By Jude Atupulazi
They live in a one room shanty containing nine of them, viz: father, mother and seven children. There is scant ventilation in the room, such that during the hot period, everybody will be sweating like a Salah goat.
They struggle for space in the room with roaches and rats. How they can close their eyes and actually sleep in such a hell hole can constitute a topic for research. But they not only sleep there, but seem oblivious of their plight.
These are people who ordinarily should have stayed back in the comfort of their villages to pursue a living but because of the need to find greener pasture elsewhere, are forced to go to the township where they live in penury.
The man of the house often does such menial jobs like masonry; carpentry; commercial bus, keke or okada business; and motor park touting. The mother of the house is usually engaged in petty business such as road side food vending, road sweeping or even sachet water selling. Tough life, huh? But these are what husband and wife do to take care of seven children and counting. Such people just keep bringing children into the world without a thought about how they can survive.
Is it a surprise that some of these children eventually drop out from school and become motor park or market touts? (a big menace to their society)
Then, there are the civil servants, most of who go to work in the city from surrounding towns. They are not paid up to forty thousand Naira a month and their transport fare to work and back surpasses their monthly pay at the end of each month. This is not limited to only civil servants though. Those working in private firms, face the same problem.
If they live in the city, they pay rent from their meagre earning, train their kids, settle their medical and electricity bills and generally take care of themselves and everything. Even yours truly is affected. How do they still make it? It can only be God, as we say.
These are all magicians because it is only magicians that can survive in such conditions. But every dire situation gives room to certain developments which some opportunistic people exploit to their advantage. Enter, the emergency pastors, dibias.
Just before I wrote this, I heard about this pastor in Kaduna who told his congregation to pay N310, 000 in order to go to heaven as it is End Time. He recently moved to Ekiti State with his followers. I watched his matter in a clip from Arise TV where he was discussed.
They called on the Kkiti State and Federal Governments to arrest the man before he led his gullible congregation into harm. They recalled a case in America some years back in which a pastor gathered his congregation to a remote place and told them the world was ending and eventually he told them to kill themselves which they all did.
Now, back to our Nigerian pastor in Kaduna. It is clear that he has devised a way to milk money from the ignorant. Imagine if his congregation is up to one hundred and they all pay what he is demanding. The pastor will make a cool thirty one million Naira! And from what we can see, he seems to be convincing a lot of them. A female member of the congregation told how she was asking her daughter abroad to come home and pay and join them.
I really don’t know what these pastors put in their mouths that makes many people to take leave of their senses and willy-nilly do their bidding. Is it that the hardship is too much that people are willing to do anything to survive, despite hearing about the nefarious activities of these pastors? But then, if some people can see the Odumejes of this world as genuine men of God, what, indeed, can’t they believe?
These emergency but fake men of God are also magicians because of the way they confuse, manipulate and control the minds of their followers in an age when we daily hear about the activities of fake pastors.
Just recently, I listened to a radio programme where a pastor who lost his father was reeling out a list of things he wanted to buy for his father’s funeral. He was openly asking listeners to indicate if they would buy cows or tell how much they would contribute. To my amazement, some callers were asking for his bank account!
Really, these fake pastors have succeeded in killing the faith of many people who now see them as God without whom they can do nothing. This also applies to even men of God who run prayer ministries and who pose to people as God himself. They make people believe that their prayers can only be answered if they come to their prayer grounds.
Because of this, as I once wrote earlier, many have abandoned private prayers in chapels or in their homes for praying only at the prayer grounds of these people. But they forget that God is a jealous God who frowns at anyone who claims the glory that belongs solely to God.
They know that many of those coming to their prayer grounds or ministries do so because they believe in them more than they believe in God. That is why in situations where the men of God relocate or are relocated to far off places, those people follow them to those places. Why not tell their followers that they can obtain God’s favours by praying in chapels or in their rooms? They won’t do this because that will mean a depletion in the money they generate and the accompanying adulation. This is too bad! But at least, some of those in this category are not really fake but only unknowingly ascribing God’s Glory to themselves which is dangerous.
For me, I think it is time the government swooped down on all the fake pastors. This nonsense cannot be allowed to continue, as it is doing more harm than good to society. I know cases where these pastors had ”seen visions” of husbands plotting to kill their wives to marry new wives or where mothers-in-law have tied up the wombs of their sons’ wives. Once they reveal these ”visions”, the families involved become scattered.
The only visions they see are visions of bad luck, people plotting to kill others and so on. They usually follow up by charging money to perform certain rituals or sacrifices or just to come and pray in order to exorcise the bad spirits they have seen in their compounds. These are what we call job men. They often use black magic to bury things in the ground which they come and dig up as proof that some bad people had planted the stuff in order to stifle the progress of the family.
One of such pastors was once caught physically burying something in the family house he was about to perform cleansing.
Sadly, it has become very easy to become men of God or even eze nwanyi or dibia these days. If you notice, most of them quickly become rich at the detriment of their gullible followers. No one believes anymore in the power of private prayers but I know that private prayers still work for those who believe in them.
Such prayers work for me. I will tell you this personal testimony that proves it. I fasted and prayed before I took JAMB and followed up by fasting and praying after that. But mind you, I studied very hard before taking the exam and bought up all the past question papers on the subjects I would take in JAMB. I went through them so well that I was sure I would pass any question on the subjects I read.
After taking the exam, I concentrated on saying the Rosary at least three times a day. Then one night while saying the Rosary, I specifically requested God to show me that very night in a dream that I would pass the exam. I also asked that I would not be the only one to have the dream so that it would not be said that I dreamed what I had in mind. I then slept.
That night, I dreamt that the result came out and I went to the school (I had chosen Uniport) to check my result. I saw myself before the notice board where the results were pasted. I checked but could not see my name. Somebody told me if I didn’t see my name it meant I had failed. I told him I could never fail because I had prayed hard enough. Then he directed me to enter one office nearby and make enquiries.
I did. I met one man who asked for my name and I told him. He opened his drawer and after a while, he told me my name was on the list and even in the first batch, but because my surname was long it could not enter. I looked at the list and my name was second to the last. It was so real that when I burst out in celebration, I woke up.
Then in the morning during the ABS 6.30 News, they mentioned something about JAMB. A member of my family who was still in bed called out and told me about the dream she had about where I passed JAMB! Now, isn’t this miraculous? Why did this happen on the morning of the night I had asked for a revelation? From that moment, I started preparing for school, being so sure I had passed.
But the miracle wasn’t ended yet. When I went to Uniport to check my result (in those days you went to check when results came out because that was the only way of knowing if you passed), my name was second to the last as was revealed in the dream. I also saw the small office I dreamt about and entered inside to be sure. Sure enough, the man there asked my name and opened the drawer exactly as in the dream and told me I had made the first batch! My name was also second to the last!
Note: I never went to any crusade or consulted any man of God. I prayed by myself all through! I’m not saying it is wrong to consult pastors or priests for prayers but it’s just that these days there are many fake people who take advantage of others. They charge money and make them go through certain things not right and proper.
All I just want to prove is that one can stay in the comfort of one’s room or in the chapel and pray and God will answer. Imagine if a pastor had told some other person in my situation what I saw in the dream and it came to pass, that pastor would be regarded as God and the victim would be his toy for life, doing all the pastor’s bidding.
Yes, magical things are happening these days but I will only believe in the magic of the real God; not that of some goddamn crook somewhere, masquerading as a man of God. Anya saa!
