Editor’s note: Ebenezer Obadare, a sociologist and Naij.com columnist, talks about mixing prophecies into politics, and the overall tendency of blindly trusting multiple Nigerian pastors, prophets and other “men of God”.
As elections have emerged as a perennial political spectacle in Nigeria, predictions of their outcome have become an increasingly interesting sideshow. No sooner is the lineup of aspirants set than a cavalcade of prophets, prophetesses and senior apostles emerges to apprise Nigerians of what God has purportedly divulged to them in private. Which is where the problem usually begins – for reasons which are not entirely clear, God appears to vouchsafe different assurances to different prophets. He tells one apostle that he has awarded victory to the incumbent, and yet another that his challenger is a sure banker. Apparently, in matters of electoral outcome, Providence more or less assumes the persona of IBB, the evil genius who, towards the end of his eight-year reign, reportedly assured every visiting politician to Aso Rock that they were the Chosen One, and the presidency was theirs just for the asking.
Our growing tribe of pastors and sundry “Men of God” had a field day in the approach to last year’s presidential election. While some confidently predicted that Goodluck Jonathan, being Christian and all, was the divine choice, others swore that God had in fact grown tired of Jonathan’s fecklessness, whereupon he had resolved to go with his challenger, his religious bona fides notwithstanding. The question of how a perfect and omniscient God could have failed to anticipate that Jonathan would be a fiasco in office was left unaddressed. At any rate, other soothsayers warned that contention about the outcome of the election would provide a spark for an inter-religious and inter-ethnic bloodbath, the like of which has not been seen in the country since the end of the Civil War in 1970.
As it happens, not only were predictions of a bloody outcome wide off the mark (in the end, the APC candidate Muhammadu Buhari won a by and large trouble-free election), none of the prophet-eers anticipated one of the most interesting facts about the 2015 election, its postponement by six weeks from its original date of February 14 to March 28. Imagine God somehow disclosing a million and one contradictory things about an event to an avalanche of prophets, and somehow omitting one little detail: that it would suffer a controversial postponement.
The postponement of the 2015 presidential election was one of two major omissions from last year’s round of prophecies. The other was the price of oil – the lifeblood of the Nigerian economy – which, since 2015, has embarked on a downward spiral, reaching an 11-year low at the end of the first week of January 2016. Again, God found a way to bend the ear of every prophet who cared to approach Him with the details of practically everything that would happen to the country in the outgoing calendar year, and yet, managed to leave out what many might consider to be the most important thing.
I have been thinking about these omissions these past few days, as seer after seer, seemingly undeterred by last year’s wild inaccuracies, has lined up to avail a public whose credulity seems to know no limits of what God has disclosed (only to them of course) in confidence. We’ve heard the usual vague generalities about this being a “year of blessing for some” and of surprise for others. We’ve been told (and this is really a surprise) that the country will lose some major personalities this year.
We’ve also been assured (this, courtesy of Mr. Eugene Ogu of the Abundant Life Evangel Mission) that Nigeria’s economy “will shock the nations of the world” since 2016 is “a year of divine promotion by the will of God”. Yes indeed, the economy may be on the brink of collapse because the price of oil has reached rock bottom, young people may be voting with their feet, and our schools and hospitals may be in their worst state ever since independence, but not to worry, all will be miraculously fixed in this year of “divine promotion”.
Daddy G.O. has also weighed in with the usual inanities, delivered with his trademark solemnity – though this year’s offering seems decidedly tame compared with previous years. For instance: “Some will obtain help from unexpected sources.” I guess nobody did in 2015. Another one: “For many, the pendulum of life will generally be on the upward swing”. Waoh! And now for the winner of the crown for the most ludicrous prophesy of all: “Natural disasters, floods, fires, earthquakes are likely to get progressively worse, until governments realize that these are part of Divine judgements against those who pass ungodly laws”. Translation: God will punish the rest of us for the misdemeanors of leaders who are unaccountable to us, and whose ascension to power God Himself previously sanctioned.
If the prophecies of the prophet-eering class are not worth the paper on which they are printed, why then are Nigerians unable to wean themselves off, and instead look forward to every New Year’s offering with palpable anticipation? Put differently, why would people continue to yearn for a product whose track record is consistently abysmal? To penetrate this collective psychology, we’d have to properly understand the reasons for the emergence and continued flourishing of all manner of peddlers of irrationality (a gamut that runs from TB Joshua, through Father Kukah, to Daddy G.O.) and why the public space in Nigeria is now literally overrun with their kind.
To be sure: The wish to know today what may happen tomorrow is a legitimate human desire, constant across human history. The difference is that, in our country today, prophet-eers have hijacked the role now commonly assigned to secular institutions in societies which have successfully cast off the chains of religious superstition. A key factor in this is the acknowledged decline of our tertiary institutions and think tanks as authentic producers of knowledge about the Nigerian society. Hence, for the most part, the senior apostle has stepped into the breach vacated by the senior economist.
He may possess none of the latter’s training or ability to interpret data, and his grasp of reality is often suspect, but the apostle boasts nonetheless of direct access to divine revelation.
In its deepest sense, prophet-eering is a mode of civic pacification. It fosters the dangerous illusion that men are not makers of their own destiny, that human action has no consequence, and that there is some superordinate being somewhere who will somehow make things right even as we go about daily, busily frittering away our future and the future of our children.
Ebenezer Obadare is associate professor of sociology at the University of Kansas.
The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of Naij.com.
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