More than twenty years ago I not only ‘predicted’ that evangelical churches would become a locust-like pestilence and blight on Nigeria’s (and Africa’s) landscape, I also ‘prophesied’ that such a profusion of churches and cognate religious entities would set the country (and continent) back by hundreds of years. Nigeria and Africa are living down both ‘predictions’ today. By the way, the first was neither a prediction nor the other a prophecy, both were mere deductive guesswork - and a little knowledge of the laws of probability had also helped.
At the time I was doing this secular soothsaying, a churchman called Primate Olabayo was also flourishing in Nigeria, doing pretty much the same thing that I did, foretelling things, although now in a religious-industrial scale and with a cocksureness that religious leaders often evince. Years after he had become a big-time forecaster of events, the man ‘predicted’ the victory of George Bush the second in the American presidential election, something that a lot of intelligent political analysts and observers were also able to see. And though I think I read somewhere that Olabayo foretold the death of a sickly Yar Adua a couple of years ago, he seems to have yielded the pre-eminent position of ‘Abrahamic Oracle’ to another man.
Pastor TB Joshua, founder of Synagogue Church in Nigeria. Before now I had shown little or no interest in the man because I thought he was as much a smartass showman as any Nigerian pastor or primate (what juxtaposition! Fancy this as a title of a book, Of Pastors and Primates). But I was well aware that TB Joshua had stature, religious stature. For some reason, people believe he can heal the sick, resuscitate any limp limb, make the blind see, even cure cancer and AIDS. Since no conclusive proof has ever been provided for these deeds, I refuse to believe that the guy is doing anything more than sheer monkey business and hokey-pokey, I believe he is only carrying out elaborate eyewash rather than miraculously restoring sight to the blind.
I was also well aware of the altercation that Joshua had with other Nigerian pastors a few years ago, something which recalls the territorial skirmishes between ostensibly mojoed masqueraders when I was a boy growing up in semi-rural Nigeria, an ego-fed tussle for shamanic superiority.
I also recall how the incumbent Ghanaian president Professor Atta Mills came to pay obeisance to TB Joshua because the Synagogue man foreordained his winning of the Ghanaian presidential election. I was ever so slightly surprised when I read this because I thought someone whose name had the tag ‘professor' should know better than coming round from his country to anoint the foot of a man who predicted he would be king. I wonder whether the pastor, who has variously been accused of sorcery, was able to foresee any Macbethal sting in the tail of the Ghanaian presidential good tidings.
In the grip of immodest self-aggrandisement, an attitude which is not alien to top churchmen and women, TB Joshua posted on Youtube the prediction he made of the death of the 78 year old Malawian president. Although the pastor did not explicitly say Mr Mutharika was going to die, in his trademark oracular style, he said something about an African president dying, an African president who was not from West Africa. So when the Malawian president died, it was bull’s-eye for TB Joshua. And there was the chorus of hosanna: ‘oh, the man has done it again, he predicted the death of someone.’
The supporters of the late president were no less believing than others that Joshua foresaw the death of their leader, they even accused him of casting a spell on the late president and machinating his death, so that the vice-president, Joyce Banda, who attends his church would be president. Mr William Shakespeare, where art thou?
Anyway, as a consequence of this vicarious death-wish waffle, Morgan Tsangerai, the now irrelevant Zimbabwean prime minister, invited Joshua to Zimbabwe’s Day of National Prayer. Although I am no longer surprised to see or hear anything Africa throws up in the way of religion and mumbo-jumbo in general, I was nevertheless stumped that a country so battered like Zimbabwe still had the time to orchestrate a day national of prayers. But then what else would a sub-Saharan African country in straitened circumstances do if not organise such a brainless barbarism as a day of prayer and fasting, and then invite a celebrated, wonder-working African pastor who makes pythonic utterances?
As in Malawi, there is some controversy in Zimbabwe. A group of Zimbabwean church leaders declared a few days ago that they do not want to see TB Joshua in Zimbabwe’s National Prayer Arena. Why? Because, according to the churchfolk, Joshua’s teachings are ‘judgemental and unorthodox,’ and they also asked how the ‘prediction of the death of Michael Jackson helped the children of God?’
If you believed that there was anything like ‘children of God,’ you would give some credit to the Zimbabwean pastors’ objections. But then one of them had also said, ‘God is particularly not interested in the outcomes of football matches,’ which Joshua often also predicts. If God is not interested in the outcome of football matches, one wonders why footballers waste their time praying to him before they start running after and kicking the ball, and why the same God had saved the life of a footballer (a la Patrice Muamba)!
And the Zimbabwe’s pastors had also unconsciously used the argumentative pitfall of ‘selective reasoning’ to destroy the theory of an omniscient and omnipotent God who is interested in everything. Because if God does not want to know anything about football matches, he would not - a fortiori - be interested in Zimbabwe, because there is no proof that the space called Zimbabwe is of any significance than any square of turf where football is played. Anyway, this is no time or place for theologising - or logic-chopping.
Although they know what my answer will be, people have asked me whether I believe TB Joshua is a true faith-healer or a real soothsayer. Now while I am not directly privy to Joshua’s bag of tricks, I can say with some certainty that what the man does is no holier than what the British magician, illusionist, mentalist, sceptic and atheist, Derren Brown, does on TV, the only difference is that TB Joshua makes a religious circus out of his own show. Brown takes his time to tell viewers that what he does is nothing but trickery, mental juggling, entertainment and deception. In his 2005 show, Messiah, he seeks to out-Jesus Jesus in the act of faith-healing and miracle-working.
While unbelieving Derren Brown is doing everything for show and money, TB Joshua - doing pretty much the same thing - is being lionised in Africa. Even messianised - the new Jesus of Africa - after all, Jesus’s putative original name was Joshua (Yeshua or Yehoshua). Just as I don’t see any need for any high day of prayer in any country, less so in technology-starved African countries, I do not see how TB Joshua is relevant to the continent’s wellbeing and development.
Let us hypothesise and say Joshua’s miracles and predictions are genuine. But what has that got to do with anything? And if he goes to Zimbabwe’s prayer-fest, is he going to openly pray for the demise of Robert Mugabe, the Hitler-moustached geriatric who has trashed his country over the last 30 years? If he does that and Mugabe drops dead the next day like a kind of suddenly-stricken Herod, then I may give TB Joshua a smidgen of the benefit of the doubt.
But no, I won’t. Mugabe, like every animate being, can die at any time, any day or any hour. As a matter of fact, I have always argued that it is proof that there is no such thing as a fair god if the bespectacled old crock that is Mugabe still waddles around, dye-headed, while holding his people in the state of serfhood.
Adebowale, I can only wish I could write as well as you do.
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