ALIGNING AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY WITH AFRICAN CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AS PANACEAS TO ILLEGAL BUSINESS IN BORDER AREAS OF AFRICA: A YORUBA (AFRICAN) CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Abstract: This study explores how African Christianity and African Christian Religious Education can help address the widespread illegal business activities found in Africa’s border regions, using Yoruba Africentrism as the analytical lens. The paper begins by noting that poorly marked borders, weak enforcement, and leadership negligence have made many borderlands hubs for cross border trade, commercial sex, and other illicit activities. It examines how early African traditional leaders upheld moral order and social responsibility before the arrival of Western missionaries and the rise of Eurocentric influence. The study also considers how African cultural values and aesthetic traditions once shaped communal morality and contrasts this with the effects of Western Christianity and Western civilization, which the paper identifies as contributors to moral decline, commercial sex, and mental colonization in several border communities. Using socio historical analysis, interviews, online sources, and narrative methods, the research finds that African Christianity rooted in indigenous cultural identity, along with purposeful Christian Religious Education, can serve as strong tools for social transformation, moral renewal, and public enlightenment in border areas. The paper concludes that reclaiming Africentric values can help reshape attitudes toward illegal business and offers recommendations for restoring responsible leadership and community ethics across Africa’s borderlands.