• Ikenna Paschal Okpaleke

Do you often hear things like:

It is not going to work?

This is not the first time and so, we are better off divided as we are.

There is no way we can have unity in this Nigeria.

Ecumenical dialogue among Christians is of no use.

Dialogue between Christians and Muslims is a waste of time.

Are such comments not symptoms of learned helplessness?

Yet one may argue, if they are signs of learned helplessness, where did we learn them? Of course, those who defend the impossibility of unity and dialogue do not speak from the blues. They speak from experience: the experience of the failed Church Union Movement in Nigeria in the 60s, the experience of the messed-up status of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the experience of the collapse of the Advisory Council on Religious Affairs (ACRA) and the inactive Nigeria Inter Religious Council (NIREC), the experience of the countless religious riots in Jos, Kaduna, Kano, the massacre of fellow Nigerians in Benue, Plateau, Borno, Sokoto, Nasarrawa, Aba, and so on till date. These are concrete experiences, and indeed, that is why the resultant helplessness is qualified as learned.

However, in admitting learned helplessness as a norm, many things are missed out in the picture. These include the very little issues as well as the big ones: the fact that we are humans and not animals; the fact that there are also other narratives, stories of the success of unity and dialogue, of love and community; the fact that Christians from different denominations still marry themselves and live in unity; that Muslims and Christians form our national football, basketball and volleyball teams; that Pastor James Wuye and Imam Mohammad Ashafa moved from a state of bitter enmity to deep friendship; and so on. No matter how little these examples might appear, they still defy the complete logic of learned helplessness. Even within psychology, Seligman’s hypothesis of learned helplessness has been shown to be flawed, and has since then been revised. In the revised version, the type of explanations we give about failures determines our attitude towards that particular challenge in the future.

The failure of dialogue and unity cannot be allowed to lead us to despair, to make us believe that we are utterly helpless, to force us to conclude that nothing, absolutely nothing could be done about it. What we need, rather, is to calmly and deeply analyze the causes of the failure and seek the best ways to fix it.