11/21/2025
Governor Hyacinth Alia (19 November 2025):
âIn my state of Benue, we donât have any religious, ethnic, racial, national, or state genocide. We donât have that. There is no jihad in Nigeria. Iâm speaking to you as a reverend father and as a governor. If such things existedâespecially in my stateâI would have been the first to raise the alarm.â
Me:
Governor Alia speaks here as a politician, not as a Catholic priest.
A Catholic priest must stand with the oppressed, not with the oppressors.
With the weak, not with the powerful.
With justice, not with the machinery of injustice.
With truth, not with convenient political lies.
A priest should speak truth boldly and accept the consequencesânot silence reality for political alignment.
A priest overseeing a state overflowing with internally displaced people should be the loudest voice for the victimsânot a shield for those whose actions and failures created the suffering in the first place.
A priest should worry more about a people abandoned by their government than about repainting the image of a government that repeatedly fails to protect them.
When the Catholic Church banned priests from partisan politics, it acted wisely.
Today, the reasons are painfully clear.
A priest cannot serve two masters.
And when he chooses politics over truth, the people suffer.
Sham e on Him