RCCG’s Dangerous Foray into Politics for Osinbajo
By Farooq Kperogi
The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Nigeria’s hottest Pentecostal church the place Yemi Osinbajo was (is?) a pastor, issued a Feb. 28, 2022, memo, which got here to mild as we speak, that hints at an enormous, ground-up political operation to assist its members win political workplaces in Nigeria.
The memo talked of the institution of an “Office of Directorate of Politics and Governance,” which it stated must be replicated “at all levels of the church – zone, area and parish” to be able to “help coordinate the engagement of our people who are willing to be involved in politics as well as mobilize support for them when required.”
Peoples Gazette appropriately interpreted the memo as an “arrangement to mobilise sweeping support for [Osinbajo’s] ambition” to be president.
This isn’t actually stunning, frankly, as a result of Pentecostal Christians see Osinbajo as their consultant in authorities and assume he’s the fulfilment of Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s oft-quoted prediction that certainly one of them would grow to be Nigeria’s president throughout his lifetime.
(Osinbajo’s rise to the vice presidency, for the file, was a consequence of Buhari’s private want to blunt notions of his Islamic fanaticism by having a pastor as a operating mate. It was the identical cause that prompted him to choose Pastor Tunde Bakare, a Muslim convert, as his operating mate).
Osinbajo himself defines his function in authorities within the slender phrases that his co-pentecostalists see it: because the materialization of a Pentecostal Christian theocratic dream. That’s why his inside political circle is nearly totally made up of Yoruba RCCG members.
When his multi-billion-naira corruption within the administration of the Buhari regime’s social funding program was probed by members of the Aso Rock cabal (which prompted it to be taken away from him and reworked right into a separate ministry), it was found that the overwhelming majority of people that benefited from the contracts he awarded had been Yoruba members of the RCCG.
Osinbajo is so smugly ensconced in his RCCG filter bubble that he doesn’t even care to hunt out the cultural counsel of his Federal Government-imposed Muslim aides when he travels to the Muslim North.
That is why he routinely steps into mosques and folks’s bedrooms along with his footwear on, despite the fact that the Queen of England whose folks dropped at Nigeria the Christianity he practices takes off her footwear when she visits mosques.
There’s no Christian in authorities in Nigeria’s historical past who has ever been as narrowminded, as culturally clueless, and as insular as Osinbajo which was why, as I stated in my final Saturday column, a senior Christian Yoruba professor informed me lately that Osinbajo would “create greater instability as president” than Buhari has as a result of “The Sharia folks will confront [Osinbajo’s] Christian fundamentalism with more violence,” which might precipitate disabling communal upheavals.
What the RCCG is doing with its wholesale immersion into partisan politics isn’t distinctive, after all. Muslims, notably Salafists, pioneered it.
The late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi began it in, I feel, the Nineteen Eighties when he urged his followers to be politically partisan and shocked the Nigerian Muslim group when he stated politics was extra vital than worship.
Just just like the Pentecostals, the Salafists need to take over the facility construction and impose, by stealth or by power, their model of theocracy on the remainder of Nigeria.
Salafists’ highest consultant in authorities as we speak is Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami. He taught for two years on the Islamic University of Madinah, the ideological breeding floor of Salafist ideology, and is being prepped for a better function.
Anyone who desires to hasten Nigeria’s conflagration ought to elect Osinbajo as president and Pantami as Vice President. Osinbajo could be the matchbox and Pantami the matchstick.
The push and pull between Pentecostal and Salafist theocratic craziness would offer the friction obligatory for the matchstick and the matchbox to collide.
With RCCG’s overtly political partisanship, anticipate the identical from the Salafists. Let’s see the place that leads.
