How Anglican and Catholic priests in the East extort bereaved families and hold the dead for ransom

I didn’t know I was still angry about what an archdeacon said at my father’s funeral some eleven years ago. I didn’t realize it until last month when someone added my phone number to my hometown’s archdeaconry’s WhatsApp group, and I started getting a barrage of messages from someone who called himself the Archdeacon.

The first thing I did was call around to find out if the Archdeacon was the same one that buried my father. Fortunately, he was not. But my anger that had resurrected did not subside. I made more calls to other people whose names also appeared on the same WhatsApp group. I wanted to find out who gave my name to the Archdeacon. In the course of my search, people I spoke to told me horrific stories about their encounters with clergymen during the burial of their loved ones. It turned out that mine was a minor issue. The stories that I heard made me feel mine was like a negligible debt that Unoka in “Things Fall Apart” did not feel deserved a place on the ‘wall that does not leak.’

What I thought was an outright disrespect of the bereaved family by arrogant clergymen who had grown wings because nobody dared to challenge them had become daylight extortion. Maybe the best way to describe what is going on in today’s language is that clergymen in Eastern Nigeria are kidnapping the dead…