Opinion
By Emmanuel Nnadozie Onwubiko
“War is useless slaughter and a failure of humanity.
POPE BENEDICT XVI.
“Never again war!
With war, everything is lost. War is always a defeat!”
POPE FRANCIS.
“Enough of the display of power! Enough of War! True strength is shown in serving life.’
POPE LEO XIV.
Daniel Weltman reviewed the magnum opus (major work) of Thomas Hobbes in the following paragraphs, which I find very elucidating. He started from a profoundly philosophical basis by posing an interrogation that What would life be like without any government? Would it be a utopia, or would it be miserable?
Weltman then asserted that the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously leaned in the latter direction. He argued in his book Leviathan that, without government, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
This essay by the aforementioned reviewer of Thomas Hobbes’s work explains why he thinks this, and it presents his solution, which is to create a government with absolute power.
The State of Nature:
Hobbes imagines what life would be like in the “state of nature,” a hypothetical world without governments.
Hobbes thinks all humans are equal when it comes to matters of survival. Nobody is powerful enough to be immune to attack. Even the weakest person can kill the strongest if there’s nobody around to stop them.
In the state of nature, this equal ability to kill each other leads to mistrust. All of your belongings and your life itself might be taken at any moment because there is no greater power to stop anyone from attacking you.
Some people would attack you because they need your resources to survive. Others would attack you because they want to be more powerful than everyone else. Even those who don’t need or want to attack you are a danger because they can’t trust that you will leave them alone, so to be safe, they must attack you first.
The end result is that the state of nature consists of a war of all against all.You must constantly be ready to fight, even if you’d prefer not to, because the only way to ensure your safety is to go after others before they go after you.
In this state of nature, projects like farming, manufacturing, science, and the arts are a waste of time because there’s no guarantee you’ll enjoy the fruits of your labour. Someone can take it from you at any moment. Everyone lives in “continual fear and danger of violent death.”It’s awful!
Hobbes says that if you doubt it would be so bad, think about how you act under your existing government. Even with the police just a phone call away, don’t you lock your doors when you sleep at night?
According to Hobbes, if you can’t trust your neighbors to leave you alone even when there are laws against theft and assault, imagine how much worse it would be if people were free to do anything they thought was necessary to survive in the state of nature.
Hobbes’s Solution:
If life in the state of nature would be intolerable, then what is the solution? To escape the state of nature, Hobbes proposes that it would be rational to establish a government.
Hobbes thinks that humans are rational creatures, and we can all see that it would be better if we agreed not to rob from and murder each other.But without a government, these agreements will fall apart, because there’s nobody to ensure that all parties stick to the deal. In the state of nature, agreements “are but words.”
To secure peace, we will need to form a government that is strong enough to enforce these agreements, says Hobbes. We do this by forming a special sort of contract or agreement with each other.
The contract Hobbes imagines goes like this: if everyone else agrees to obey some sovereign ruler, you too will obey that sovereign
This creates a government ruled by a sovereign that we have all agreed to obey. The sovereign will make and enforce laws. Chaos will be replaced with order.
According to Hobbes, the state of nature is so terrible that any sovereign will do, as long as it can protect you.[14] You must obey the sovereign whether it is a king, an aristocracy, or a democracy, even if the sovereign passes oppressive laws that you dislike.[15] Even under an oppressive sovereign there can be trade, and art, and industry, and you won’t have to worry that your neighbor will murder you.
In order to keep the peace, Hobbes thinks the sovereign must have power over everything: the army, the treasury, the judiciary, what’s taught in schools, and anything else that it needs to prevent the state of nature.
Hobbes thinks that these powers are all linked together: if the sovereign doesn’t control the army, it’s no use to control the judiciary because they can’t enforce the laws. If they don’t control the money, they can’t pay the army. If they don’t control the schools, people will be taught false things that will cause them to rebel.
We will stop here. The truth is that in some advanced societies, governments operate the way they should with all the institutions of checks abd balances working systematically well and in an orderly manner. But in most of the other underdeveloped nations especially in Africa, government isn’t what it is. Rather, governments of most African countries have through the exercise absolute powers, corrupted and eroded the independence and operational capacities of mostbof these institutions of checks abd balances like the judiciary and the legislature. In that case, what we see in most of these African nations including Nigeria, isn’t so different from what Thomas Hobbes described as the STATE OF NATURE. Let’s leave Thomas Hobbes for now.
Then, we will say straight away that even the world order of our contemporary world is not so different from those assertions made by Thomas Hobbes. With Donald John Trump, invading many nations such as Venezuela and Iran, what we see is what philosophers call MIGHT IS RIGHT. So there’s a new World order whereby the mighty ab strongest nations of the world lord it over the other weak nations. Our world has become brutish, short, and miserable, going by the types of wars that are happening all around us.
In Africa, there is leadership afflictions such as dictatorship and heists of public finance by those who ought to be the custodians of governance. The African continent has become the place with the largest number of poverty stricken population. In 2018, Nigeria overtook India as the nation with the largest population of multidimensionally poor households. India is bigger than all of Africa in population. So if Nigeria is now home to the largest population of extremely poor households, it tells you exactly the kind of story narrated by Thomas Hobbes in his Magnum opus or locus classicus, which Daniel Weltman reviewed.
The Gulf region is going through some of the most devastating wars unleashed by Israel and the United States of America against Iran. Thousands of innocent people have been caught up in the bombardments, and the casualties are only increasing by the day. It is in this kind of scenario that the newest Pope Leo XIV has become a noticeable voice for global peace.
The Pope has consistently rejected the war and has advocated peaceful negotiations, which President Donald John Trump doesn’t seem to admire. Trump has, therefore, attacked Pope Leo XIV for his gestures towards peace and concord. But the Pope has maintained his ground that he is not a politician but a religious leader who is a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ the prince of peace and of course the Gospel of Christ Jesus is dominated by the narrative of peace, reconciliation, dialogues and harmony.
He the Holy Father, has said he is not afraid of Trump, who is the president of the USA. Pope Leo XIV is the first US citizen to become Pope in several centuries. Pope Leo XIV emphasized that technological, economic, and military power must be directed toward the common good.
In an address to the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the pontiff discussed authority in the context of Catholic social teaching and described it as grounded not in strength but in moral virtue.
“Catholic social teaching regards power not as an end in itself but as a means ordered toward the common good,” the pope wrote in his message. “This implies that the legitimacy of authority depends not on the accumulation of economic or technological strength but on the wisdom and virtue with which it is exercised.”
Leo’s message follows his remarks at a Vatican prayer vigil for peace on April 11, where he denounced the “delusion of omnipotence” among global leaders amid ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. In his letter, he criticized the imbalance of economic and military power among nations, calling it a threat to democracy.
“The concentration of technological, economic, and military power in a few hands threatens both democratic participation among peoples and international concord. Divine power does not dominate but rather heals and restores. It is precisely this logic of charity that must animate history, for human activity inspired by charity helps to shape the ‘earthly city’ in unity and peace,” Leo wrote.
Referring to Centesimus Annus, St. John Paul II’s encyclical on Catholic social teaching, Leo stated that legitimate power “finds one of its highest expressions in authentic democracy,” a democracy that recognizes human dignity and is not dominated by “economic and technological elites.”
“Far from being a mere procedure, democracy recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good,” Leo wrote. “Reflecting this conviction, St. John Paul II affirmed that the Church values democracy because it ensures participation in political choices and ‘the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate.’”
Ironically, Pope Leo XIV came on a ten days visit to some African nations since Monday 13th April 2026 and will spend ten days traversing these African nations. As I write, the Holy Father is in Cameroon which is one of the countries in Africa that is going through totalitarianism of Paul Biya who has ruled with iron fists, supported by the French government for over 4 decades. The Pope had visited Algeria earlier, which is a Muslim dominated nation now but was formerly a Catholic nation before the Ottoman empire sprang up many centuries back. One of the Church’s greatest Theologians Saint Augustine was from Hippo in Algeria. Pope Leo XIV visited there.
He made a comment that Muslims and Christians do not have animosity. But he is not right. This is because in countries in West Africa, including Nigeria, Muslim extremists have established terrorists networks of boko Haram and ISWAP and are waging Jihad, which in the last ten years has killed over 100,000 people. However, the major teaching of Pope Leo XIV, which finds acceptance with most people, is his persistent calls for end to all wars. His position on the needless war in Iran started by USA and Israel is profoundly right and I can only wonder why Trump who is a self acclaimed Christian leader has an issue with the calls for peace as made by Pope Leo XIV.
Was Trump expecting the Holy Father to back him up for bombing school children to death? I support the Holy Father in this aspect and I pray he continues to let the flames of peace to shine around the world so the darkness, and misery that have become the situation of most people of the contemporary times, especially in Africa becomes a thing of the past. I expect the Pope to tell Paul Biya, who was once a Catholic senior seminarian in Bigard seminary Enugu, to respect human rights. I stand with Pope Leo XIV, and one word I would use to draw a conclusion to this article is “GOD SAVE THE POPE.” Donald John Trump is not so well educated like the Holy Father and for a proper context, let us go through their academic profiles.
Specifically, Donald John Trump was born in Queens, New York, on June 14, 1946. Trump was educated at the New York Military Academy and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1971, he took over his father’s real estate company, renaming it the Trump Organization. The business soon became involved in a variety of projects, including hotels, resorts, residential and commercial buildings, casinos, and golf courses. His first of many books was The Art of the Deal, published in 1987. In 2004, he launched the reality television show The Apprentice. The following year, Trump married Melania Knauss. They have one son, Barron. Trump also has four adult children from previous marriages: Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany. As we can see from the aforementioned records, Trump has just his first degree with very limited work experiences before he won the White House. Let us see who Pope Leo XIV is in terms of his academic and working backgrounds.
What is Leo XIV’s educational background?
Pope Leo XIV attended Villanova University (near Philadelphia), earning a B.A. in mathematics in 1977. He later studied at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and received a master’s in divinity in 1982. He also studied canon law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, earning his license in 1984 and his doctorate in 1987.
Also it takes a lot of accumulated work experiences for a priest to be elevated to the prestigious rank of a Cardinal and then if he gets elected Pope, by his fellow Cardinals, that’s the highest evidence of high erudition, integrity and credibility.
So, clearly, Pope Leo XIV is so far away from Trump both academically and experientially. This is then the time to call on the President of the USA to calm down and face his job as the president of the strongest nation in the World. Trump should listen to the Pope, go after peace and concord and spend time to grow the economy of his nation of USA.
***EMMANUEL NNADOZIE ONWUBIKO is the founder of the HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA). HE SERVED AS A NATIONAL COMMISSIONER OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF NIGERIA.
A.I
April 16, 2026
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