The reason Nigeria is never boring is that 180 million of us can pivot and become emergency anything – depending on the hot-button issue of the week.

If the hot-button issue of the week involves constitutional and legal issues, we end up that week with 180 million lawyers and Professors of constitutional law – and you pity Abdul Mahmud, Inibehe Effiong, Kennedy Emetulu, Ayo Turton, Olutoyin Adeyinka Eweje and Amina Miango Chohwe as they are forced to argue law with 100-Level students of Mechanical Engineering in the best case scenario; or they have to argue law with Okada machine operators with social media accounts in the worse case scenario.

If the hot-button issue is on women’s rights, 180 million people become feminists or anti-feminists or Professors of Women and Gender Studies. And you see bachelors and spinsters offering marital advice to folks celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary.

The hot-button issue this week involves a Pastor and a lady with well-known severe mental health issues. I have never really followed the lady since she was deported from Ontario here to Nigeria. The case has now produced 180 million theologians. I do not want it to be said that I did not become an emergency theologian when every Nigerian became one and that is why I am sending my mouth on an unwanted errand into the matter.

I have read a lot about the civil and criminal law aspect of the matter. I will let that remain the headache of the above-mentioned lawyers, lest I become a literature teacher arguing law with lawyers.

However, as an emergency theologian, I have read a lot of back and forth on forgiveness. The Pastor’s detractors are cremating him alive for seeking legal redress instead of forgiving Kemi Olunloyo.

I never knew that I would one day have to weigh in on the side of a prosperity Pentecostal Pastor, given what I think of them in Nigerian society. However, I have been scratching my head to understand what this Pastor did wrong. He sued for defamation. I support his right to sue when offended. If the Nigerian authorities then proceed to litigate a civil case as a criminal case, is it the fault of the Pastor who sued? I will let the lawyers answer this question: can an aggrieved citizen seeking redress be responsible for institutional errors if the police and the courts assign his complaints to the wrong portfolio?

Now to theology. This is why I keep claiming that as a Christian, I am stuck in Nigerian Christian ethos and values of the 70s and 80s. Personally, I don’t see anything Christian in Nigeria after the 80s.

This is why people will be talking forgiveness before admission of guilt, confession, repentance, penance, and apology. Where have those lynching the Pastor for not forgiving Kemi Olunloyo seen her do any of these things?

As a teenager growing up in a strong Christian tradition, if I mentioned forgiveness before admission of guilt, confession, repentance, penance, and apology, Reverend Father Leo Leblanc or Reverend Father Gerard Fournier or Reverend Father Fernando Cote would have given me a very strong knock on the head during catechism.

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada