By Taju Tijani
To appreciate the brutal candour of Pastor Tunde Bakare, we must focus on the interplay of General Buhari’s virulent, violent politics; his resistance to alternative voices, his shameless embrace of Fulani exceptionalism, his tribal intolerance, his granite love for fundamentalist jihadism, and his countervailing impulse to reduce Yoruba and Ndigbo to subservient slaves to Fulani primordial timelords. The gestation of Fulanisation agenda is not just a project of whim and fancy, it had been a consuming passion among the Fulani political elites since the 60s when we had storm trooper Northern politicians who lived to crush the Southerners whom they regarded with homicidal malice and indentured slaves.
Those who challenged this dominating wisdom were either jailed, maimed or killed. This bully tactics between the North and South had been at play from year dot. It had been there throughout our relationship with these foreigners from the Sahel. The savagery and public degradation they put Southerners who have the balls to call for radical change amount to having the meanest junk yard dogs among humans. Yet, Southerners continue to disagree with the North because their political model of master/servant relationship would not be allowed to take root in Nigeria of disparage nationalities.
Today, Buhari and his Northern cheerleaders are vexing Southerners big time. Daily, they recalibrate a communal sense of moral and political indignation in their caliphate struggle to achieve the prehensile dream of Uthman Dan Fodio. This tribal and ideological blinker got more fatal when Buhari reversed Nigeria into a nation of perpetual tribal travesty and cleavages. Buhari came and began to prove to the world that he carried the desperate expectations of his Fulani clan and Bedouin cousins on his lanky shoulders. He began the process of industrial fabrication of purpose-designed agenda to create homelands for Fulani across Nigeria using the armed forces as punishment guards where there was resistance against forceful occupation.
All his agendas turned into a cyclone of disasters after disasters. Islamisation was turned down, Ruga was rejected. Waterways was dumbed down. Open grazing was return to senders. There was madness in Buhari’s method to Fulanise Nigeria. There were methodical deviations from the South, but the recalcitrant North still has historical agenda to defend and fight for.
The desire of the ancient Fulani land confiscators to steal the beautiful Southern landscapes is today meeting brick walls of resistance from Abeokuta to Benue. Fulani land thieves would not be allowed any further extension of their criminalities, anti-social behaviour, sub-human violence, and destruction of Southern farmlands with their cows.
Buhari is not a benign actor on a democratic stage. Rather, he is a huge monster with a hammer looking for things to smash. Today, Nigerians are picking the broken pieces of their hard-won democracy. His seemingly endless capacity for self-delusion, an essential part of Fulani mythology, means that while much of the world see Nigeria for what it is, Buhari is blind to it all.
He has succeeded in pushing the Ndigbo and Yoruba into modern servitude. He has been testing our endurance by deploying extremely partisan state forces to clamp down in a meaningless battle he could not win. Now men and women of conscience are coming out of their stoical silence to speak to Buhari’s cavalier, stubborn, irrational, and contemptuous reflexes. Today, Southerners must learn to invoke a new standard of conduct in the face of Southern genocide going on. The conduct of courage and speaking bitter truth to power. That conduct is a tribute to shielding our humanity from Fulani murderous extinction agenda.
Within the contested fields of uncouth gratuitous swipe, probably we may want to exclude pastors and save them from eternal damnation. But as we write, courageous pastors are fuelling public discourse with their stout defiance and head banging bitter soundbites. We may say that Buhari is receiving spiritual caning because he has eaten the forbidden fruits. Pastors are becoming uncomfortably angry and are finding ways to deploy verbal gunfire when rattled by Buhari’s dictatorship that seeks to crush alternative ways and dissent.
Senior Pastor Paul Adefarasin, founder of House on the Rock once rocked us all by throwing a ricocheting bombshell that Nigeria is a “scam”. According to Adefarasin, it is time we do something about Nigeria. No politician, according to him, has the right to talk to “us on this matter unless they believe as we believe on this matter, Nigeria can do better, we are suffering in Nigeria in our hundreds of millions.
“We could easily be one of the top three countries in the world with the kind of resources we have. And it is about time we let the international community know that there must be purpose, don’t tell us you are protecting democracy, don’t tell us you are looking for free and fair election, which election has been free and fair in this country except the closest to it is Abiola and Babagana Kingibe which was annulled?” Nigeria after all is a scam!
In his own sonic blast, Pastor Tunde Bakare, the general overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, has accused General Buhari of denying Nigerians the oxygen of liberty and freedom. Bakare, for years has been enriching the Pentecostal space with his hounding, rebuking and correcting sermons. Today, he wants to take back Nigeria from an interloper Buhari and re-energise the spirit of everything good and worthy. There is no more any accommodation of tyranny from a man who had betrayed his trust. No more cautious, timid, and subservient attitude towards Buhari. He believes that Buhari has lost popular confidence and has become hugely disconnected from the people that elected him.
To Bakare, Buhari has individualised Fulani tribalism and the time to call him out is now. This hour. This minute. This second. To him, “Sovereignty is not in your hand anymore, you are commander-in-chief of nothing, except the people put you there. The highest office in the land is the office of the citizen. Nigerians are going to rise and demand for their rights.” In a shocking roar of challenge Bakare said, “And I dare you to try to stretch your hand against me like you have done to others, then you will know whether God sent me or I’m just empty and just making noise…”
Tunde Bakare is obviously tired of Buhari’s shambolic government. He wants him out of his way. Bakare is daily irritated like all Nigerians by Buhari’s ubiquitous and shameless brutality which morphs ever lower into bestiality as he brings Nigeria further and further into international shame and disdain. Bakare words are weighty and are made straight for the records. He has lent his canonical voice at a time when Nigerians are silenced by bestial tyranny, brutality, and ugly dictatorship.
Yes, Nigeria Pentecostal pastors are not monastic recluse. They are not gloomy ascetics. They hardly thank God for suffering but prefer life’s pleasures – private jets, huge churches, expensive wines, designer clothes, international travels, prestige cars – to a life of pretentious moral ambiguity. To them, blessed is him that likes to enjoy everything! They are never old light puritans but millennial connoisseurs of the good life.
However, nothing refreshes more than when men of God shared in the burden of the voiceless laity as we have seen in the canonical rage of Pastors Bakare, Adefarasin, Mbaka, Ehusani and Bishop Kukah. Men of God are now jettisoning the illusion of detached saintliness to redefine who they are in clearer political terms. General Buhari expected them to be passive, polite, politically neutral, and pleasant. The miracle of Christianity does not respect political yardstick: pastors could be a lamb today and lion tomorrow. Buhari is a sinner, and they are not afraid to say so.
TT Soundings 