Prophecy or hallucination? Nigerian clerics who wanted to be president

…Has God stopped speaking to them?

For some years now, some Nigerian pastors have been all over the media space over their interest in becoming the president of Nigeria.

While there seems to be nothing wrong in any individual- ‘pastor or not’- vying for the highest office in the country, the manner in which some clerics have gone about their ambition has attracted more criticism than applause.

In the last two decades, a number of pastors have campaigned with the claim of receiving clear revelation of divine call on them to become the president of Nigeria. From their pulpits and at press conferences, they had claimed that had been divinely selected to succeed this and that president.

These prophecies or semblance of it have only brought opprobrium to those who made the claim, most times, questioning their spiritual maturity.

Some analysts believe that these clerics have been able to get away with the claims on the back of worshippers being gullible in accepting and believing everything thrown at them in the name of “God has said.”

“I didn’t want to be too sharp with them because Nigerians are gullible and don’t like to hear the truth that many of those pastors are charlatans. If God has truly said it, it would have been,” Olufemi Popoola, told BusinessDay SUNDAY.

Over the years, two names have been very vivid in the Nigerian political space. Chris Okotie and Tunde Bakare, two pastors well known for their interest in wanting to be Nigeria’s president and have both claimed to receive revelations in this regard.

For instance, Chris Okotie, founder, Household of God, in a 2022 interview maintained that he was not done with contesting the presidential election. This was after contesting severally under different political parties, without achieving his political goal.

In 2002 ahead of the 2003 general election, Okotie had announced to the whole world that he received a divine mandate that he was going to be elected president in 2003.

Okotie contested under the Justice Party (JP) and Fresh Democratic Party (FDP), which he founded between 2011 and 2019, but maintained that he would not join any of the major political parties (APC/PDP) because he did not want to be part of the problem he intended to solve.

Tunde Bakere, founder of the Citadel Global Community Church, told his congregation that God told him expressly that he was to be Nigeria’s next president after Muhammadu Buhari.

Bakare made the claim in 2018 that God instructed him to run for president.

The cleric, who is also convener of the Save Nigeria Group, SNG, told members of his Church: “In my study around 4 a.m. on Sunday morning, God told me ‘You cannot bring your political career to a close; there is still more to do. Run for the presidency. I will do it at the appointed time.”

While he explained that the revelation might prove difficult to actualise, he insisted that he was unfazed by the challenge, because once God has spoken, it was left for God to make it come to pass.

He said: “Joseph (in the Bible) did not contest an election; yet, he became the Prime Minister of Egypt. Why must I worry myself about where to get the resources for the task? Your own duty in this assignment is to pray along with me. When it is the appointed time, He (God) will do it. When He tells me the time, you will hear about it.”

He was the running mate to the late president Muhammadu Buhari on the platform of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), in the 2011.

In the run up for the 2023 general election, he said, “God told me to run for president” and that it was ordained he would be Nigeria’s 16th president. He later took part in the APC primary in 2022, losing Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Similarly, one Olasupo Akinola, a 40-year-old Ibadan-based Islamic cleric also claimed that God sent him to solve Nigeria’s problems by becoming president. He declared his intention to run for the 2023 presidency, stating that God vividly told him to contest for the presidency in 2023.

Reacting to the claim of “God said” by ambitious clerics, Charles Ighele, general superintendent, Holy Spirit Mission (The Happy Family Nation), said: “There are men of God who hear from God before coming out to pursue their presidential ambitions and there are men of God who pursue presidential ambitions because they felt fully convinced to do so.”

According to him, some of the clerics see the level of unrighteousness and suffering in the land as a motivating factor to vie for political office having been strongly persuaded by the suffering of the people to go for the office of the president so that they can get the nation fixed.

“My thinking is that some of those men of God who said that God told them to go and contest for the presidency did so not because God told them to contest but because they interpreted the pain they feel for their fellow citizens to mean that God is speaking to them,” Ighele said.

According to him, the boundary between God speaking to the heart of a man and the heart of a man being made to feel the pain of fellow citizens can be very narrow to the extent that one may think that God is speaking.

Joseph Ojo, archbishop and national president of the United International Association of Pentecostal Bishops (UNIAPEB Global) College, said God sometimes speaks to people in different ways.

“I was not there when God spoke to them. You know, all of us are in a big family. At times, a father talks to children differently. When Joseph is not at home, he will be talking to Andrew. So, if someone say, daddy told me this, I won’t doubt because I was not there. So, it depends on what God told them,” Ojo said.

According to him, people could misunderstand the messaging being given or the appropriate timing of the message.

“At times, God may have spoken, but not at that appropriate time. They may misunderstand what the Lord said to them. They are all good people, but the truth of the matter is only they can really say whether God spoke to them or not.”

Ojo added that there was nothing wrong in a Christian or Church leader participating in politics. According to him, having people of faith in partisan politics may indirectly lean towards biblical teachings.

“The Bible even said about Jesus, the government shall be upon his shoulders. So, that means the responsibility of the governance of this country should rest on the shoulders of the people that know God. Not the people that don’t know God. The people that don’t know God, the burden will be heavy,” Ojo said.

Emmanuel Udofia, former primate, African Church, said that sometimes, people often do not understand the timing of revelation, which makes them appear to be misrepresenting the revelation.

According to him, anybody that claims to receive a revelation from God might be right in their own story.

“It may be a revelation of something in the future. What I think some people don’t do well is that they receive a revelation, and don’t know whether the revelation is for that particular time or a specific time,” Udofia said.

According to Udofia, the individual who claims to receive from God must make the revelation relevant by understanding the purpose and timing. He added that not understanding the timing could make the revelation seem wrong.

“Because if someone says he received from the Lord, then God wants to speak on this. He should know the timing. We shouldn’t say, I think God did not tell him, or God did not reveal it to him; because if he does not know the timing, then definitely it will go wrong,” Udofia said.