Pentecostal Republic

Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria

Ebenezer Obadare

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786992383
• eBook ISBN: 9781786992406
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Higher Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Throughout its history, Nigeria has been plagued by religious divisions. Tensions have only intensified since the restoration of democracy in 1999, with the divide between Christian south and Muslim north playing a central role in the country's electoral politics, as well as manifesting itself in the religious warfare waged by Boko Haram.

Through the lens of Christian–Muslim struggles for supremacy, Ebenezer Obadare charts the turbulent course of democracy in the Nigerian Fourth Republic, exploring the key role religion has played in ordering society. He argues the rise of Pentecostalism is a force focused on appropriating state power, transforming the dynamics of the country and acting to demobilize civil society, further providing a trigger for Muslim revivalism.

Covering events of recent decades to the election of Buhari, Pentecostal Republic shows that religio-political contestations have become integral to Nigeria's democratic process, and are fundamental to understanding its future.

Chapter 1

PENTECOSTAL REPUBLIC, ENCHANTED DEMOCRACY

Introduction: demons in the villa

On Friday 14 October 2016, Reuben Abati, one-time spokesperson for the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan (2010–15), published an article in his weekly newspaper column titled ‘The spiritual side of Aso Villa’.¹ Prior to his appointment in July 2011 as replacement for former TELL magazine associate editor Ima Niboro, Abati had established a long-standing reputation as one of Nigeria’s most forthright newspaper columnists, a model of pugnacious integrity in a notoriously venal media landscape. However, by October 2016, things had turned sour between Abati and his avid followers, the greater part of whom struggled to reconcile themselves with his decision to serve the same administration he once pilloried in his writings. Others took exception to what they decried as the petulant manner in which he discharged his duties as Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, launching peevish attacks on perceived enemies of his boss. Therefore, by the time Abati started writing for The [Lagos] Guardian again following his controversial stint in Aso Villa, few bothered to pay him any heed. The columnist who had once told everyone what they needed to think had become a social undesirable many would rather not think about.

Despite this, the article in question was widely circulated and vigorously debated across the vast spectrum of Nigeria’s boisterous social media. Presumably, this was due to the subject of the essay – spirituality and power. But another reason the article generated such intense interest was because of Abati’s core claim, that Aso Villa, the seat of the Nigerian presidency, was under siege by demonic forces, and is a place where ‘most people … always bathed in the morning with blood. Goat blood. Ram blood. Whatever animal blood.’

Abati’s essay invoked and consecrated four related narratives about power and spirituality in Nigeria.

First, for many people, it validated the popular belief that there is something sinister about Aso Villa, the physical seat of executive power in the country. When the administrative capital was moved from Lagos to Abuja in December 1991, there were wild rumours of the move having been sanctioned only after a cautious President Ibrahim Babangida had made the place safe through ‘spiritual cleansing’ facilitated by sundry ‘mallams’ and conclaves of Muslim marabouts recruited from across the West African sub-region and beyond.² Abati’s testimony about ‘colleagues who lost daughters and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and fathers, and the many obituaries that we issued’ reinforced the image of Aso Villa as a space associated with mortal danger.

The following excerpt from an article by Vanguard Abuja reporter Ben Agande, written in response to the Abati article, captures the popular belief about the ‘strangeness’ of Aso Villa and the spiritual precautions successive presidents are rumoured to have taken:

As a correspondent of the Vanguard newspaper who covered presidents Olusegeun [sic] Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, I can relate well with some of the stranger than fiction scenario painted by Dr. Abati. But beyond the strange incidence, the foundation of the construction of the villa itself was laid in strange circumstances. According to a staff of Julius Berger, the construction company that built the Villa, from the very day that the excavation for what is now known as the presidential Villa was made, it was mired in strange incidences. The staff who has [worked] for the construction company for over thirty years and claimed he was there when the very first excavation began narrated the strange occurrences that marked the first few months. ‘When we moved in here, it was as if we were in a war zone. There were multiple incidences of equipment failure, workers developing strange illnesses and in one particularly poignant case, a very senior officer of the company who was brought in from Germany to supervise the construction collapsed and died on site while supervising the uprooting of a particular tree that defied all attempts to remove. Strangely, his death brought an end to the many equipment failures that we had witnessed over many weeks,’ he said.³

Agande continued:

Whether the strange incidences that have been noticed in the Villa are products of striking coincidences or handiwork of higher, inexplicable spiritual powers is hard to decipher. But since President Ibrahim Babangida, the first occupant of the presidential Villa left office, subsequent occupants of the sprawling edifice have brought spirituality to bear on their stay in the edifice. From General Sani Abacha to Abdulsalami Abubakar to Olusegun Obasanjo to Umaru Yar’Adua down to the present occupant, Muhammadu Buhari, these occupants have had to carry out spiritual cleansing of the place before moving in with their families and hordes of aides.⁴

Second, Abati poured fuel on the fire of the common belief that political success is neither secured nor maintained without the ‘donation’ of blood, often other people’s, but, if necessary, the blood of a close relative or kin of the individual either seeking office or desperate to keep it.⁵ For most people, therefore, incidents such as the shocking discovery by the Nigerian police in August 2004 of dozens of corpses at a shrine in Okija, Anambra State and the subsequent revelations that senior political figures had attended the shrine and sworn oaths there merely confirmed a reality that they always took for granted.⁶ It was in that spirit, presumably, that Abati wrote about ‘days when convoys ran into ditches and lives were lost’, and other occasions when the plane in which then President Jonathan and his team were travelling ‘had to be recalled’ because it was ‘acting like it would crash’, or other times when the aircraft either ‘refused to start’ or ‘just went dead’. There is an obvious logical contradiction here: if Aso Villa is such a place of danger, why have successive Nigerian heads of state shown such desperation in their attempts to cling on to power? Nigerians’ unique resolution of this contradiction is that the mechanisms of the same dark forces create the leaders’ fatal attraction to power.

Third, with his allusion to ‘all those colleagues who used to come to work to complain about a certain death beneath their waists and who relied on videos and other instruments to entertain their wives’ quite suddenly experiencing ‘a reawakening’ after vacating Aso Villa, Abati was, for many, merely affirming the connection between power and masculinity, between sex and power, and the general impression of the (politically) powerful man as one who is also invariably sexually potent. In Nigeria, no discussion of the powerful is complete without salacious gossip about their sex lives. For political theorist Achille Mbembe, such talk about the orifices and genitalia of the powerful must be seen as ‘powerful referents or critical metaphors in the production of the political in the postcolony’.⁷

In fact, it is widely assumed that the highest echelons of power in the country are guaranteed only to those willing to participate in any named variety of unconventional sexual acts, including same-sex acts and sex with animals.⁸ In this account, Aso Villa itself is little more than a political bordello, a place of sexual licentiousness where famous residents frequently indulge in infamous orgies. Even today, rumours persist that former military ruler General Sani Abacha (who was in power from 1993 to 1998) did not expire from food poisoning, as the grapevine has it, but in a tryst involving two Dubai-imported Indian prostitutes.

Fourth, and most significantly from the standpoint of the underlying sentiment of this book, Abati’s essay strengthened the by no means unpopular narrative that Nigeria, Nigerians and most definitely Nigerian politicians have been under a demonic spell (since political independence in 1960 according to some accounts, or since the ill-advised hosting of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture [Festac ’77] in others);⁹ and that liberation from this malign energy is unattainable in the absence of collective contrition and the necessary spiritual amelioration. Here is Abati reprising this particular sentiment:

When Presidents make mistakes, they are probably victims of a force higher than what we can imagine. Every student of Aso Villa politics would readily admit that when people get in there, they actually become something else. They act like they are under a spell. When you issue a well-crafted statement, the public accepts it wrongly. When the President makes a speech and he truly means well, the speech is interpreted wrongly by the public. When a policy is introduced, somehow, something just goes wrong. In our days, a lot of people used to complain that the APC [All Progressives Congress] people were fighting us spiritually and that there was a witchcraft dimension to the governance process in Nigeria. But the APC folks now in power are dealing with the same demons. Since Buhari government assumed office, it has been one mistake after another. Those mistakes don’t look normal, the same way they didn’t look normal under President Jonathan. I am therefore convinced that there is an evil spell enveloping this country. We need to rescue Nigeria from the forces of darkness. Aso Villa should be converted into a spiritual museum, and abandoned.¹⁰

On 24 October 2016, ten days after the publication of his essay, Abati was picked up in Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT), by operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) investigating his and others’ alleged involvement in a 50 million naira bribery scandal.

Did Abati publish his essay in the hope of pre-empting the massive outcry that he was certain media reports of his involvement in a bribery scandal and his eventual arrest would provoke? In saying of Aso Villa that ‘when people get in there, they actually become something else’, and that President Buhari’s ‘mistakes’ since assuming office ‘don’t look normal, the same way they didn’t look normal under President Jonathan’, was he in fact admitting guilt while at the same time providing grounds for exculpation?

Considering Abati’s pedigree, such assumptions are not far-fetched. Following his appointment in 2011 by President Jonathan, he had morphed quite rapidly from celebrity into pariah. In his heyday, such was his fame and popularity that Abati could afford to write a twice-weekly column – on Fridays and Sundays – and still count on the attention and admiration of the reading public. As a government spokesperson, however, Abati quickly unravelled. Not only did he fail to rise to anything remotely approaching the level of the soaring moral rhetoric that had characterised his column, but in a unique spectacle of self-immolation he took every opportunity to contradict everything he had previously articulated and apparently stood for as a progressive journalist. His transformation came as a shock to his followers, many of whom had fallen for his flowing prose and had taken his every word as gospel. It is quite possible, then, that ‘The spiritual side of Aso Villa’ was, if not a desperate attempt to recapture the ardour of his disappointed followers, at least an effort to explain away his gauche comportment as a presidential spokesperson.

State of siege

Whatever his intentions, Abati’s essay – and the reaction to it – offers a didactic moment for understanding the mentality that has animated the Nigerian Fourth Republic since its inception in 1999. The mentality in question is evident in a reported encounter between Abati and a colleague, recalled in the essay’s closing paragraph as follows:

A colleague called me one day and told me a story about how a decision had been taken in the spiritual realm about the Nigerian government. He talked about the spirit of error and how every step taken by the administration would appear to the public like an error. He didn’t resign on that basis but his words proved prophetic. I see the same story being re-enacted. Aso Villa is in urgent need of redemption. I never slept in the apartment they gave me in that villa for an hour.¹¹

The key question for me is not whether this encounter actually took place, but what Abati had successfully communicated: within an explanatory paradigm, he implicitly accepts that decisions are regularly taken in ‘the spiritual realm’ concerning the fortunes (or misfortunes) of the Nigerian state, and that a ‘cloud of evil’ veils all the key decisions taken by those in office.

This book is about the ascendancy of this paradigm, one of enchantment, and its impact on the politics and the democratic process in the Nigerian Fourth Republic. It is because this ascendance coincides with the birth of the Fourth Republic that I describe it – the republic – as a Pentecostal republic, and Nigerian democracy as an enchanted democracy. While Paul Gifford, from whom I have borrowed the term, speaks of an ‘enchanted Christianity’,¹² I have applied it, for reasons that I elaborate, to democratic politics in the Nigerian Fourth Republic.

That the paradigm is widely shared (not just by a section of the public, but, crucially, by those who have either worked in the villa or occupied political office) can be deduced from the overall flavour of responses to the Abati piece. For example, for Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity to President Muhammadu Buhari, the problem with Abati’s essay is not that it brings everyday politics and life in Aso Villa under the aegis of ‘demonic infestation and manifestation’,¹³ but that it does so ‘in a way that stoked and kindled the kiln of fear, rather than of faith’. For Adesina, the issue is not just that Aso Villa is enveloped in evil, but that evil is ubiquitous and can be countered only through strict adherence to biblical principles. Thus:

To believe and teach otherwise is to carry superstition to ridiculous level, and venerate the Devil, granting him omnipotence, an attribute that belongs to God only. For the Devil, doing evil is full-time business, and whether you had anything to do with Aso Villa or not, he continued with his pernicious acts … If you are under the pavilion of God, sleep, wake and operate daily in Aso Villa, you are covered, no matter the evil that lurks around, if any. There is a better covenant established on greater promises, and that is the canopy under which you should function. God can spare you from all evils, and if He permits any other thing, it is ‘such as is common to man,’ and not because of Aso Villa.¹⁴

Not only did former Ogun State Commissioner for Information Sina Kawonise agree with Abati and Adesina that the country is besieged by ‘Satan, demons and their human agents in high places’,¹⁵ he commended Abati for:

pointing our attention to a serious aspect of our national life: there is gross spiritual evil going on in the seat of power more than...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Pentecostal republic, enchanted democracy
• 2. 1999–2007: Pentecostalism ascendant
• 3. 2007–10: a Muslim interlude?
• 4. 2010–15: Pentecostalism re-ascendant
• 5. Electoral theologies
• 6. ‘Kill them before they kill you’: on violent Pentecostalism
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index