2019: How will the church vote?

Thursday with Abimbola Adelakun aadelakun@punchng.com

When the Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate for the
2019 elections, Atiku Abubakar, visited former President Olusegun
Obasanjo, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, one of the striking faces in the
photographs that emerged from the meeting was that of the founder
of the Living Faith Church (aka Winners Chapel), Bishop David
Oyedepo.

There were, of course, other religious leaders, like Bishop
Matthew Kukah and Sheik Ibrahim Gumi, but Oyedepo’s presence spoke
far more loudly because of the vital space he occupies in the
Pentecostal-dom. Oyedepo would later react to the hue and cry that
attended his appearance at that meeting by saying he was there as a
witness to a peace parley and not for partisan reasons. Whether
that explanation was an afterthought or not, he brokered a
discussion that would have arisen eventually: How will the church
vote in 2019?

By that question, I do not mean to suggest that the church is a
monolith, nor am I suggesting that the Christians in the Nigerian
electoral demographic have singular concerns. In the same October
Oyedepo witnessed Atiku and Obasanjo’s peace meeting, some men of
God, led by one Bishop Sunday Garuba, led other men of God, to pray
for President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election. The group, the
National Inter-Faith and Religious Organisations for Peace,
organised a 40-day prayer tagged, “Buhari Shall Come Back in 2019.”
Bishop Garuba was quoted as saying that the prayer was necessary
because there was a plot by “agents of darkness” to return Nigeria
to the “bottomless pit.” Their assignment as God’s messengers, he
claimed, was to forestall it through the power of prayer. Given the
diversity of interests, the question of how the church will vote is
about how religion will shape the 2019 polls. What will be the
overriding concerns of Nigerian Christians given all that has
unfolded since 2015 – the northernisation and so-called
Islamisation of public offices, the Fuani herdsmen massacres
particularly in places where Christians have been the victims, and
the massive hit the economy has taken under Buhari’s watch
resulting in an almost unprecedented rate of unemployment?

Recently, I read the newly-released book, The Pentecostal
Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria,
written by Ebenezer Obadare, an academic and social scientist whose
study of the Nigerian religious cultures is pretty well-known in
academic and non-academic fora. This book explores Pentecostalism
as a source of socio-political influence that has been muted by its
cavort with the political class, and whose reactionary force has
had a demobilising effect on the Nigerian civil society. Since
1999, the beginning of the Fourth Republic, Pentecostalism’s
incorporeal presence has loomed over every administrative
dispensation. Pentecostalism is the not-so-silent listener to every
national conversation, the unseen guest that determines how the
national meal will be shared among those for whom faith is their
access card to the dining room of power.

The date, 1999, is auspicious in the historicisation of
Pentecostal power and influence in Nigeria because, as Obadare
argues, it was a period that conglomerated several coincidences all
of which propelled the Pentecostal political power formation. (That
is not claiming that Christianity’s dalliance with power only began
with the rise of the Pentecostalism, no). It was in 1999 that
Nigeria returned to civil rule after a protracted military rule.
Interestingly enough, the death of the dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha,
that freed all of us from his psychopathic grip and made democracy
possible happened shortly after Pastor Enoch Adeboye of the
Redeemed Christian Church of God’s prophecy. Whether it was
Adeboye’s prophecy that “killed” Abacha or not, the incident
boosted his prophetic influence and turned his church into a
political Mecca of sorts. At the last annual Holy Ghost Congress of
the church held in December 2017, Pastor Adeboye still re-narrated
the story of his prophecy of Abacha’s death.

The person who would become President, Olusegun Obasanjo, had a
straight-out-of-the Bible kind of emotive narrative that appeals to
religious folks: a palace-to-prison story that mirrored that of
Joseph in the Old Testament. Obasanjo’s ascendancy was labelled
“the second coming.” The metaphysical scaffolding of his Presidency
was given more traction by the Christian “theocratic class” (as
Obadare described them) that rose up around him. By spinning
Bible-based narratives of what the Obasanjo momentum meant, they
turned him to a “born-again President.” Obasanjo’s Presidency could
not help but become churchi-fied because Christian organisations
saw him as an answer to what they had always longed for: Religious
and geopolitical power shift to a southern Christian. Thus, the
Pentecostal movement broke the jinx of Christian non-involvement in
political power, and since 1999, they have consolidated their
gains.

Then, there were other contributing factors such as the global
rise of Pentecostalism and its interfaces with local culture and
politics such that the ethos of the Nigerian landscape almost
radically became so pentecostalised. The development aggravated
Muslim discontent and contestation for public space resulting in
the push for Sharia law and various other national dramas. Other
factors that converged around that same period include
Pentecostalism’s tilt towards neo-liberal ideology and its
manifestations in the growth of the prosperity gospel, along with
the emergence of influential and uber-rich jet-setting pastors. The
Pentecostal Republic charts all these convergences, and how the
social and cultural imagery that was impregnated with Pentecostal
ethics since 1999 has continued to reproduce. The result is that we
have an enchanted democracy; one where otherwise rational
intellectual agents like Dr. Reuben Abati (yes, the book names
names) would be emboldened to write an article about demons in Aso
Rock, and it would resonate with the populace whose imagination has
been steeped in the belief that political power and occultism are
embedded, and that the solution to such religious superstition is
more religious superstition.

In 2015, it was remarkable that the power of Pentecostal pastors
ran its limits in their support of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. The
Pentecostal factor did not work for Jonathan as it did for Obasanjo
because of a number of factors, one of them was the excesses of
Jonathan himself (and his wife, Patience; and his spiritual
adviser) who must have thought performing one’s religiosity was an
immutable formula for retaining power. President Buhari undercut
the symbolic worth of Jonathan’s churchy display when he chose the
RCCG pastor and a professor of law, Yemi Osinbajo, as his running
mate thus leaving Jonathan clutching an expired blueprint for
political success; his undertaking of different tawdry dramas in
his desperate bid for votes ending up almost useless. With Osinbajo
by Buhari’s side, all the claims about an imminent Islamisation
agenda vapourised, and Jonathan’s good luck ran out.

The Pentecostal Republic stops its analysis at the 2015
elections, and offers critical insights on the future of Nigerian
Pentecostalism. Considering that the Fourth Republic will hit its
20th anniversary next year, it is essential to reflect on how
religion will continue to shape the political terrain. One cannot
but acknowledge that even though the influence of Pentecostal
pastors climaxed in 2015, it does not mean that they will not
influence the 2019 elections. They will, only one is not so sure
how it will play out. For one, the configurations this time round
are somewhat different from what subsisted in 2015. The frontline
contenders are the Muslim-Fulani, and nobody can successfully spin
a narrative of voting a Christian President that will unshackle us
from the grip of Hausa-Fulani-Islamic domination. It is also
unlikely that either Buhari or Atiku will pander to the church as
excessively as it happened in 2015 – Buhari is too arrogant to
kneel before any pastor and Atiku does not seem to be at home with
that kind of politics of ostentatious acts of piety.

The Christian contenders in 2019 are actually the deputies
–Osinbajo and the PDP’s Peter Obi. Osinbajo has an advantage on
this score because Obi has hardly ever sold himself based on his
Christian faith. Although it must be noted too that when
Pastor-Professor Osinbajo goes out to churches to campaign this
time, he will meet a much different sheep in the Lord’s flock.
Unlike 2015, they will be more circumspect when he begins his usual
smug, self-righteous claim about their government’s moral
superiority. The past three years has proved that the simultaneous
zeal for the house of the Lord and for Aso Rock that consumed
Pentecostal pastors like him has been about power and access,
rather than extending the frontiers of God’s kingdom. Maybe, just
maybe, the overwhelming influence of religious politics will be
attenuated after its phenomenal two-decade run to give a wider room
for discussing critical electoral issues.