Nigeria held hostage by its denials (3)

The main thrust of this series is the NAIRA-KOBO memes are not frivolous detours in Nigerian public life. They are symptoms – visible, pithy, and inexcusable – of a sovereign state that appears reluctant to appreciate the urgency of divesting herself of the historical and contemporary manacles, which hold her hostage. This part of the series takes off from ‘prophecy’ as pretext underscored by the contrived Bakare-Ayodele clerical intervention as a theological smokescreen for masking political failure to frontally address key existential challenges of Nigeria’s sovereignty. Both Pastor Tunde Bakare and Primate Elijah Ayodele tend to offer an ostensibly obverse register, that is, ‘curse’ prophecy rather than policy. Yet, their narratives are functionally contiguous with the meme.

Both relocate the problem from structural injustice to metaphysical pathology. Their argument, which is perverse in its logic, goes thus: If Ndigbo cannot rise to the position of a president in Nigeria, it is because of a curse and the remedy is spiritual cleansing, not institutional course-correction. This theological re-coding performs a political sleight-of-hand. It absolves the Nigerian state of accountability, sanctifies exclusion, and reframes dissent as spiritual sickness. Mr. Ayodele’s later insistence that his words were “misinterpreted,” and that he provided “solutions” rather than bans, does not erase the structural effect of such rhetoric. Where civic reform would require truth-telling, restitution, and inclusion, Ayodele’s brand of partisan prophecy asks the injured party to undertake penance. That is a fundamental inversion of justice.

This line of thinking in this series aligns with the prescient observation – that the “curse” should rather be read as a theological smokescreen for political failure and the only real curse is the refusal of the sovereign Nigerian state to correct its own injustices. To call for spiritual cleansing of the Igbo is to demand that victims be made to cure the wound inflicted upon them. That is not piety; that is victim-blaming. The true curse is the Nigerian state’s unwillingness to confess and to course-correct. In the end, the WhatsApp memes – NAIRA-KOBO, the Ojukwu–Gowon prophecy, the rejoinders – are not jokes. They are mirrors reflecting the fractures of a nation that has refused to tell itself the truth.

A country that mocks the suffering of one group will eventually inherit the suffering of all. Nigeria abused Ndigbo; today, Nigeria is abusing itself. Nigeria denied justice in the East; today, justice is denied everywhere. Nigeria refused to heal its oldest wounds; today, the entire body is infected. Until Nigeria embraces truth and justice, it will continue to stagger, falter, and grope toward greatness – never arriving, always circling the same abyss. If there is a curse, it is self-authored. And it is high time Nigeria broke it. Until Nigeria recognizes that its greatest insecurity is its own denial, the country will continue to trade its potential for parody, its dignity for jocular memes, ‘forwarded many times,’ and its future for fleeting scapegoats. It is time for Nigeria to trade memes for mandates – mandates of truth, restitution, and deliberate inclusion – so that the currency of collective laughter – NAIRA – might one day be replaced by the more durable currency of justice. Follow me as I unpack this clerical reframing, which suggests divine warnings against Igbo political leadership, and illustrate how prophecy is routinely conscripted into Nigerian political grammar. Prophecy becomes pretext; ‘divine’ revelation becomes a discursive shield for secular prejudice. Memes circulated in response reframed these pronouncements as thinly-veiled political messaging. WhatsApp theologians responded swiftly with counter-memes – satirical ‘prophecies’ foretelling what Nigeria would look like if truth, justice, and equity were allowed to govern. In this way, memes become tools for popular hermeneutics, interpreting the religious–political nexus with humour sharp enough to cut through dogma.

At this point, it seems pertinent to advert our minds to global patterns of ‘sacralized power’ when religion is leveraged as a tool of state and ethnic control. The claims by Pastor Bakare and Prophet Ayodele – that the Igbo ‘cannot’ produce a president unless a curse allegedly placed on them is ‘cleansed’ – are not theological accidents. They are part of a deeper global pattern in which religion is mobilised to translate political exclusion into metaphysical inevitability. Their rhetoric transfers responsibility away from state structures and elite decision-making and relocates it into the supernatural. What should be a democratic question becomes a ritual question; what should be adjudicated by ballots becomes trapped in the register of spiritual warfare.

This reframing mirrors global historical practices, where dominant groups deploy ‘sacralized power’ to legitimate political inequalities. I will illustrate with five empirical cases – (i) United States – ‘Curse of Ham’ and racial hierarchy, (ii) Apartheid South Africa – Calvinist pre-destination as statecraft, (iii) Rwanda – clerical endorsements and ethnic legitimacy, (iv) India – Hindutva and the divine mandate of majoritarian rule, and (v) Myanmar – the Sangha and ethnic cleansing.

Let’s dive deeper in the order outlined in the foregoing. For over two centuries, American slaveholders invoked the biblical “Curse of Ham” to naturalise Black enslavement. The myth provided a theological alibi for a political economy of racial extraction. Just as Bakare and Ayodele relocate Igbo political exclusion to a mythical curse, antebellum preachers shifted responsibility from state policy to divine decree. The effect was the same: injustice becomes God’s will; reform becomes rebellion against divine order. The apartheid regime relied heavily on the Dutch Reformed Church’s theology of predestination to justify racial hierarchy. Inequality was framed not as a policy choice but as part of a cosmic architecture ordained by God. This mirrors how Bakare’s “prophetic” assertions dress ethno-political exclusion in sacred vocabulary, thereby giving state failures an aura of spiritual inevitability.

In pre-genocide Rwanda, segments of the Catholic hierarchy sanctified the racialized ideology that placed Tutsis over Hutus, and later, in different historical moments, reversed the roles. Here again, state power was shrouded in religious legitimacy. Prophecy and clerical pronouncements became instruments to sculpt the political horizon, not unlike how Ayodele and Bakare’s pronouncements sculpt Nigeria’s imagination of presidential possibility. In contemporary India, the fusion of Hindu nationalist rhetoric with statecraft reframes minority dissent as a spiritual subversion of national destiny. The divine mandate becomes an alibi for democratic exclusion. This is directly analogous to the Nigerian case where metaphysical discourse replaces institutional evaluation, turning political marginalisation of Ndigbo into a purported spiritual malfunction.

Lastly, Buddhist monks – especially figures like Ashin Wirathu – provided religious cover for the state’s persecution of the Rohingya. Violence was reframed as the defence of a sacred national order. This parallels how Nigerian prophecy is sometimes wielded to bless elite preferences, demonise minority political aspirations, and varnish discrimination with divine authority.

Now, let’s situate the Bakare–Ayodele logic within this global pattern. Both Bakare and Ayodele’s interventions follow a consistent architecture: identify a marginalised group (Ndigbo); attribute their political exclusion to a supernatural defect rather than structural injustice; prescribe spiritual compliance – penance, cleansing, ritual correction – as the route to political legitimacy; remove responsibility from the state, the ruling class, and the constitutional order; sanctify existing inequities by shifting blame to the injured party.

Pastor Tunde Bakare, speaking in a widely circulated video sermon in 2022, claimed that the late Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa had cursed the Igbo at the time of his assassination – a curse that, according to Bakare, explains why “the Igbo cannot rule Nigeria.” He proclaimed that he alone had the spiritual mandate to “break” this curse, thereby granting future generations of Igbo “access to the throne like any other Nigerians.”

Obi Nwakama did much to debunk Pastor Bakare’s position in his article, entitled ‘Tunde Bakare lies about Balewa and the Igbo,’ published in Vanguard (12 April 2022). In 2025, Primate Elijah Ayodele revived this narrative. Again, in a viral video and subsequent clarifications, he declared that a “curse” lay upon the Igbo people, meaning that the presidency would remain forever elusive to them unless they underwent some form of spiritual “cleansing.” His exact words: “Igbos are the problem of Nigeria. They are desperate for power and want to rule Nigeria at all cost. There is a curse on you and if you do not reverse that curse you can’t become president of Nigeria.” Reacting to the ‘curse’ claims, a legal practitioner, Maduabuchi Idam, threatened to sue Primate Ayodele, for defamation. Idam, in a letter to Ayodele, dated 18th November, 2025, stated that he was “grievously affected” by comments made by the promoter of INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church, on 16th November, 2025. According to him, the cleric’s remarks are widely understood to be clearly defamatory, injurious, and disparaging to every son and daughter of Igbo extraction, “myself included,” (The Whistler 19 November 2025).

Pastor Bakare’s rhetorical flourish that an Igbo presidency requires cleansing a ‘curse’ is not politically naïve; it is politically functional. It displaces the conversation from federal character distortions, civil war residues, and elite fear of power rebalancing, economic regionalism, and constitutional bottlenecks to a theatre where no one in power is accountable.

Prophet Ayodele’s later retractions that he was ‘misinterpreted,’ or merely offering ‘solutions,’ do not erase the structural impact – the introduction of metaphysical suspicion into democratic discourse. What ought to be a national reckoning – about injustice, rehabilitation, integration, and the unfinished business of the civil war – becomes instead a spiritual probation imposed on a historically injured region. In this convoluted equation, the state escapes scrutiny; citizens – especially Ndigbo – bear the burden of divine appeasement. This is precisely how sacralized power operates globally – it turns structural oppression into cosmic order, and turns demands for justice into spiritual rebellion.

This is the current political problem of representation and justice corrected, not through truth-telling and genuine restitution but through spiritual theatre. This clerical warfare waged against Ndigbo has contributed to this mode of moral-theological adjudication, with dire implications for the possibility of healing ethnic divisions. This theological re-coding performs a political sleight-of-hand. By relocating the problem from structural injustice, historical marginalisation, and institutional bias – all of which could, in principle, be addressed by policy, constitutional reform, or sincere national dialogue – to a metaphysical pathology, it does three things in one swift move. First, it absolves the state of material responsibility. If the problem is spiritual, then structural reform, resource redistribution, electoral fairness, or justice for grievances becomes secondary or irrelevant. Second, it sanctifies exclusion. Ethnic or regional disenfranchisement is cast not as denial of rights, but as a divinely sanctioned curse – giving bigotry a veneer of spiritual inevitability. Third, it reframes dissent as spiritual sickness. Any call for political inclusion or memorial justice becomes not a democratic demand, but a sign of spiritual malaise that must be “cleansed” rather than reasoned with. Ayodele’s later insistence that he provided “solutions,” not bans, cannot erase the structural effect of his rhetoric.

The damage is not only to public discourse but to the possibility of civic trust. When religion becomes a tool for political exclusion, the lines between faith, identity, and citizenship thins out dangerously. Where the demands of a just society would require truth-telling, restitution, inclusive governance, and corridors of forgiveness grounded in political accountability, prophecy demands obedience and penance. That is not reform; it is reversal. It is a fundamental inversion of justice. Thus, the invocation of spiritual curses over the Igbo becomes yet another sign that Nigeria remains suspended – not in peace, not in justice, but in self-denial.

In the light of the foregoing, the questions continues to recur: Why does a country continually reach for the same scapegoat? Why does WhatsApp-mediated humour become the medium of truth? Why do contrived partisan and mercantile ‘prophecies’ become the grammar of power? Why is the meme as a signifier of digital historiography, more honest than the ministerial briefing? And why does the Nigerian state, confronted with its own fractures, choose denial over repair? Again, the answers will be unfolding in the concluding Part of the series.

• Concluded

•  Prof Agbedo writes from UNN, Nsukka.