I project that both Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and Dr. Kayode Fayemi would be re-elected for their second term in office as governors of their states of Osun and Ekiti respectively in the governorship elections taking place this year. And the projection is not based on some “pulpit vision” but on evidence of the spate and pace of development they have brought to their respective states.
Mind you I say projections, not predictions. Prediction is what the herd of religious pastors, especially of the Pentecostal hue, do in Nigeria particularly at this time of ushering a new year in. I have never stopped to be baffled by it all, those hoodwinking balderdash they call predictions. And I’m more angrily perplexed at those (and they are in the millions) who lend their ears, let alone of hearts, to them.
I don’t believe in any of them, indeed I don’t even bother to read or listen to them, both the message and the messenger. It’s nothing more than a half-clever juggling of probabilities, no more than the pool gambling permutations. Perm any two from five, or any three from ten! The only difference is that whereas in pool game you lose your money if you don’t make the minimum number permed, these Godforsaken so-and-so don’t lose anything, not money not face, by not making any number. Their blinded followers ensure that. If just one mere item comes close enough to the periphery of the prediction, they jump to the rooftop to proclaim the “holiness” of their religious leader using this one close-enough case as proof-positive.
An example: Say one of them pastors or marabouts “predicts” that President Jonathan would have a close shave with death soon (mind you, soon could be any time between now and 2015), and on one fine morning that wasn’t that fine for Jonathan, he walks into one of the many glass doors of the Villa while infused with the thought of how to deal with Governor Amaechi. Poor Jonathan has to be given some APC (don’t be silly, no puns) medicine to clear his head, and the rumour goes out about the president missing his first appointment of the day due to a “domestic accident”: “Yeah, told you,” the multitude would deafen our ears, “Told you so, didn’t he?” they would say of their “prophet”, “he’s a man-of-God. He predicted it.”
Not much different from the whole thing about religion in the first place, if you ask me. It comes with a lot of rationalising of followers’ circumstance and excusing of their deity in tacky moments. If things work out well, as they sometimes will, then it is the prayers to the deity that have been answered. If things don’t work out well, indeed if disaster or calamity visits, as they randomly will, then it’s not that less premium should be placed on prayers or that the deity has long left the world alone, it is that God has other mysterious plans that will work for the better! If “better” comes, “told you,” if it doesn’t, then the “better” must be waiting in heaven!
And so we have a country, which by popular reckoning is the most ostentatiously religious and religion-investing country (with churches and mosques dotting every nook and cranny) yet being the most ungodly country on earth,wallowing in filth, crime and corruption of the most wanton kind and dropping it all – the problems and their salvation – on the laps of some benevolent made-in-Nigeria God that has no other job than figuring out how to hold Nigeria together and how to catapult her into a developed nation by divine miracle!
Talking about the Nigerian condition. Not someone to quote at the start of the New Year but Iyabo Obasanjo has captured the Nigerian malady in the most succinct way:
“Nigeria has descended into a hellish reality where smart, capable people to “survive” and have their daily bread prostrate to imbeciles. Everybody trying to pull everybody else down with greed and selfishness — the only trait that gets you anywhere. Money must be had and money and power is king. Even the supposed down-trodden agree with this.”
It is only in Nigeria that bad leadership is tolerated by the masses and excused as “God’s work”, and so, rather than resolve to send a bad leader packing, they allow their temper to be soothed with the refrain that it is God’s work. God, they say,must have a reason for letting some incompetent rogue become their leader; only God decides who and who would become governor, president or king.
Right now, as we start 2014, our made-in-Nigeria God is back on the throne and would make us forget many things. We will forget about the pension scams and the billions that were stolen as the culprits lie low, keep giving offerings to pastors and imams and praising God or Allah. We will forget about the missing or unreconciled oil revenue billions of dollars, whittled down from Sanusi’s earlier claim of about $50b to Okonjo-Iweala’s $10billion; just as we have forgotten about Halliburton, Siemens, and all the others before Jonathan and during Jonathan.
But I leave such “random talks” to make my projections for 2014. Call it mere wishes or informed deductions, but here they are:
I project that both Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and Dr. Kayode Fayemi would be re-elected for their second term in office as governors of their states of Osun and Ekiti respectively in the governorship elections taking place this year. And the projection is not based on some “pulpit vision” but on evidence of the spate and pace of development they have brought to their respective states.
It is no exaggeration to say the quality and scope of development being witnessed in these states, as is also evident in the states of Lagos, Ogun and Oyo, have not been seen since the time of Awolowo in the Western Region of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, one can discern something akin to competition, albeit positive one, amongst these states. And it is cheerful news.
I project that President Jonathan will delay till the third quarter of the year before formally declaring his position on next year’s general election. I also project that he will choose to be the first president not to run a second term over being the first president to run and suffer electoral defeat. I project that this position of Jonathan’s will create as much pleasure as displeasure, and as much rest as unrest within the polity.
I project that the PDP will continue in its spiralling disintegration, but also that the APC will need more than “APC” to resolve the headache and contradictions from the runaway invasion of its fold.
I project that 2014 will be interesting and eventful for the country. Happy New Year folk.
Condolences
My heart goes to those who entered the New Year with the grief of bereavement of their loved ones.
Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka lost his daughter, Iyetade, a medical doctor aged 48, to the cold hands of death through illness just as 2013 drew to a close. The world is a mystery, but no greater misery a parent feels than the loss of a child. May our own WS be comforted by his supreme philosophy of life and the joy of those others living.
And I lost a friend, the amiable advertising guru, Sesan Ogunro. His death is crueller by the nature. Sesan was yet another victim of Nigeria’s mad state of insecurity. He was gunned down in Lagos by armed robbers on Sunday, December 22, right before his wife, children and grandchildren after a special Christmas service programme they attended.
Sesan is father of popular video director, Sesan Ogunro Jr. who also incidentally is friend and business associate of my son, Luti, a video and film producer in the UK.
My family mourns with the Ogunros on this devastating loss of their beloved. What a mess of a country.
