Reuben Abati
It seems to me, with due respect, to every party concerned, that while we are all obsessed with the contemporary, topical issues of Ministerial nominations, the likely conflict with Niger and the noted desperation of the Northern Senators and Elders Forum, as well as others across the country, to prevent same, in addition to the concerns about palliatives and the rising cost of living, or the unresolved battle with organized Labour (NLC, TUC), we may be overlooking something that may be relevant to the health and the future of Nigeria. I identify this hereunder as the menace and terror of Prophets – those self-appointed owners of direct telephone access to God and who on a daily, unrelenting basis inflict upon this community, what they claim to have heard from God. They expropriate the claim that God speaks to them alone, and that whatever they hear from God is the gospel truth. There is no mechanism to double-check. They don’t provide any data reports of their telephone conversation with God. They simply tell us this is what “my father told me”, and the rest of us are all expected to obey blindly. We are the multitude of orphans, whose Heavenly fathers, just in case everyone has a father in Heaven, may have been denied telephone access to the earthly realm and hence, the rest of us have to depend on their own God whom they covet with so much proprietorial control. The problem is the lack of accountability and the fact that nobody really knows who speaks to these so-called spiritual fathers.
