The politics of religion and Nigeria’s future: Assessing the controversy around the amended Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) 2020

The Company and Allied Matters Act (CAMA) is the key legal framework that governs the procedures and operations of companies and other related organisations in Nigeria (Chigbo and Faseemo, 2021). It was amended and signed into law by the former president of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari in August of 2020 (CAMA LFN 2020). The signing of the re-enacted Act into law presented major changes to business organisations and corporate governance in Nigeria. The changes brought by the new law is proposed to also affect the operations of religious organisations (section 389(1)(a)(b)(c)(2)(3), 842, 843, 844, & 850) and therefore generated a lot of controversies that demonstrate the dynamics of religion and politics in Nigeria. In this paper, I suggest that the politics of religion has given rise to a climate of suspicion and the dearth of trust in social relations which constitute threat to Nigeria’s future/continued existence as one indivisible country. Finally, I propose that African epistemologies of the inseparability of the “material and immaterial” aspects of life may provide a fruitful way to frame these developments in religion-state relationships in Nigeria.

Framed around the question of Nigeria’s future in the light of engaging in politics of religion, the paper examines how the controversy around the introduction of the newly amended CAMA 2020 law, reveal Nigeria’s government attempt at regulating religious organisations within the country. This development attracted a lot of mixed reactions, both verbal and written. On the one hand, the new law has been praised, applauded, viewed as groundbreaking and a step in the right direction that will enhance the business environment (Elias, 2020; Dentons, 2020). On the other hand, the law is seen as oppressive, autocratic, deceitful, and unconstitutional (Unini, 2020; Elendu, 2022). CAMA 2020 as a law has been subject to critique (Oxford Analytica, 2020; Udeoju, 2021; Aduma 2023;) the main bone of contention being the law’s provision that gave the Corporate Affairs Commission’s (CAC) registrar the power to, “by order” and “in public interest” suspend trustees of any registered organisation and appoint interim management if he “reasonably” believes there has been misconduct, mismanagement or fraud in the day to day running of the organisation.

I illustrate ways in which the politics of religion manifest in Nigeria impacting on the religion-state relationships and revealing the mistrust among relationships – first between government and the governed and second among religious organisations. In doing this, I draw on fieldwork conducted in Abuja Nigeria over 2021. This entailed semi-structured interviews with religious leaders of both Christian and Muslim organisations and members of the Trade and Investment Committee of Nigeria’s 9th National Assembly that presided over the amendment of the Companies and Allied Matters Act (CAMA 2020). 28 interviews were conducted in-person (24) and online (4). Also, media report analysis of some major newspapers in Nigeria between August 2020 and December 2022 are used. The paper follows a qualitative and inductive content analysis approach (Nelson and Woods, Jr. 2011; Davidsson Brembourg, 2013). Data coding and analysis were conducted using the NVivo software.

A key point that emerged from the results was that there is a climate of suspicion and a total dearth of trust in social relations in Nigeria. CAMA 2020 controversy is premised on the issue of trust. The results show that some Nigerian religious leaders do not trust the government. In addition, religious leaders also, do not trust their counterparts from opposing faiths. Building on Bok’s (1978) observation that “whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives. When it is damaged, the community suffers; when it is destroyed, society falters and collapse”, it seems that Nigerians here are grappling with the consequence of a dearth of trust: “the fear is the intensions of those who made the law and the situation we have found ourselves where we do not trust the government again. We hardly believe anything the government says because from their precedence, you know they will say one thing and will be doing the other” (FSC); “there is a breakdown of trust between the government and a lot of us who are being governed, we began to suspect that there is a hidden agenda behind this law” (FGE); across the sample, Christian religious leaders consistently expressed their lack of trust in government. Due to some historical antecedents and largely because of the dynamics of conflicts in the Nigerian context, where it has revolved around Muslims and Christians, in addition to the fact that the current state power issuing the law is within the control of Muslims, Christian leaders view the new law as a declaration of war on Christianity. Their mistrust of authority figures stem from past experiences.

Similarly, some Muslim leaders in the sample expressed their suspicion and mistrust of Christian leaders. Many of the Muslim leaders seemed not bothered about the government probably for the same reason of it being a Muslim led administration coming up with the law. Thus, they directed their responses at critiquing Christian leaders for opposing the law: “in my opinion, CAMA is designed to fish-out the criminals and anyone objecting to it may have some criminal tendencies” (SUI); “what CAMA is saying is that individualism should be separated from religious organization. When we see our counterparts in the Christendom start complaining, it is because they have attached to individualism” (AAN). Consequently, the controversy of the CAMA law demonstrates the tension between Islam and Christianity in Nigeria.

Having introduced some of the ways in which the CAMA controversy reveals the tension and lack of trust within religion-state relationships, I suggest that theories of African epistemology may provide a useful lens through which to understand these processes. Of particular use is Ellis and Ter Haar’s (2004) approach in which they maintain that the specific content of religious thought must be grasped if we are to appreciate the political significance of religion in Africa. Looking back to religion-state relationship in Nigeria, which grapples with the supposition of a separation of the religious and the secular realms, it becomes evident that a different model which should make sense of the inherently holistic mode of African cosmologies becomes necessary and this is what Ellis and Ter Haar’s approach advances to better understand the relation between religion and political action in general.