By Suyi Ayodele

They gave us civilisation and then said our forebears were wrong in speaking truth to power. A child of God, they reasoned, should pray “for kings and those in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceful life in all godliness and honesty (1Timothy 2:2). We accepted the strange doctrines, and our leaders grew wings and became our tormentors.

While our forebears challenged kings and whipped them back to line, the new ‘civilisation’ asked us to raise our hands “first of all, (in) supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks…” (1 Timothy 2:1). By the time we opened our eyes, those whom our forebears used to command to go join their ancestors for bad rulership had become our masters. Through their bad leadership, they send us to early graves. Sadly, the modern-day spiritual fathers and mothers-in-Israel drowned our cries in ‘signs and ‘wonders’ that have neither been significant nor wonderful!

I may soon be ordained a pastor. Read that again and believe me. The time is close. Why? My Father-in-the-Lord, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the General Overseer of The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), is doing what the church is called to do at critical moments.

I am happy with Daddy G.O.’s message at the November Holy Ghost Service held last Friday. Now, we can boldly say that the Church is alive to its responsibility. I am faintly proud to be a member of the RCCG in recent times.

Before those who claimed to have given us ‘civilisation’ came, men and women who occupied high spiritual positions were a check on the African indigenous thrones. The Yoruba traditional administrative setting that I am familiar with places a premium on religion and religious leaders.

Ifa priests and our mothers played important roles in bringing orderliness to the society. Kings in those good old days would not do anything without the input of the knowledgeable. Our mothers, the very owners of the night, then, had a way of getting the thrones to act appropriately.

But when modernity came, they tagged our nocturnal esoteric gatherings as ‘coven’. Then they went ahead and replaced the ‘coven’ meetings with vigils, forgetting that covens and vigils are businesses of the night! They told us to stop chanting esoteric words and ‘impacted’ us with the Holy Spirit. They asked us to speak in tongues and do away with ayajo (evocation); two coded languages that are not easily sussed! They took away our gbere (incision) and gave us anointing oil. We accepted.

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Africa’s fortune dipped because we suddenly became complacent. Nigeria, for instance, has suffered great misfortunes over the last three decades because we relied more on the dictates from the pulpits rather than taking our destiny in our own hands. Those we elected turned around to become our taskmasters, using the very resources they stole from us to buy our consciences. In all this, the Church universal – indeed, the strange religions imported from the West and the East – became accomplices.

Save for the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, which, to a large extent, has shown that the prophets of old were not power pleasers, the Nigerian cassock club has been partners-in-crime with the lethargic leadership that has been the bane of development in Nigeria. Clerics of the two dominant religions (Christianity and Islam) turned a blind eye when the Nigerian political class began this journey to the bottomless pit. Many of them found it difficult to distinguish between the pulpits and the campaign podiums. The compromise from the religious leaders is so much that nowadays, most crusades, homilies, messages and recitation sessions have become political campaign rallies!

Our leaders, the locusts, became emboldened because they know that the faithful-in-the-Lord have gotten their share of the national cake. We cannot forget easily how religious leaders, having attracted huge part of our patrimony to their faiths’ coffers, declared their support for the then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan for the 2015 general election.

Or should we talk about the college of Bishops that endorsed the candidacy of the incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2023, wearing their funny cassocks as they filed to collect their alawee? For the eight ruinous years of General Mohammadu Buhari, who among us can recall a whimper from any of our Pentecostal pastors or Islamic clerics?

This is why the latest message of Daddy G.O. during the November 2025 Holy Ghost Service of the RCCG became instructive. I did not watch Pastor Adeboye preach at the service. But I have read the transcript of his message at the service. It is worthy of commendation, not because I am a member of the RCCG family, but because it appears that the Church, under the leadership of Daddy G.O., appears to be waking up from its pretentious slumber! We may well be returning to those epochs when the prophets of old spoke truth to power at the risk of their lives.

In his message that night, the preacher said: “This is not the time to joke. This is not the time for grammar, not time to argue, is it suicide or kidnapping? This is not the time to say it’s not Christians alone; Muslims are also involved. Innocent people are dying.” I read him over again to be sure that Daddy G.O. actually uttered those words. They are wonderful words no matter how late they are coming. The time a man wakes up is his morning, so, they say. If it has taken the threat from President Donald Trump of America to get our religious leaders to speak, so be it.

The most important thing now is that the pulpit is talking when it should. Pastor Adeboye said that when he heard President Tinubu beat his chest on October 1, 2025, that he had defeated insurgency, he knew that the President is surrounded by those who don’t like him. He added that hours after Tinubu declared Nigeria free of insecurity, “…The following day, we read that a traditional ruler was killed in Kwara or Kogi.” Then the clincher: “Somebody wrote it (the speech), but it was the President who read it.” What the clergy man did not say is that though, “There are several people around Tinubu who are not telling him the truth”, the president should be blamed for the choices he made in his aides. Daddy G.O. is right!

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This is how men of God should speak during a crisis. The cassock must not be part of the President’s clappers’ club. Enough of diplomacy, enough of prevarication. Our leaders are surrounded by sycophants who would rather marinate the truth in a sauce of lies just to please the President. If not, there is no way Tinubu would have declared as Adeboye quoted that “displaced people have returned to their villages.” Thank the gracious God that Daddy G.O. did not quip, as an average Ijesha man would have done, kà íbi e rè (where was that)?

He went ahead to call on President Tinubu to be decisive on the steps to take to arrest the situation. Adeboye asked Tinubu not to be like his predecessor, Buhari, who shouted the order at his own parade but went back to sleep without ensuring that the colour party obeyed him.

This time around, the RCCG big shot said that the President must give the directives to his services chiefs, follow them up, set time limit for them “not only to eliminate the terrorists but also eliminate the sponsors, no matter how influential they may be” and fire the services chiefs if there were no results after the time frame! Wonderful counsel!

It appears the fear of Trump is the beginning of wisdom for us. In the last two weeks that the American President issued the threat of an invasion, our armed forces appeared to have gotten their mojo back. Bandits and other criminal elements, they told us, were being killed in their scores. That is the type of response we want from the Commander-in-Chief. Ragtag soldiers should not be making meals of our trained and sophisticated soldiers.

What Pastor Adeboye said on Friday is what other leaders of other faiths and sects should do. Nigeria must first be safe and peaceful for any meaningful crusade to take place. There is no point asking people to surrender to Jesus or be converted to Islam when there is no guarantee that the converts will live to see the light of the following days because bandits, kidnappers and other bad elements wait in the corner to waste them! No matter how beautiful heaven and Aljannah are, we should be allowed to live and enjoy the good things of life before we go to meet our makers. After all, “all things bright and beautiful, the Lord God made them all”, the choir sing!

The time to rescue Nigeria is now. This is the message the Supreme Council for Shari’ah in Nigeria (SCSN) should imbibe rather than its recent voyage of discovery of who sent legal brief to the United Nations on the genocide of Christians.

It is bad for the SCSN, which urged “all Nigerians, Muslims and Christians alike, to reject narratives that seek to pit one faith against another”, asserting that the nation’s “common enemies are injustice, corruption, poverty, and insecurity”, to now look for a scapegoat to sacrifice for the activities of some bad elements in its midst.

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The SCSN, rather than asking for the head of Professor Joshua Ojo Amupitan, the newly appointed Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on the platter because of his 2020 brief, should look for the Sheik Ahmad Gumis in its camp and caution them. The havoc the likes of Sheik Ahmad Gumi have wrecked in Nigeria through flippancy and intemperate utterances, can sink the peace which the SCSN seeks. Elements like Gumi are the reason why we have so much mistrust among the followers of the differing faiths!

It, therefore, baffles every rational mind that amid the present crisis, the SCSN would still drape its ‘genuine’ clamour for peace and religious harmony in Nigeria with the flag of politics! The religious body, like its Christian counterparts, should separate the hijab from the politicians’ babariga. Asking for the removal of Amupitan as INEC Chairman on account of the 2020 paper speaks volumes. It sounds like making a mountain out of a molehill while ignoring the more important matter of genocide which has become the concern of the Trump administration.

Nigeria is in a grave moment. Every man and woman of good conscience must be involved in the rescue mission. The nation’s traditional institution must lend its voice. Many of them have been victims of the malady, and many more will become so unless the drift is halted. The Olubadan of Ibadanland, Oba Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja, hinted at this a few days ago when he cautioned that “…terrorists don’t know the difference between Muslims and Christians. They see everybody as a prey, while they are the predator.”

Oba Ladoja, who received the President of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), Bishop Francis Wale Oke, at the Olubadan Palace, over the weekend, said that the period the nation is now in is the time for Nigerians to come together to fight terrorism and appease those who had fallen victim of the crisis.

According to the Ibadan king, “Many people have been killed and property worth an inestimable amount of money destroyed. Multitudes of families, particularly women and children, have been displaced. Kidnappings have taken place. Successive administrations have spent trillions to fight insecurity. When you look at this scenario over the past ten years, people are bound to feel aggrieved and resort to self-help.” He therefore recommended the prototype of the harmonious relationship that exists between the two major religions in the South-west to other parts of the country.

President Tinubu is lucky that in the face of the threat from President Trump, Nigerians of worth are offering him pieces of advice that could help him to navigate the current situation unscathed. I commend Oba Ladoja’s royal stance to other monarchs in the country. Rather than strutting the red carpets on the fashion runways, our monarchs should sit back and think of how they can add value and help solve the current national debacle.

From the Sultan of Sokoto to the Obi of Onitsha; from the Oba of Benin to the Agadagba of Arogbo Izon, our palaces should take a break from the narratives of those destined to be president and those not so fortunate to devote time to tangibles that will bring lasting peace to the nation.

The Church must not rest; the Mosque must not drop the megaphone. President Tinubu himself must walk the talk. It is not enough for us to consider Trump’s threat as an insult. Nigeria, particularly the President, must demonstrate that he indeed understands that the job he applied for is not hard as bricklaying, but one that requires him to think outside the box, harnessing geniuses around him to achieve lasting peace in the country.

Lastly, President Tinubu must not cower to the dictates of the sponsors of this evil just so he could extend his presidency beyond 2027. The realisation of that ambition is not worth the life of even a single Nigerian. The entire nation is, by now, tired of viewing gory videos of mindless killings all over the social media. We are tired of hearing muffled cries of widows and fatherless children whose benefactors have been incinerated in their own homes! We have had enough of reports of neonates and toddlers who are dispatched in cold blood back to their Maker alongside their helpless parents! Enough is enough!