President Muhammadu Buhari
Abimbola Adelakun
When the news broke that men of the Department of State Services had supposedly attempted to arrest Prophet Isa El-buba, the General Overseer and President of Ebomi Ministry, my first thought was that the present administration had scored another own goal. Lately, the prophet gave a fiery sermon against President Muhammadu Buhari where he alluded that transcendental forces are arraigned against the President for his many shortcomings. Christians in Nigeria, he urged, need to match the spiritual forces aligned against the President by getting their Permanent Voter Cards and doing the needful at the forthcoming 2019 polls. It was a rather stirring sermon, full of head-nodding references to the failures and hypocrisies of the Buhari administration, and how the nation will be imperilled if he wins a second term. While some folks took El-buba as a vessel through which God is warning the nation not to trade her destiny for another leader that merely glitters on the surface, the more cynical listener recalls that the same El-buba prophesied that former President Dr. Goodluck Jonathan would defeat Buhari in 2015. If he is back on the block ahead of 2019 and is prophesying against the same Buhari, then his prophecies might just be a continuation of the 2015 elections by other means.
Regardless of the speculations about the political undertones of his prophesies, whichever agency of government that reportedly laid a siege to his house and perhaps attempted to arrest him has helpfully (!) increased the handwriting of ordinance against the President. They gave his opponents and his traducers one more joker to wield against his candidature. Any show of aggression on the part of the state, in the light of Buhari’s persistent poor human rights record yields the plot to the aggrieved mob cataloguing the autocratic sins of President Buhari. Prophet El-buba might not be the most popular pastor in Nigeria right now, but, his story might be about to change, no thanks to overzealous agents who have handed him a narrative of King Ahab vs. Prophet Elijah persecution. By making the prophet a victim of their excesses, they gave people the yarn to be spun against them in various churches in the coming months. If I could look into the future, the question I want to be answered is what good the pastoral crusade against the current administration will do other than the mere possibility of switching the All Progressives Congress with another party of equally clueless johns?