…will Alia live up to Adasu’s legacy?
Reverend Father Hyacinth lormem Alia on Monday, 20 March 2023, became the second Roman Catholic priest to contest and win a governorship election in the history of Benue State and Nigeria as a whole.
Alia, who ran the governorship race of the North-Central state as candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), was declared winner of the 18 March poll in the state by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) after he scored 473,933 votes to defeat his closest rival and Speaker of the Benue State House of Assembly, Titus Uba of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who scored 223,914 votes.
Alia’s victory at the polls calls to memory The Very Reverend Father Moses Adasu, the first Catholic priest in the history of Nigeria to go into partisan politics and win an election.
Very Rev. Fr. Moses Orshio Adasu was elected as the second executive governor of Benue State on 2 January 1992 on the platform of the Social Democratic Party (SDP). He ruled the state until November 1993 when dark-goggled General Sani Abacha staged a coup that kicked out the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim National Government and replaced the state governors with military administrators.
But his foray into politics began much earlier. Fr. Adasu was a Senior Inspector of Education at the Benue State Ministry of Education headquarters, Makurdi, and a member of the Board of Governors of the College of Education, Katsina-Ala. He went to the Constituent Assembly (CA) in 1988, with the approval of the Catholic Church, as a technocrat. His people, the people of Iwarnnyamku Council Ward, wanted him to represent them as chairman of Konshisha LGA, but he refused.
Even in the church, he held privileged positions. He was a member of the Christian Pilgrims Welfare Board, the Benue State Prerogative of Mercy, and the Advisory Council of the Episcopal Commission on African Traditional Religion. He was Chairman of the Presbyteral Council, Dean of Makurdi Deanery, Diocese of Makurdi, and Vicar-General, Diocese of Makurdi.
With Fr. Alia’s emergence as governor, one question that has popped up is what happens when a Catholic priest goes into partisan politics. We can find the answer by looking at precedence.
Abbé Fulbert Youlou was a laicized Brazzaville-Congolese Roman Catholic priest who led the Republic of the Congo into independence in August 1960 as its first president. When his candidature for legislative elections was announced in October 1955, he was banned from wearing the cassock and from celebrating the Mass. This was after his bishop, Mgr. Bernard, had attempted to dissuade him without success.
In the case of Fr. Adasu, the then Catholic Bishop of Makurdi, Rt. Rev. Dr Athansius Usuh, ruled against his venturing into politics, relying on the Code of the Canon Law that bars clerics from playing “an active role in political parties or in directing trade unions unless, in the judgment of competent ecclesiastical authority, this is required for the defence of the rights of the Church or to promote the common good”.
Fr. Alia, after he purchased forms to contest for the position of the governor of Benue State under the APC, was suspended from public ministry by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Gboko, Rt. Rev. Dr. William Avenya.
The Bishop said in a statement, “The Mother Church does not allow her clerics to get involved in partisan politics on their own. Can. 285, 3 CIC. You are aware that my son, your brother and your priest has purchased the party forms to contest for the Office of the Governor of Benue State under the All Progressives Congress (APC), which is totally against our vocation. Therefore, to respond to the spiritual and pastoral needs of the Church in the Catholic Diocese of Gboko, I have suspended him from the exercise of sacred ministry.”
Explaining this in a recent article, Fr. Henry Charles Umelechi, a Catholic priest, said “suspended from public ministry” means “that the Catholic Church has withdrawn the priestly faculties from Fr. Alia and therefore he can no longer celebrate mass publicly for others but he can still celebrate his private mass because he too should also pray and the mass remains the highest prayer; he can no longer hear confession unless in danger of death (Can 986 § 2); he can no longer celebrate baptism, nor communion of the sick, nor extreme unction; and Matrimony (Christian Marriage), and what have you”.
“Yes, he can hear someone’s confession in danger of death and that tells you that Fr. Alia remains a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek but the power to exercise that priesthood has been removed from him by the Church who made him a priest of Christ, because the church is the body of Christ the Head. That means that no one is actually an ex-priest,” Umelechi said.
However, the more important question to many is whether Fr. Alia would be able to live up to the legacy of Fr. Adasu, who once said he was in politics to baptise politics and make it pure, following the general saying that “politics is a dirty game”.
The Catholic priest from Mbaamena, Shangev-Tiev, Konshisha Local Government Area, who died in 2005, is counted among the best governors Benue State has ever had, with some record achievements in less than two years as governor. To his credit, according to publicly available information, are projects like BENCO Roof Tiles Company, Abinsi; Benue Fruit Juice Company, Katsina-Ala; Benue Yam Flour Company, Zaki Biam; J. S. Tarka Foundation, Makurdi; Benue State University, Makurdi; College of Education, Oju; and connection of Makurdi to the 132kv national grid of electricity in 1992. He also planned the establishment of a specialist hospital, a medical centre, and an airport in the state. Unlike many of today’s professional politicians, Fr. Adasu after he left office went to teach at Benue State University, an institution his administration had established.
After Nigeria returned to democratic rule in 1999, Fr. Adasu was appointed a member of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) in January 2001. He resigned from the ICPC in June 2002 to re-enter politics, joining the Alliance for Democracy (AD) through which he challenged the then incumbent governor, George Akume of the PDP in April 2003, but lost the bid.
Adasu has done his bit and gone to rest. The ball is now in Fr. Alia’s court. Will he live up to Adasu’s legacy? Or will he further stir up dirt in the already murky waters of Nigerian politics?
