Prophets of truth or falsehood
From the outrageous to the plainly ridiculous, the sensational to the unimaginable, supposed Nigerian men of God predict on everything from politics to football, traditional rulers and pop idols, the economy and plane crashes. Most times they get it dead wrong, which makes Daily Sun wonder whether most of them are prophets of truth or falsehood. MIKE JIMOH reports…
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Prophet T.B. Joshua (right)

“The wisdom of the native doctor,” Chinua Achebe once wrote, “lies in his tattered cap.” What the inimitable Nigerian novelist means is that the weightiness of their pronouncement should be taken as seriously as the scruffiness of the caps covering their heads.

Almost always looking squeaky-clean in designer shirts, jackets and nifty shoes straight from expensive boutiques, nobody expects those who call themselves men of God in Nigeria – Christians, that is – to cover it all up with the grimy and stinking caps dibias sometimes wear. However, their utterances are sometimes off target as those by local fortune tellers, palm readers or stargazers in your neighbourhood.

For ages, men and women have sought to know what is to come in all societies, to see what is in store for them and how to avert possible danger. Denied God’s favour, Saul, the first Israelite king, went to the witch of Endor to rouse up Prophet Samuel from the dead.
Dozens of prophets in the Old and New Testament have delivered their messages – sweet or bitter – to anxious and apprehensive Israelites waiting for direction from God on the smallest domestic issues to the biggest belligerent causes. From Isaiah to Jeremiah and Elijah and Nathan, these prophets had something to say about the Israelites or their kings, and most of what they predicted came to pass.

Though not a Hebraic prophet, Michel de Nostredame, the famous French seer known to the world as Nostradamus, was a sixteenth century physician and astrologer. From quite an early age, Nostradamus made predictions about people and events long before they happened. Even predictions that were dead right only hours after he made them.

Once, the astrologer was staying with Florinville, a French aristocrat when his host asked to know which of two pigs – black and white – would be roasted and consumed for dinner. “The black pig,” Nostradamus said, adding that “the white one would be consumed by a wolf.”

Unconvinced and aiming to prove Nostradamus wrong later, Florinville secretly instructed his cook to slaughter and prepare the white pig. The cook obeyed but left on an errand almost immediately while the white pig was on the spit. By time he returned, the lord’s pet wolf had consumed the roasted white pig. Afraid to incur his master’s wrath, the cook secretly killed and prepared the black pig – just as Nostradamus had foretold hours earlier.

Pursued by the Inquisition from his native France, Nostradamus fled to Italy. The astrologer was walking one day near the Italian town of Ancona when he saw a group of Franciscan monks passing. Quickly, Nostradmus knelt in the mud before one of them, Brother Felice Peretti, saying “I must kneel before his Holiness.”

The friars were understandably amused at Nostradamus’s unusual deference to a man of peasant stock – for Peretti was a swine herd before he joined the monks. But 40 years later, Brother Peretti became Pope Sixtus V.

Centuries before they came to power in Europe, Nostradamus had faithfully foretold the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Nostradamus did not even spare himself. Before he died in 1566, he instructed that the year 1611 be inscribed on a plaque and left on his coffin. His body was exhumed in that year precisely, sort of reconfirming his abilities even from the grave.

For his accuracy in predicting events that happened hundreds of years after he made them, Nostradamus rightly earned the enviable soubriquet of the man who saw tomorrow.

So, that brings us to the supposed men of God in Nigeria who claim to see into the future. Are they just plain publicity freaks or do they really have messages from beyond proclaiming joyful tidings or warning us of imminent danger? Are they often right in their predictions? Can they even see beyond their noses?
Not by any chance, considering the overwhelming number of failed predictions by both the more established preachers and obscure ones.

Sometime in 2004, a round-faced character sporting dread locks literally swept into a newsroom in Lagos angling for an interview. Wearing a colourful robe, complete with a turban and smelling of incense from a mile off, he presented a picture of a cruder version of an oriental mystic. What did he have to say? He had predictions to make for the following year.

Number 1 prediction. “Adams Oshiomhole should beware of a parcel bomb,” he gleefully told a reporter. He went on to make a few more predictions about the country itself, the presidency and just about any issue that was in the news at the time. In most of them, he was wrong to his marrow.

If he’d predicted that Oshiomhole would one day be governor of a state anywhere in Nigeria, our man would have been right on the beam. But by then, Oshiomhole, an implacable labour leader, was a perennial thorn in the flesh of the government of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo over the removal or otherwise of petroleum subsidies. Needless to say that the voluble labour leader-turned-governor has not received any lethal letter till date. Instead, he is the one handing out appointment or sack letters to workers at the Government House in Benin.

Chief Obasanjo himself has been the subject of much prediction by pastors of worth. A very round and colourful character who has never failed to appear in their crystal balls, a prophet – at least so he called himself – boldly declared to a bewildered nation that the erstwhile president of Nigeria will remain in Aso Villa past his second tenure in May 2007. At the time Apostle BC Esiri of the Soldiers of Christ Ministries in Benin told a Champion reporter that in April 2007, there were fears that OBJ may prolong his tenure. But of course the Ota farmer duly handed over to his successor.

For whatever reason, governors and other politicians are always in the sight lines of clairvoyants but never farmers or some such lowly artisan. For instance, how many of the so-called men of God have had a word or two of prophecy about a vendor or the proprietress of a roadside buka?
Still from the Champion, Prophet Adedayo Samuel, described by a reporter as “a seer in the mould of Biblical Samuel,” burbled forth with a revelation in 2008 that no fewer “than six sitting governors and four past governors would kiss the canvas in 2008.”

For prophetic accuracy, Adedayo is one Samuel who seems not to be living up to his name. Unless, as many Nigerians can vouchsafe, the sitting governors died and were buried in secret, not one of them bit the dust, or “kissed the canvas,” as Adedayo so confidently boasted to the reporter. And of past governors, only one – CC Onoh of old Anambra state– and not the four he predicted actually died.
Outrageous and wide off the mark as their predictions turn out, they never seem to let up. From the youngest to the oldest, there is always something to say – a bad news or a good one – much like Cassandra reeling out prophecies to Greek citizens as a priestess in the oracle of Delphi. Unlike Cassandra however, prophecies by most supposed men of God in Nigeria fall short of their mark.

Hear this from Prophet Samuel Olawale Kogberegbe, a 91-year-old prophet of The Holy Michael Church of the Lord, Aladura, Cherubim and Seraphim, Ori Oke, Olorun Esan, Isolo, Lagos. In an interview published in October this year, the senile seer proclaimed that Nigerian politicians plotting evil for the coming election in 2011 will end up as psychiatric patients.

“Many politicians plotting to secure various positions in 2011 are only labouring in vain as some of them will drop dead or get afflicted with mysterious sicknesses that will land them in psychiatric homes,” the nonagenarian man of God assured a Spectator reporter.

To make his predictions weighty enough, he let it be known that he’d actually just finished “a 40-day fasting and prayer, and during this spiritual retreat God gave me several messages to the nation.”
An obvious question that begs an answer is why have Nigerian politicians – chronically corrupt and notorious for electoral fraud – escaped punishment all these years? Not stopping there, the granddaddy of Nigerian prophets also let slip what the journalist called a shocker. Governor Babatunde Fashola, he insisted, “will refuse to go for a second term. The man has made up his mind not to seek re-election.”
As prophecies go, the first about politicians going insane will be a hard sell by 2011.

If the seer’s aim is to frighten already hard-eyed politicos with a working motto of the end justify the means, then it just won’t work. As for Fashola’s disinclination to run a second time, only time will prove the seer wrong or right.

But one of the prophecies by another seer has been stood on its head. Shortly before Nigeria played the last 2010 World Cup qualifier with Kenya, a man of God, Pastor Timothy Ibe, actually dusted his Ouija board in a pre-match consultation. What did he see? Calamity! Nigeria, he told those who cared to listen, will NOT make the world cup in South Africa.

Published in City People before the final encounter in Kenya, Ibe’s prediction literally tore apart the football federation of Nigeria and relevant bodies. There was the “I told you so” camp (anti-Amodu Shaibu) and those who agreed “to give him a chance.” In the end, we know who won.

Others have been so brazenly wrong in their permutations, about prominent politicians, national and international elections and politics. In April 2007, a self-proclaimed man of God and General Overseer of the Voice of God Prophetic Ministry, Dr. Elijah Agbom, chest-thumped to a Sun journalist in Kaduna that he foresaw and foretold the emergence of Obasanjo as a successor to General Abdusalami Abubakar. To shore up his claim, Prophet Agbom insisted he did so in public – right before Professor Ango Abdulahi, one time Vice Chancellor of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

Eager to prove the accuracy of his prediction once more, he let fly others to the reporter. President Yar’Adua, he declared, will not only turn against Obasanjo but also jail his benefactor. Two years and seven months down the line, the former president is drinking water and putting the cup down in his farmhouse in Ota, as the Yorubas say.

Also, Prophet Agbom, like an Ifa priest whose opele has never failed him, declared that a woman will emerge the next president of America. That was before the Democratic primaries which saw Barack Obama trouncing Hillary Clinton. Two years after, Nigerians know who is right.

Prophet Agbom’s record of failed predictions is perhaps matched by those of Pastor Tunde Bakare of Latter Rain Assembly and Prophet TB Joshua of The Synagogue Church of All Nations.
Eloquent though he is and almost always concerned with issues of governance, Bakare gets off target too as far as his predictions are concerned. He fired the first salvo on March 7, 1999, insisting that newly elected General Obasanjo might not be sworn in on May 29 of that year. What was his reason?
Through a vision, he claimed to have “eavesdropped on the conversations going on in the heavens, I saw Jesus on the throne, called the seat of Governor and the subject they were discussing was Nigeria.” As he later told worshippers at the Ogba headquarters of his LRA, “Obasanjo is not your messiah. He is King Agag and the prophetic axe will fall upon his head before May 29.”

Ten years after his famous prediction, Nigerians can tell almost to the last man where the prophetic axe has descended. Also, Nigerians can tell how many of the predictions of the erudite and ascetic looking pastor have come to pass.

Never short of an audience anxious to give the obligatory applause in the capacious Synagogue Church, Ikotun, Joshua is one man whose prophecies are as random as the church programmes. For many of the Sunday worshippers, it is something close to a prophecy for every sermon.

At times randomly pointing at worshippers to stand up for deliverance from peculiar ailments, Joshua is known for tracking the trajectory of prominent people and nations. He has a clutch of presidents and Prime ministers under his care. Not to mention his predictions about countries, the most recent being that of Ghana.

Before the 2009 Under 21 World Cup in Egypt, nobody had any knowledge of Joshua’s prediction that Ghana would win, at least not on a national scale. But once Ghana won the cup, Nigerians started seeing more of the pastor on television telling them how he foretold Ghana’s victory before the finals between Ghana and Brazil.

As it is, most predictions are made by Pentecostal church leaders and not the orthodox denominations which seem to be more prudent with their utterances on the future of nations or individuals. Even so, prophecies will remain a part of man’s existence – whether for good or ill. For as Bakare himself put it, “prophecy is like a guided missile. If you repent, God will relent.” By the same token, Nigerians will want to know from the man of God what’s in store for those who make predictions that never come true.