Abimbola Adelakun
When the news broke that men of the Department of State Services
had supposedly attempted to arrest Prophet Isa El-buba, the General
Overseer and President of Ebomi Ministry, my first thought was that the
present administration had scored another own goal. Lately, the prophet
gave a fiery sermon against President Muhammadu Buhari where he alluded
that transcendental forces are arraigned against the President for his
many shortcomings. Christians in Nigeria, he urged, need to match the
spiritual forces aligned against the President by getting their
Permanent Voter Cards and doing the needful at the forthcoming 2019
polls. It was a rather stirring sermon, full of head-nodding references
to the failures and hypocrisies of the Buhari administration, and how
the nation will be imperilled if he wins a second term. While some folks
took El-buba as a vessel through which God is warning the nation not to
trade her destiny for another leader that merely glitters on the
surface, the more cynical listener recalls that the same El-buba
prophesied that former President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan would defeat
Buhari in 2015. If he is back on the block ahead of 2019 and is
prophesying against the same Buhari, then his prophecies might just be a
continuation of the 2015 elections by other means.
Regardless of the speculations about the political undertones of
his prophesies, whichever agency of government that reportedly laid a
siege to his house and perhaps attempted to arrest him has helpfully (!)
increased the handwriting of ordinance against the President. They gave
his opponents and his traducers one more joker to wield against his
candidature. Any show of aggression on the part of the state, in the
light of Buhari’s persistent poor human rights record yields the plot to
the aggrieved mob cataloguing the autocratic sins of President Buhari.
Prophet El-buba might not be the most popular pastor in Nigeria right
now, but, his story might be about to change, no thanks to overzealous
agents who have handed him a narrative of King Ahab vs. Prophet Elijah
persecution. By making the prophet a victim of their excesses, they gave
people the yarn to be spun against them in various churches in the
coming months. If I could look into the future, the question I want to
be answered is what good the pastoral crusade against the current
administration will do other than the mere possibility of switching the
All Progressives Congress with another party of equally clueless johns?
The Buhari administration has, no doubt, made governance a
questionable enterprise. Its lethargic reaction to urgent national
issues, provincial leanings on religious and ethnic lines cum shoddy
treatments of opponents – real and perceived – have all angered
Nigerians to the point that the times seem right for the pastors to
stand in the gap, don the toga of Martin Luther, and drive a reformation
of the polity. This Pentecostal power push against the political
establishment began about a year ago when Pastor Enoch Adeboye of the
Redeemed Christian Church of God urged members of the church to become
more politically active. He reportedly told church members – to everyone
else’ hearing – that come 2019, they would reprove the Federal
Government’s poking nose into their business by using their PVC to vote
the candidate who would safeguard their righteous interests.
In recent times, as the issue of the Fulani herdsmen and the
massacres they perpetrate in communities around Nigeria reach an
unbearable crescendo, more men of the cloth are coming out to speak
against the slaughter of innocents and the rather lukewarm response of
Buhari’s administration to the violence. Among the most vociferous
voices are Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly, Bishop David
Oyedepo of the Winners’ Chapel, Pastor Paul Eneche of Dunamis
International Gospel Centre, and also Apostle Johnson Suleman of Omega
Fire Ministry. The frequent acts of wanton violence by Fulani herdsmen
have made their prophetic campaigns an urgent task and even a necessity.
By challenging the administration frontally, they take the space of
civil society activists, who, until the last administration, were a
strident voice against the massacres perpetrated by Boko Haram. The
transcript of Bishop Oyedepo’s message on the Fulani herdsmen is telling
in this respect. He interweaved both political and theological
arguments to make a not-so-subtle case against the government. Only a
simpleton would read his latest speech about Fulani herdsmen and wave it
aside as insignificant. It is a precursor to how religion would be
actively politicised for next year’s elections. Also, one should not
assume that the Muslim political establishment would simply sit back and
watch their own being swept off by the force of Pentecostal power. They
will actively mobilise to fight back to protect their supposed turf
from Christian crusaders.
Religion and religious identity, are, of course not the sole
determining factors in the coming elections. There are many other
contributing factors to electoral victories but religion cannot be
played down especially now that it is anchored to a popular grievance.
Neither can the outcome of the electioneering be considered a given
based simply on which side of the divide the religious establishment
chose to stake their claim. Jonathan, for instance, was the unofficial
candidate of the Nigerian clergy in 2015 and he actively wooed their
support for his candidature while his opponent was left to make do with
the pastoral support of the like of Rev Father Mbaka and Pastor Sunday
Adelaja.
Jonathan’s dalliance with pastors, considering their immense
cultural influence, should have made him a shoo-in candidate but he
still lost to a Muslim who had to get a Christian deputy to prove to
Nigerians he would not Islamise the country. Buhari’s victory at the
polls not only proved the limit of the Pentecostal vatic influence, it
also showed that the ground beneath their feet shifted without them
knowing. Regardless of the outsized influence of the pastors, they found
that as of 2015, people were tired of a leader whose weakness at
combating the evils that combat the state – terrorism, corruption, and
all forms of dysfunctionality – also symbolised the effeteness of the
state. By the time the election drew near, Nigerians were practically
begging for a “strong” leader and Buhari was able to synchronise himself
to that image. Ironically, almost three years after, the so-called
strong candidate has only made the country weaker.
For 2019, pastors probably would not stop at a subtle endorsement
of a candidate but actively stake their reputation on the candidature of
Buhari’s opponent. We should therefore be concerned whether their
concerted political efforts towards 2019 would not merely result in the
removal of a clueless candidate who would be replaced with another
pseud. No effort is worthwhile if it merely mobilises people to the
polls with the spectres of “Islamisation,” “northernisation” and “Fulani
herdsmenisation” hanging over their imagination. Nigeria needs more.
While the outcry against Buhari is largely based on his
lackadaisical body language, we should not make the mistake that the
resident evil that needs to be exorcised in 2019 is merely personified
in him. Whatever his failings as a leader and as a human being in the
Fulani herdsmen crisis, what we should not lose sight of is the fact
that orgies of violence – either ethnic or religious based – are a
recurring decimal in Nigerian culture and history. At different times,
leaders have reacted to the acts of violence with varying levels of
sensitivity and matching brutality. Those who are going to use the altar
of God as a bully pulpit to mobilise against the present administration
should please be reminded that there should be a bigger agenda than
“anything but Buhari.” We urgently need more than an electoral process
that swaps jaded and visionless politicians with the ones who have long
dreamt the last of their dreams. The country needs new leaders, a new
team, and new names of people who can run an economy efficiently and
productively. That should be our end goal, not merely kicking out a
moral coward.
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Written by Abimbola Adelakun
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