Reciting the Eyo masquerade’s chant in his epochal album, Consolidation (1993), Wasiu Ayinde, the king of Fuji music, declared with esoteric majesty: ‘Ile ti mo wo, o d’ile owo, ona ti mo rin, o d’ona ola; apoti ti mo fi j’oko, d’ohn akunlebo.’ Gloss: ‘Any house I enter in becomes the house of wealth, any path I tread, the path of prosperity; the stool I sit on, becomes deity worshipped on the knees.’ This is language of the gods, the kind you find in Wole Soyinka, the Ogun devotee who speaks of his patron god as ‘a reluctant leader of men’ but claims to serve no deity. You see, as children of primordial gods, the masters of music and literature cannot hide their demons. They are like the Nigerian General Overseer (G.O) who, unlike salaried mortals, is Lord of his manor, and whose wife is queen and ‘mummy’.
Swanky cars and plush houses, gold-plaited suits with bespoke swagger, wristwatches that mark opulence and shoes specially crafted by the best craftsmen in Italy are normal appurtenance, as is the retinue of heavily built muscles without brains that accompany him in suits wielding weapons of war. When a G.O turned 70 recently, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was the president you saw on his way to a ceremony. With security in suits on either flank, his Rolls Royce swept through the streets, winning throngs of admirers every step of the way, and came to a halt amid a chorus of hallelujahs. Actually, the life of a G.O is the best there is: you sit and swell in the lap of luxury, dispensing justice to lesser mortals.
The gods of money will hand over their business to no one but their wives and sons: any woman on away matches will have to be content with silver and gold. G.Os aren’t about letting anyone ruin their posterity; not naysayers like Ebenezer Obadare, US sociologist whose Pentecostal Republic continues to tug dangerously at the conference between clericicality and power underlined by oil money, or anybody! After all, as Soyinka informs us in The Trials of Brother Jero, no prophet likes to be frightened.
Because his god is mammon, the G.O reads the Bible everyday to reinforce his blindness, just like the religious rulers back in the day who murdered the very Messiah they claimed to have awaited for centuries. Here’s the Senior Pastor of Salvation Ministries, David Ibiyeomie, denouncing ‘over-familiarity’ with spiritual royalty: ‘Some people are too familiar. Even the anointing we don’t respect..They are schoolmates, classmates, roommates, age mates but there are no grace mates.’
You see, Ibiyeomie’s grace is scrupulously hierarchical. In short, know thy place or be damned! After all, don’t the Yoruba say ‘I come close to the king by six steps, and go backwards by seven?’ Familiarity breeds contempt and this G.O won’t be contemned. Socrates, the ancient philosopher who said ‘Know thyself’, was plagued by half-education: far beyond the admonition to know thyself is the commandment to know thy place. As Alabi Pasuma, musician of the streets, sang sometime ago, whoever fails to recognize influential people will receive a beating. By the way, what kind of audacity drives a G.O’s deputy to expect a handing over of the enterprise to him? Has the G.O not got wives and sons? They say money lies in the mouth of a lion and you expect him to hand over his ‘chinzu money’ to you because you are the one whose picture appears on the $100 bill?
Having clinically distanced his captive audience from his Throne of Reverence, Ibiyeomie then added his clincher on spiritual exampleship: ‘Till my biological mother died, she never called me by my name. She would come to me and say, ‘Papa, pray for me now.’ I’d tell her, ‘My daughter, kneel down.’ Spiritually, she was my daughter; biologically, she was my mother. She never wanted to use her mouth to call me by name. When she knelt, I would bless her as a daughter in the name of Jesus, then tell her to take her place as my mother. She respected the grace, and that’s why she was blessed.’
You see, money plays roulette in a G.O’s brain. Or how do you justify the madness of a son receiving his own mother’s worship, like an orisa akunlebo (the god you worship on your knees)? No one knelt down before William Branham and Joseph Ayo Babalola, men who sought only the Master’s glory. Leviticus 19:32 proclaims: ‘Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God: I am the LORD.’ Exodus 20:12 provides: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.’ In Ephesians 6:2, Paul the apostle adds that this is actually ‘the first commandment with promise.’ How is a son receiving his mother’s kneeling and calling her daughter honouring her? It takes spiritual lunacy for anyone to call his mother, ‘my daughter.’
A man may be his mother’s pastor, but what in the Bible gives him the right to address her irreverently? Jesus never disrespected his mother, but you will never get these money-crazed lunatics who talk as if they own mortal life to have sense. Hear the incredible, self-indicting statement that the orisa akunlebo uttered about a friend who had a sick son: ‘Someone once walked into my office and said, ‘Oh boy, how now?’ I didn’t answer him. He brought his son and said, ‘Pray for me.’ I didn’t pray, because if I did, he wouldn’t get the anointing. How can he call me by my name like we are mates? I looked at him and said to myself, ‘This man doesn’t know what he came here for.’ He left like that with his boy.’
Apparently, the G.O expected his schoolmate to call him Papa, not the deeply affectionate ‘O boy’, which is based on their past relationship. He refused to pray for his son! Does the Almighty God, whom people insult every day, act in this manner? Can you picture the Jesus of the Bible refusing to pray for a boy? The cleric says ‘When you trivialize the anointing, you disconnect from its power,’ but what he really wants is worship. Per Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority, followers submit to a leader’s will due to perceived special powers or insights. In short, this acclaimed divine authority is used to control behaviour, and leads to the institutionalization of a power structure. Sociologists tell us that narcissism may arise from unmet psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and is maintained by distorted thought patterns. Hmm.
I will end this piece with a scenario in Acts 10:25-26 where the apostle, Peter, has been invited to preach to a household: ‘And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at his feet, and worshipped him. But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man.’