Noted Pan Africanist and Kenyan scholar Patrick Loch Otieno (PLO) Lumumba has articulated one of the biggest problems with our approach to religion on this continent.

Our fervour for religion leads to all sorts of baffling behaviours, and that’s what Lumumba has dubbed ‘Acquired Immune Spirituality Syndrome’

In Ghana at the moment, the Kenyan has been speaking on several topics relating to leadership on the continent, and the problems we face.

“I was telling a congregation not long ago that those who go to church on Sundays suffer from what I call Acquired Immune Spirituality Syndrome (AISS) and that they go to church every Sunday to receive their anti-retrovirals to last them for six days and that they go again and again.”

He identified the poverty and high unemployment rates of the continent as factors behind that sort of behaviour.

The seductive nature of a clean slate every weekend is also one of the reasons for AISS. What’s better than a week full of sin and getting it all cleansed after saying the right words on Sunday? The charismatic nature of preachers and the need for constant reinforcement of how God is fighting for you are also other factors for our dependency on religion.

The noted professor also spoke on some of the other challenged the continent faces.

“Africa will only realise her potential if the former French colonies recognise that they are not French and do not behave as if they are, if the former British colonies recognise that they are Africans and the former Portuguese colonies recognise that they are Africans and begin to behave like they are Africans,” he said.

“Unemployment is one of the most annoying and nagging things in Africa. We are about 1 billion now and over half of that , 70 percent of that population is in the working age and our countries are not producing any jobs. In Kenya, Tanzania etc. the Chinese are building railways, the Chinese are building our gas pipes in Tanzania. The Chinese are present everywhere because they are creating jobs for their young men and women.

“If you go into any hotel in Accra Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania half of the things that we are consuming are not from us and that means jobs and employment and I can’t agree more that until we solve the problem of unemployment we are not going to realise our full potential. African leaders must make the deliberate decision to begin to move in the right direction.”