This piece is a guest post by Nnadozie Onyekuru, who is currently a Master of Global Affairs student at the University of Notre Dame.
Catholic media outlets were abuzz this spring with the news of Archbishop Wilton Gregory’s transfer to Washington D.C. but an analogous appointment in Africa’s most populous country went largely unnoticed. In March this year, the Vatican announced Pope Francis’ appointment of Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama as the co-adjutor archbishop of Abuja. This means that Kaigama will eventually succeed John Cardinal Onaiyekan as the archbishop of Abuja.
The appointment is significant in matters of religion and public affairs in Nigeria. As the Roman Catholic prelate of the nation’s capital, the archbishop of Abuja exercises a unique voice in discourses surrounding national policies and events. A corollary to this influence is the expectation that it is used to promote national unity and progress.
Archbishop Kaigama’s antecedents will assist him to easily assume this civic expectation. He is currently the head of the Catholic Church in Jos, one of the crossroads of Nigeria’s ethno-religious harmony and his pastoral experience there led him into the difficult work of peacebuilding and reconciliation. In this respect, he will continue the work of Cardinal Onaiyekan. Again, like Onaiyekan, he is a past president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, CBCN. During his leadership of the CBCN, two major opposition presidential candidates in Nigeria sought the conference’s audience while clarifying their views on religion, national unity, and development.
After the opposition’s historic victory, Kaigama and the CBCN struggled between giving the newly elected government the benefit of the doubt and criticizing it for its shortcomings on matters concerning the sanctity of Nigerian lives. It’s a familiar aspect of episcopal responsibility in Africa and the more a Catholic bishop is in the spotlight, the greater the dilemma. That dilemma will now be even more fixed in Archbishop Kaigama’s mind as he prepares to heed Pope Francis’ call.