By Promise Adiele PhD
Nigeria’s undisputed political sensation and Labour Party’s presidential aspirant in the 2023 elections Mr. Peter Obi continues to bestride the country’s political firmament like the Shakespearean Colossus. His unrelenting consistency in challenging Nigeria’s hegemonic status quo, urging the people to believe in attaining a new country, resonates beyond terrestrial frontiers. Somehow, millions of Nigerians, his supporters and detractors alike, unconsciously recognize something fundamentally legitimate about him. That explains why his utterances, gestures, and opinions prod everyone’s emotions, attracting varied interpretations. Nigerians cannot ignore him – bloggers, media houses, paid social media hustlers, and all categories of people depend on his daily engagements for traffic to their media handles.
Peter Obi is not the president of Nigeria, governor, minister, or Director General of any parastatal, yet, his views elicit responses and concerns across the country. He recently stirred the hornet’s nest by drawing a parallel between nights spent in churches for vigil and nights spent in factories for work and productivity. The reactions came in a deluge. Some misguided fellows inevitably misinterpreted his statement to the extent of saying he was attacking the church. Indeed, “religion is the opium of the people,” says Karl Marx.
In its original foundation, the church incubates the tenets of genuine Christian life and the bible provides the immediate compass to locate Christ-like attributes. Unfortunately, aspects of the church have ingloriously transmuted into unrecognizable outposts where people ventilate their perverted ideologies and pursue inordinate intentions. The greatest number of unbelievers are in churches, especially in Nigeria. You see them in every church, people who do not understand the nature of Christ or are not even born again. But they ascribe holiness to themselves by speaking in tongues, calling prayer points, and presenting a façade of sanctimony that continually offends heaven.
The conspirators, betrayers, innately wicked people, and harbingers of iniquity inadvertently disquiet spiritual tranquillity from their moral delirium through the church. Dark-hearted, desperately wicked fellows find in the church a cover, a hiding place to conceal their obnoxious identities. Show me one hundred people in Nigeria who claim to be born again and I will pick out two honest, dedicated children of God. The rest are Satan incarnates masquerading as born-again Christians. We have them all around us, within the family and at the workplace.
Many churches in Nigeria practice what I call ‘legitimizing witchcraft’, that is practising witchcraft under the cover of the law by manipulating the fragile, unstable mentality of members. The presiding pastors take advantage of the people’s desperation for good fortune and subject them to horrible, unimaginable practices that have no trace or parallel in the holy book. It is all geared towards enriching the pastor who lives in overflowing affluence and extensive ostentation while the worshippers crouch in multiple agonizing shapes and sizes. Therefore, the spiritually myopic and ignorant followers see the pastor as the mouthpiece of God who must be obeyed even in the face of glaring misdirection and stupidity.
Some of these pastors recreate God in their human image, thus demonstrating an embarrassing lack of knowledge of the Godhead. In their short-sightedness, they assume that God is a man and therefore ascribe him with all the mundane characteristics of humanity. It is laughable sometimes to see many preachers profess and wallow in confounding ignorance from the depths of their scrabbled spiritual beliefs without convictions. So, the people become irresponsible by outsourcing their responsibilities to God believing that God will ultimately succumb to their blackmail by pandering to their whims and caprices while undermining His divine ordinance. Indeed, many so-called Christians are jokers and do not understand the ways of God at all. The Holy Book forewarns us in Isaiah 55, 8 – our ways are not the ways of God.
So what you find in Christendom is a manipulated procession where some business merchants posturing as servants of God design different schemes to undermine hard work as preached by the holy book. They promote a get-rich-quick syndrome which is what the current generation is interested to know. Such schemes include night vigils, prayer sessions, and various religious programs in the church that only promote the kingdom of perdition. Let us get this clear, I am a Christian and I believe absolutely in the teachings of Jesus Christ. I believe in miracles because I have experienced them in my life. I know genuine men of God too. I have met some of them.
I pray. I fast. I have an established, inviolable relationship with God. But does that make me stupid? No! I know what the bible says and therefore cannot be deceived. I have attended night vigils and experienced first-hand the miracle-working power of God. So, please do not get it twisted. The Christian merchants organize different church programs and night vigils that are subtly motivated by devious, mercantile considerations. Therefore, people become lazy and unproductive while waiting for God to drop manna from heaven. No country makes progress with such an attitude. This is exactly the point Peter Obi was making.
In many developed countries of the world, they recognize the existence of God, many of them through cosmotheism. They do not subscribe to religion and all its vanishing illusions as we do in this part of the world. Religion and its various practices especially the Christian religion have turned many people into lazy, indolent fellows who anticipate miracles from heaven without the corresponding, laid-down principles that guarantee its enduring sustenance. No country makes progress by embracing such vacuous, inchoate spiritual ideology. No GDP of any country grows through the establishment and inauguration of spiritual industries. This is exactly the point Peter Obi, in his natural epiphany, was making. But sadly, children of damnation, victims of intuitive elemental collapse, who must jump into the fray without proper cognition of the subject, saw in it the opportunity to excoriate Peter Obi and threaten not to vote for him in 2027. Nothing could be more reciprocally disingenuous and self-destructive.
The threat not to vote for Peter Obi in 2027 emanates from a fractured mental process, those who are unable to come to terms with Nigeria’s socio-economic dislocations orchestrated by the current APC government. I have argued in another essay that discussing 2027 when Nigerians are suffocating under the present macabre economic dance is irresponsible behaviour. It shows an abysmal deficit of eschatological orientation. Nigerians must survive first before talking about 2027. Nobody’s life is guaranteed tomorrow. No one knows who will be alive in 2027 to contest an election. Therefore, we must concentrate on today and deal with the issues that ail us which is primarily the parade of Nigerians to Golgotha for ultimate crucifixion by the current government.
Today, biblical interpretations emanating from different pulpits across the country sketch within the parameters of abstract thought while jettisoning Christ’s true, honest doctrines. These sermons show a level of discourtesy to the Godhead and Holy Trinity, ultimately leading people astray. The dilemma of some preachers is how to retain their messianic posturing and the commitment of their followers (customers if you like). Recognizing their spiritual estrangement, these ‘men of God’ prophelie to remain relevant through a careful analysis of social developments. A renowned prophet recently prophelied that Kamala Harris would win the US presidential election by a landslide. It was an emphatic statement. The opposite happened. Donald Trump won. Yet, the ‘man of God’ will surely have worshippers turn up in his church every day. For some fellows, the church is an avenue to mislead and deceive naïve people who, out of a desperate need for miracles, fall for multiple schemes, some of them machinating and ridiculous.
While Nigerians pray and look up to heaven for divine intervention, such prayers and other allied religious activities should never blind us to becoming irresponsible, abnegating our duties as mortals. The very offensive effusions as biblical interpretations from some preachers should call for concerns. Many of these people mislead millions with their warped, diluted interpretation of the holy book which reveals their ignorant and boorish appreciation of heavenly tenets. The curses and vile statements directed at Peter Obi for his remarks from supposed Christians underscore the position of those who claim to know God more than the Pope.
We all agree Nigeria needs urgent revival but that revival cannot be achieved through irresponsible devotion to the spiritual highway while our immediate obligations as citizens are abandoned. Prayer has its place in our lives but we also have duties as Christians to redefine and redirect our mind-sets to success. God will never descend from heaven to take up our responsibilities. In different parts of Nigeria, Churches are everywhere, yet evil is littered all over the country. Let prayers not take the place of productivity, responsibility, and hard work. It is along the lines of these musings that Peter Obi’s remarks about churches and night vigils must be understood.
Promise Adiele PhD is of Mountain Top University and can be reached through promee01@yahoo.com, X: @drpee4