistance by them; Mr. Jim Obazee, the then FRCN boss, was sacked following Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s visit to Aso Rock. 

This would give the impression that the president neither commissioned nor sanctioned the move, that it was Obazee’s sole overreaching initiative. 

But in 2018, the selfsame provision for government regulatory authority over churches (and Charities or NGOs) and their finances was imported into a proposed NGO bill. The bill was however defeated at the National Assembly. 

Undeterred, Buhari in 2019 would address a letter to the National Assembly requesting the repeal of CAMA 1990. 

He would place before the lawmakers an Executive bill proposing a new CAMA as replacement. 

Into this newly proposed CAMA bill would the selfsame provision for government’s regulatory authority over churches (or charities generally) and their finances be imported as well. But at the public hearing stage the provision was also roundly rejected. 

The leaderships of the churches were thus gobsmacked when despite their serial rejection of the controversial provision, Buhari still went ahead to sign the new CAMA 2020, which contained the said provision, into law. Curiously, the president had earlier before signing the new CAMA into law sacked Mrs. Azuka Azinge, the southern boss of the regulator, Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), replacing her with a northerner, Mr Abubakar Garba. 

Azinge had been accused of false assets declaration, charged before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, and sacked. 

For keen observers, it was not coincidental that ahead of re-enacting CAMA, Buhari would appoint a northerner in January to head the government regulator CAC to oversee the implementation and enforcement of the new legislation. 

Undoubtedly, corruption is at the heart of the Nigerian story. It is part and parcel of what defines the Nigerian polity and reality. It’s even cultural. It’s a way of life. And central to the Nigerian tragedy. 

Every segment of Nigeria’s national life is corruption-ridden. Party politics and the politics of corruption are synonymous. Official corruption is normalized and pumps the life-blood of private sector corruption till date. 

Corruption even powers the national economy. The average Nigerian is corrupt, and the religious circle is no oasis in this regard. Christian cleric, Muslim imams, churches, mosques, judges, court officials, and the police, everybody share the DNA. 

It was thus easy for Buhari to win the hearts and minds of many Nigerians when his campaign for the presidency, ahead of the 2015 general election, was built on the anti-corruption rhetoric and sloganeering. 

For this only, he was crowned the messiah by not a few who were too starry-eyed and carried away as to bother putting other factors touching on his antecedents in perspective. 

No sooner had he been inaugurated than Buhari’s anti-corruption programme bared its authentic character. It was personal, and not institutional. It was selective. 

The political opposition was haunted under Buhari’s anticorruption war, as its members were gleefully and glibly whisked away by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s anti-graft agency, and hauled into courtrooms, save and unless they jumped ship and moved into the president’s party. 

Buhari’s hunt saw the media in sheer defamatory relish to drag the opposition, seemingly pronouncing them guilty ahead of the courts, which on most of the occasions never did. 

The anticorruption war became no more than media trials to shame, defame and uproot persons who the president wanted out of the way and replaced with loyal persons. 

But when the president’s attention was drawn to the patent moral and professional inadequacies and failures of some of these appointees of his, he neither sanctioned nor sacked them, let alone have them investigated and prosecuted. 

The security situation in Nigeria has been worsening from the activities of Islamic terrorists, amid accusations of barefaced larceny against Buhari’s security chiefs. Yet the president would rather they remain in office. 

Ibrahim Magu was twice denied Senate confirmation on grounds of mind-boggling corruption allegations against him. Yet Buhari secured his office as the anti-graft EFCC boss for so long until recently. 

SaharaReporters recently showcased the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, as a corruption totem. Yet the man is still one of the leading faces of the Buhari presidency. 

The Buhari presidency, ahead of the 2019 general election, secretly reappointed into the civil service and promoted AbdulRasheed Maina, a fugitive from the law who earlier had been sacked by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration for stealing billions of naira of pension funds. 

The presidency merely relieved him of the reappointment following the uproar that greeted the travesty upon becoming public knowledge. 

While Maina was never handed over to the EFCC for prosecution, Mrs Winifred Oyo-Ita was scapegoated and sacked despite, reportedly, having resisted an order from the Attorney General Malami directing Maina’s reinstatement. 

Hitherto, the president has been advertising his anticorruption agenda as the sole ennobling motivation behind this effort to regulate the churches and other Charities. The idea, he claims, is to cleanse the Augean stable. 

But not many will believe this in light of the fact that Buhari’s anticorruption programme has so far been personal, lacking a sustainable institutional framework. The EFFC, for example, is right in the presidency. It’s scarcely independent. 

It is barely limited by the fundamental rights doctrine as constitutionally enshrined. The anti-corruption programme has displayed a penchant for defamation. It’s been destructive. 

In contradistinction is the president’s proclivity to overlook the corruption of his own, typically northern Muslims, while ensuring that the full weight of the law is made to operate against others—showcasing them as pathologically corrupt and undeserving. 

The point is that this move to use the re-enacted CAMA to cleanse the church of financial corruption under the watch of a government as Buhari’s will foreseeably degenerate into the persecution of the churches. 

This is because the president’s claim to fighting corruption is bereft of evenhandedness. It’s unlimited. It’s selective and seemingly beholden to identity politics. Otherwise, it should have been a laudable scheme. 

Section 839(1) of CAMA 2020, which is the most controversial provision of the law, empowers the CAC to suspend the trustees of the churches or NGOs and appoint interim managers to manage the affairs of the association where it reasonably believes that the there is misconduct or mismanagement of the affairs of the church or NGO. 

This, according to the section, is to ensure that the church’s property is not wantonly dissipated or is secured for the purpose of achieving the object of the association or church. 

The CAC intervention, the Act further provides, should be for the public interest or in circumstances where the affairs of the association is being run fraudulently. 

However, the Commission cannot effect the suspension save by an order of court upon a petition, backed with evidence, and brought for that purpose either by the CAC itself or one-fifth of the members of the Church or Association. 

On face value the provision is morally compelling. The issue however is not so much its laudatory anti-sleaze intendment, as it is that its implementation and enforcement will foreseeably be abused by a Buhari-led government that has made no effort to distill the anti-graft campaign from the morass of selectivity. 

It doesn’t seem tidy that a CAC led by a Muslim, amid concerns of Islamization and Fulanization under the Buhari government, will be the agency suspending, say, the trustees of a church and appointing interim managers. 

Arguably, therefore, a CAMA 2020 regime will engender a situation where so many churches will be locked in civil and criminal litigations. This is in complete contumacy of biblical authority, which frowns at such. 

First Corinthians 6:5-7 reads in this connection, “I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren? But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers. 

“Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?” 

It’s submitted against this backdrop that the said controversial provisions of CAMA cannot hold against churches. 

Since churches are registered as trusts, only the cestui que trusts or beneficiaries of the trust, namely its membership, or indeed individual members of its board of trustees ought to be able to bring legal action, not the CAC, if going to court is at all the only available option in the given circumstance. 

Enough of the opacity that surrounds the administration of churches’ trust property, particularly their finances, by their leaderships. 

It’s submitted therefore that the re-enacted CAMA should be immediately returned to the National Assembly for the necessary amendments.