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And a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed. 1 Peter 2:8
Now, get me right, there is nothing heretical here. Because the referenced scripture refers to our Lord Jesus, I do not equate Ndigbo to Him; never. However, I know that the Igbo are kinsmen of Jesus. Being Jew, they are both hated yet undeterred; they both hold the key to the salvation of man, and for ndigbo, Nigeria.
When the Bible described Jesus as a rock of offence, it meant that lovers of Jesus stand on solid ground and are unmovable, but His haters are in trouble and continue to stumble till they roll off the cliff into damnation.
That is exactly what the Igbo typify. Those who love them are blessed but Nigeria continues to grope in darkness because of her manifest hatred for God’s covenant of which the Igbo are a part.
What is baffling is how the pulpit of God is deployed by those who should know better to scandalise and whittle the Igbo, an impossible task.
The other time, the Igbo came under the sledgehammer of a priest, who could not mask his jealousy and went as far as stopping the Igbo from offering God His sumptuous, fresh meal of worship, served and hot and fresh. The rest is history.
Now, Tunde Bakare, a preacher man I used to respect has gone overboard and I now know why things seem to have suddenly gone south for him and his ministry; he hates the Igbo and must pay the fine.
In a televised sermon recently, Bakare talked about a curse placed on the Igbo by the slain former Prime Minister, Sir Tafawa Balewa.
However, it is not certain who, between the Igbo and Bakare is cursed.
In the first place, Bakare was not there when the Balewa supposedly placed the curse. He did not also tell us who told him about the curse or if he consulted the spirit of the dead man, as Saul did Samuel in the Old Testament because nowhere in the narratives of history was this tale recorded. Or was this why they banned history from our schools so that his ilk could distort it at will?
I do not intend to interrogate Bakare’s anointing; I am but a ‘small fry’ and don’t have the credentials to do so. If he said God told him anything, who am I to query him? He should be left to sort himself out with his God whom he represents or misrepresents.
God forbid that I should sit in judgment over him, a man of God. However, I think I deserve a right to be doubtful when obviously spurious messages are spewed from the altar of God because of its damning consequences, especially for the hearers.
Pulpits are not political soap boxes or entertainment platforms for jesters. Whatever any preacher says from the pulpit, especially while delivering a sermon, must flow the spirit of God or do we rightly believe. To this extent, Bakare, who declared his intention to contest the 2023 presidential election soon after, should differentiate between his dual roles as a pastor and a politician and be mindful of what he says on each occasion. He should be explicit to tell us what Bakare says and what God says, otherwise, he’d be creating confusion and making nobodies like me to question God’s call on his life or bring God’s name to disrepute.
For instance, the allegation of a huge bank debt and receiving millions of dollars from someone to thus speak makes a mockery of his ministry and is equally ridiculous for a servant of God, true or false.
It is not clear why Bakare wanted to ride on the back of controversy to announce his infantile interest in the coveted presidential office. Was he so scared of the Igbo he felt inciting the hatred of Balewa’s kinsmen against them would make his puerile and stillborn ambition easier? Or assuming he was actually bought, was it part of the plan to discredit the Igbo, who have for years borne the brunt of a coup that was wrongly branded Igbo coup despite palpable evidence to the contrary?
Without wasting further time on Bakare’s jaded proposition, all Nigeria needs at this hour is a president of Igbo extraction.
Bakare’s laughable position fell flat because just after the supposed curse, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, an Igbo man, became the head of state. In other words, the curse was soon broken or never existed, as Bakare would want people to believe. So, anybody clinging to Bakare’s booboo to deny the Igbo their right to the presidency next year is doing a great disservice to the country.
Holding the Igbo down in perpetuation of an assumed victory over them in the civil war that ended in 1970 has brought more harm than good to the country. Certainly, the Igbo are a rock of offence on which Nigeria and the likes of Bakare will keep stumbling until the right thing is done.
That right thing is the enthronement of justice, equity and fairness.
Nigerians should circumspectly consider the various regimes that have ruled this country and decide how good or bad life has been for them. The Hausa-Fulani have ruled this country; so have the Yoruba and even minority South-south. It is time to ask, as in our local parlance, ‘how market?’
The market report is that despite its abundant human and natural resources and self-trumpeted giant of Africa status, Nigeria has virtually collapsed before our very eyes. It has failed to coalesce into a nation but remained disparate hot sand scattered in opposing directions by an evil whirlwind of inept, nepotistic and clannish leadership. Shamefully seated at the bottom of the world poverty index and ranked as the third most terrorised country in the world, Nigeria parades millions of out-of-school children and almost an equal number of jobless youths, among several shocking deficiencies.
Nigeria is definitely headed to the worst, and this is for no other reason but bald leadership whose only credential is a dubious grip on power while excluding the people in whose hands the country’s renaissance lies.
The obvious plausible deduction from this would be to try the Igbo, since the other tribes have failed to set Nigeria on a trajectory of survival as a country. Interestingly, the Igbo parade a galaxy of tested and proven hands-on leaders on standby.
Nothing dies in the hands of the Igbo. A people that were given mere twenty pounds in exchange for their millions in the bank after the Civil War and yet rebound to their current commanding heights have all it takes to turn Nigeria’s sombre trend to glory.
Nigeria, not the Igbo, is the loser, for, as they say in Igboland, “O ji madu n’ala ji onwe ya (whoever wrestles a man to the ground is also on the ground)”. Paying attention to Bakare and his ethnocentric postulation is to further manacle the country to avoidable gloom.
This same Bakare, in 1999, likened ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo to King Agag and prophesied to a bewildered country that the prophetic axe would fall upon his head before May 29. We know that no axe fell and Obasanjo ruled for eight years and is still very much alive and being consulted by those seeking power.
Therefore, much as Bakare sometimes gets a glimpse of divinity, he often gets obscured by his own human frailty and this is the source of his confusion.
Bakare’s narrative about the Igbo is a personally invented falsehood. If he heard a voice, as regards the curse, he should pray to know whether it was the voice of God or another spirit. His claim is as drab as he has become monotonous.
How blessed it would be if Bakare returned to God to ascertain the veracity of the mantle he still flaunts. The Holy Spirit may have since left and he is not aware.
Nevertheless, may God put a mitre on your head and give you deserving and fitting garments (Zechariah 3:1-5) so that you can be rid of jaundice and not stumble on the Igbo rock and scatter irretrievably.
