Money, The Church and The Men That Call God

If you believe that all 'Men of God' are faultless and every man (or woman) who picks up a Bible and ask people to give their lives to Christ is a saint and will automatically make heaven, this article (or whatever you choose to call it) is not for you. Slowly turn around and walk away. Come back next time when we have something that appeals to you. Thanks!

I reread (with an equal level of awe) the great Wole Soyinka's Jero Plays sometime ago; after I had watched an interview where he said and I roughly quote: 'Brother Jero now has a private jet with which he flies from country to country to continent. He's now an international figure and makes so much money.' Stuff along that line.

For those who have not read The Jero Plays, it is a couple of fantastically written plays about a crook prophet called Brother Jeroboam. The first one is titled Trials of Brother Jero, here, he ceaselessly comes up with ingenious ploys and schemes through which he gains undeserved appraisal and admiration from his members thereby easily defrauding them, too. He preys on the extreme and mostly blind religiousness of people who need God's intervention in a situation. The second is titled Jero's Metamorphosis, here is where Brother Jero probably lays the foundation for what Soyinka now calls 'an international figure.'
It is important at this point to add this caveat: there are real Men of God. There are people who are called by God to help spread His word. I know this for a fact and I know a few of them. The problem however is that there are more false, fake, evil, I-lack-words-to-describe-how-bad-they-are Men of God and prophets around. I heard, not very long ago, a story of a pastor in Nothern Nigeria who borrowed some money from a man and refused to payback. He began to hide and run away at the sight of the man that lent him money. This went on until one fine Sunday when this creditor decided that the best way to get back his money was to visit this pastor in his Church. Perhaps with his members, who hold him in high esteem around, he will behave himself and payback what he owes. The creditor was wrong. When he entered into the Church and the pastor saw him, the pastor(debtor) began to shout: Boko haram, Boko haram (Boko haram is a terrorist organization in Nigeria). The Church immediately swung into chaos, the creditor was now considered by everyone in the Church as a member of the sect boko haram, he was caught and brutally beaten to within an inch of his life. And then handed over to the police. 
Listening to stories like that makes one wonder what the world is becoming. As a matter of fact, that story sounds exactly like something Brother Jero will do.
This brings me to what I consider to be the REAL problem: money. The Church of God has been liquefied and diluted by money. There is too much money being circulated. The pastors have become way too rich so that they can afford jets upon jets upon jets. Don't get me wrong, I have not said Pastors should be paupers and I am not inferring anything along that line. This is simple common sense, because pastors are so wealthy, the job has become highly appealing to ordinary people who are just looking for ways to get rich. These people are not called by God, they call God and they do not really care if He answers or not. All they need to do is pick up a Bible and wear a fancy silver suit and voila! Prophet Frankenstein — casts out demons for a living.

The fact that we as a people are now at the mercy of our pastors is another problem. Many people no longer pray to God, they pray to their pastors. I witnessed this disgust as a student. It was our departmental fellowship and we had invited one of our lecturers to speak (I have no idea why he was chosen of all the lecturers in the department, to be honest). When he came, he started praying in the name of his father in the Lord and not in the name of the Lord Himself. What insolence, I thought. We need to take hold of the authority that God has given us. We need to become responsible for ourselves and our religiousness. Even the Bible has given us authority, each and every one of us. We need to stop depending on pastors for every little thing. I have nothing else to say about this. It is.solely up to us.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!

NB — Pray for Gaza, be human. Little kids are being killed on a daily basis. People are being displaced. Rockets, missiles flying back and forth, yet Israel will not stop.

— It's been exactly One Hundred and One days since over 200 Chibok girls were kidnapped. They're still with their captors. Bombs are going off every day in the North and it's coming closer down south. Pray for Nigeria!

The Burning House

It was a day like any other; the sun was rising, the cock crowed, the birds chirped, the women that wore skimpy dresses and went out late at night came home. The strips of light that gradually crawled into your room through your window pane and formed rectangles on the tiled floor had begun their crawl. Still, you lay on your bed and plotted your day: activities —where to go, what to say whence there; what to wear, what to have for breakfast: to cereal or not to cereal.
You decided to pray that morning, your relationship with God had become of thoughts and not of words, you did not like this, you wanted to be close to God but it felt as if there was a wedge of thorns between you and Him; Him and you. Whenever you began to pray, something almost always took away your attention, almost as if God was the sky and your prayers were admirations, so that the distractions were colourful birds flying; blocking your view from the sky — stopping your admiration, and at the same time, dragging your attention to themselves with their colourfulness.
You closed your eyes and began to pray; and then the noises started. They had this piercing, bustling, painful tone: somebody was in trouble, some people were in trouble. It was not the noise of just one person; it was a collective, painful shriek. It was a help-me-now-or-I-would-die type of shriek. Again, that colourful bird had come to distract you from Him in form of a group of people in pain. Almost outside your house, you smelt smoke, deep smoke of something burning, something big. When you got outside, you saw smoke, not the gray, lazy kind of smoke that one sees when a small fire is extinguished the one that has the colour of the sky on some days, but the black type, the thick black type that spells doom.
It was a house, your neighbours’ house. It had almost been totally engulfed by fire, the duplex that looked so big last night, was looking so bright this morning, so fiery bright. Yellow flame rising up fast, burning, business-like, it seemed as if it had not come to play games with anybody, as if it had no time for such ridiculousness. It was spreading, razing everything in its path; concrete being reduced to ash; pieces of paper being reduced to memories, to thoughts. You could not think fast enough of what a good response was; you were stuck. Should you think about the burning house or the people inside the burning house? People! The family that lived in the house: a man, his wife and their two children. The noises you heard when you had just begun to pray, the shriek! The help-me-now-or-I-would-die shriek. It had come, you suddenly realized, from the burning house. They were people in this burning house. You ran towards the house with a speed that you had never run with since you became you. You entered the compound and found that people had already been gathered — men wearing white singlet and sport shorts, running around the compound carrying buckets: green buckets, yellow buckets, blue buckets. Some others were holding up hoses and watching water from it extinguish small amounts of fire at a time, the fire seemed too large for what a few hoses and some buckets could quench – those were like snails trying to run a dash. But still, they tried. Best for a snail to try and run a dash than for the dash to be left untried. You joined. You found a bucket: a black bucket and scurried like the rest of the men to the nearest tap in the large compound. You could not stop thinking, however, of the shriek. Everybody there knew that there were people in the house but nobody was talking about it, almost as if they were scared to admit that people had been charred, that a family had been burnt to death in their house. It was a scary thought, so it was left un-thought — for sanity’s sake.

Before long a siren began to wail indistinct, the people whose job it was to quench fires, who extinguished fires for a living were finally on their way. When they arrived everyone eased out and watched the firefighters do their job. They did. Thirty minutes passed and the raze finally bowed to the pressure of the water that faced it, the fire was extinguished and the firefighters came out of the compound – each wearing a version of a long face. The crowd gathered around the firefighters, the crowd said nothing, but their faces asked everything.
The family, all four of them — the man, his wife and their two children died in the fire, burnt in the fire, were razed to solid black matter — black ash. Your heart broke as you walked back home. No colourful bird will distract you from praying anymore, and today, you won’t just pray, you would cry because you may be next.

Remembering Our Girls

When a child cries, he cries for a particular reason: it could be that he has dampened his pant with urine, or that he is hungry; and that child never stops crying until his needs are met: when his damp pant is changed or when he has been breastfed. Silence should only come after victory. If there is a deafening uproar, it should never stop until its aims have been achieved.

We heard a deafening uproar when the world knew about the Chibok abductions for the first time. We read about it on the pages of newspapers, we watched grown women cry on our TV screens. We were hurt by their tears of longing to see their daughters again; by their tears of hope and pain mixed in equal proportions, so that one could not outweigh the other.

We witnessed the pain and we shouted together in that single loud voice that only the united can muster. We kept the security agents on their toes with our social media hashtags and real life campaigns on tarred streets. They heard us, they were hearing us, but then, silence followed.  We became quiet because our voices became stifled by the threat of impossibility, the collective loudness of our shouts slowly dissolved into the quietness of hope and then the silence of capitulation.

Our hashtags and rallies, our loud voices of anger and annoyance were muffled into thoughts, and then after-thoughts, we no longer talked about the girls, we thought about them and we hoped. Perhaps, gravely, at this moment, our voices have died; and perhaps, even more gravely those thoughts are disappearing into nothingness and our girls are no longer our girls, but the girls of their parents.

Maybe we need to be reminded that still, as strange as it may sound, teenage girls are missing. Maybe we need to remind ourselves that they were abducted from their schools; their schools where they enrolled because they wanted a better life for themselves. Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that any of these girls could be our daughters, our nieces, our sisters. Maybe we need to remind ourselves that these girls that were abducted have parents and siblings that pray everyday and cry every night because one of them have been taken, stolen in broad day light by evil men who can do whatever they want. Maybe we need to start imagining again, to start wondering again what fate could have befallen them; the lust, the gore.

Our rage should never be diluted until our girls are brought back. We should not sit and watch things unfold. Let us be angry again at the monsters that took them, let us once again press our government and make sure they do not lag because of our silence. Let us find our voices once again and shout that united shout, let us revive this dying uproar of ours. Let us not forget our girls because they indeed still are our girls!

First published on omojuwa

On Teachers and their Importance to Society

My last post, on the First Day of May, was an S.O.S. Open Letter to the Kogi State Governor (I come from Kogi State, by the way, incase a few are wondering.), a call, a challenge to improve the laughable state that Education has found itself - in Kogi State and in Nigeria even, the ridicule that the concept of Teaching has become. Education is important and has become even more important in Nigeria in the face of the senseless killings and terrorism bedevilling the country at the moment. It was written by my friend and brother Ibrahim Husseini.

Today, interestingly, I saw one of my Secondary School class teachers, he used to teach Economics and he was pretty good - seasoning his class lectures with jokes, and not the normal hideous jokes that teachers are known for, pretty good jokes that earnestly put smiles on our faces, and sometimes so much smile that it was accompanied by beads of tears. When you laugh so much, you cry.

He did not remember me, I could tell. Even though after I had told him my name, he nodded and smiled, even though he said 'Oh,', even though he said 'Take care of yourself,' just before he walked away; I could tell he had absolutely no idea who I was. He had taught so many students, it was almost mentally impossible to remember each and every one of them by their faces, and especially impossible to remember me as I was not the type to bring attention to myself when I was in school.

He had tattoed knowledge in our memories from his, I will never forget the concepts: 'Demand and Supply', 'Law of Diminishing Return', 'Various Definition of Economics', 'Labour and Productivity', 'Fiscal Policy', 'GDP', 'Inflation' and so many others because of that man: he engraved them in my head, in our heads, he engraved knowledge. Took from his and added to ours.

He wore a very well starched white shirt, as if he was trying to compensate for something - the shirt had a blue collar and a blue eagle badge at one of its chest pockets, and a well ironed plain black trouser. My school was a private school and I wondered, after I watched him walk away, if he had been content, fulfilled as a  teacher. If passing knowledge to spoilt rich kids was as fulfilling as he had imagined it would be when he first took the job. I wondered how much he was paid - if it was enough to take care of his family, his wife, his kids, his relatives that may have believed that his status of 'employed' and 'city man' was enough to take care of everybody in the village not minding how much he was paid, since to them, the fact that one lived in the city and was 'employed' meant one was reeking with wealth.

Teachers should be paid well, they should not live like paupers. It is simple. They have one of the most important jobs on earth. This brings us back to the extreme usefulness of Ibrahim's Open Letter. A society that mistreats its teachers is a society that mistreats education and any society that mistreats education is evidently heading for the gutter.
My Economics teacher taught in a private school and still I did not think his salary was good enough. Only the government can change this, if the government improves the public schools and pay teachers bountifully, as they should, the private schools will have no choice but to do same.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!

N.B: Pray For Nigeria, we are going through difficult times. It's been exactly one month that the girls from Chibok were kidnapped, they have still not been found.

Save Our Souls by Ibrahim Husseini

SAVE OUR SOUL (SOS)

An Open letter to Governor Idris Wada, Executive Governor of Kogi State.

“Every city should make the common school so rich, so large, so ample, so beautiful in its endowments and so fruitful in its results, that a private school will not be able to live under the drip of it.”
Henry Ward Beecher

Your Excellency Sir,
I greet you in the name of the general discomfort and anger being felt by all the workers in your state, especially PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHERS.
I wish my letter were on a much more pleasing note as it may interest you to know that this is actually the first time I have written an “open” letter to someone as “distinguished” as yourself. I must take you down memory lane, in order for you to understand my sincere grievances and concerns for the poor teachers of Kogi State, who some of you politicians readily refer to as nuisances.
I may be too young to understand the intricacies and complexities of Kogi politics, but I am not too young to understand the illegality of your oath taking ceremony which was administered by the President, Customary court of appeal; Shuaibu Atadoga instead of the constitutionally recognized Chief Judge of the State; Justice Nasir Ajanah. I have nothing against all of these, as I believe it is fate and destiny at work.
What I find hard to stomach and accept as destiny, is why your administration has chosen to throw education to the gutters. It is on record that in less than two years into your four year term, you have conducted series of “screenings”, five(5) by my last count. Your Excellency Sir, five screening exercises in two years of your administration is too many by any standard and a complete show of cluelessness and corruption on the part of those you have contracted to conduct the exercises with the teachers at the receiving end of it all.
The industrial actions have also gone unchecked either on the basis of non - implementation of the Improved Teachers Salary Scale or the National Minimum Wage. With the last industrial action lasting for a whole term (June 2013 to September 2013). It is no longer news that government primary schools have become day-care centres where parents who cannot afford the “real” schools take their children/wards, which is unfortunate to say the least.
As a result of your administration’s attitude towards education, Kogi now ranks as one of the top investment destination for private school operators with ill-equipped private schools springing up in every nook and cranny of the State.
It is also on record that your government under a fraudulent ICT empowerment scheme sold laptop computers of seventy thousand naira (NGN 70,000) at the rate of one hundred thousand naira (NGN 100,000) after publicly claiming to have approved 10% subsidy on the sale of the laptops to teachers who have been groaning in pain over non-implementation of minimum wage and 27.5% allowance and rising cost of living in Kogi.
Only in January 2014 did your administration approve 65% implementation of the minimum wage for primary school teachers in the state while other workers including secondary school teachers have been enjoying this national “blessing” for two years now. The delay in payment of salaries has also worsened with primary school teachers collecting February 2014 salary in the second week of April 2014, not to talk of the fact that teachers celebrated most religious festivals and holidays of 2013 without pay.
Sir, you can take a covert walk around Lokoja, the state capital and ask ordinary Kogites on the streets what they think of government’s handling of primary education and you will know the extent to which this extremely important sector has been ridiculed during your administration.
Lastly, as it is not in my nature to point out problems without proffering simple solutions. There is still enough time to set things straight;
1. Pay teachers their salaries as at when due
2. Approve 100% implementation of the minimum wage and settle outstanding debts.
3. Conduct a sincere and corrupt free screening to detect ghost teachers within the work force.
4.As a leader, do not feel too big to ask other performing governors the methodology in setting things straight in a system as corrupt as ours.
“The countries who out-educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow”
Barrack Obama.

Ibrahim.O.H
ibhusseini@gmail.com
08085024782, 07059223419.

Chaos.

My prose was recently featured in a literary magazine, which is interesting because prior to that time, I had never been featured in a literary anything - magazine, journal, blog - anything. So it's quite a good development. The story was good enough - it talked about mob mentality, which is interesting because it is going on at every corner these days, I once wrote on this blog about the Jungle Justice Mentality. This is a story about it. The writing however, was not all that, to be absolutely honest, but it was manageable, I guess. Here goes, It was first published in Nigerians Talk Litmag:

I was hungry; I had not eaten in days. My stomach kept on reminding me that I was soon going to die: making increasingly loud noises, like the type a grinding machine that needs some oil makes. I had no choice.
I set out to get something, anything that could at least hold my stomach for the meantime until a miracle happens. I tried begging, but trust Nigerians; they would not mind someone giving them some money, not to talk of giving something to a beggar. I received responses like ‘nothing is wrong with you.’ And ‘go and work.’ The truth is that I can work, in fact, I used to work, but there has not been work: ever since the government closed the normal route to the market. Now, people who came to shop, took the back road and therefore parked their cars near themselves. Our business of helping shoppers haul their goods into their cars with our barrows was now quite dead, so there’s no work.

I saw the woman, I monitored her, when her lover came she dropped her small bag that contained all her recharge cards and all the money she had made today, so far. Ah! I am sure it was a lot of money o, the way people usually rush her recharge card, I am sure she uses some kind of jazz, because she is not the only one that sells around, but people buy from her more than anybody else, maybe it is because of the way she looks, she’s very pretty and her back is something else. Anyway, as she dropped the bag on the bench, I thought: this is my chance, if I am smart enough, she will not see me and nobody will catch me. She was laughing with her lover, he must have been deceiving her, maybe he was telling her that he would marry her and she probably believed everything, stupid.

I was very close to the bag, I made sure I observed everywhere to make sure nobody was looking and when the coast was clear I snatched the bag from the bench where it was placed on as though the bench had power to resist, then I started walking away, walking normally, I did not run so that people would not suspect that I was a thief. I thought that I was home and dry; that I had escaped, and then I heard her voice.
‘Thief… Ole… he has stolen my money.’
That was when I began to run, I didn’t hear any footsteps behind me, I knew I heard her shout ‘thief’ but maybe she was not even looking in my direction when she shouted, maybe she was referring to someone else, because I was sure there was nobody behind me. Just as I turned to confirm that she was not referring to me, I felt a big stick strike my jaw violently and down I went, how could this happen? There was nobody running after me, or, so I thought, there were multitudes of people actually. Probably it was the hunger in my belly and the anticipation of food that dwarfed my ability to hear properly.

What is happening to me right now is not a joke. Several heavy sticks have been split on my head, my face is red from all the blood that has seeped into it through the injuries, I am barely conscious. This people want to kill me. I know I was wrong to steal, it’s only just dawning on me that I could have found some other, legal means of getting money instead of trying to steal. Still, is it enough to kill me? Is it enough to take my life? I am begging them, I am crying. I am trying to explain to them that I was very hungry, but they are not listening.
The girl’s lover has brought a tyre; they are planning to set me on fire. ‘Ah, please. Please I will never do it again. Forgive me, please now? Please I promise I will not steal again.’ I shout.

Somebody in the large crowd of vicious humans that has enveloped me says ‘I get kerosene, make we burn the idiot.’

Oh God, why me? What have I gotten myself into? Why did I have to take that bag? Is this how I will die; is this how my life will end? God, where are you? Help me now? They are pouring the kerosene over my body, I can’t even see again. The fuel is burning my eyes.

Hey you, are you in the crowd? Help me now, please, I promise to never steal again, Will you not help me? You are just going to stand there and watch me burn?