People tend to be
alarmed when the Nigerian Presidency takes certain decisions. They don’t think
the decision makes sense. Sometimes, they wonder if something has not gone
wrong with the thinking process at that highest level of the country. I have
heard people insist that there is some form of witchcraft at work in the
country’s seat of government. I am ordinarily not a superstitious person, but
working in the Villa, I eventually became convinced that there must be
something supernatural about power and closeness to it. I’ll start with a
personal testimony.
I was given an apartment to live in inside the
Villa. It was furnished and equipped. But when my son, Michael arrived, one of
my brothers came with a pastor who was supposed to stay in the apartment. But
the man refused claiming that the Villa was full of evil spirits and that there
would soon be a fire accident in the apartment. He complained about too much
human sacrifice around the Villa and advised that my family must never sleep
overnight inside the Villa.
I thought the man
was talking nonsense and he wanted the luxury of a hotel accommodation. But he
turned out to be right. The day I hosted family friends in that apartment and
they slept overnight, there was indeed a fire accident. The guests escaped and
they were so thankful. Not long after, the President’s physician living two
compounds away had a fire accident in his home.
He and his children could have died. He
escaped with bruises. Around the Villa
while I was there, someone always died or their relations died. I can confirm
that every principal officer suffered one tragedy or the other; it was as if
you needed to sacrifice something to remain on duty inside that environment. Even
some of the women became merchants of dildo because they had suffered a special
kind of death in their homes (I am sorry to reveal this) and many of the men
complained about something that had died below their waists too. The ones who
did not have such misfortune had one ailment or the other that they had to
nurse. From cancer to brain and prostate surgery and whatever, the Villa was a
hospital full of agonizing patients.
I recall the
example of one particular man, an asset to the Jonathan Presidency who
practically ran away from the Villa. He said he needed to save his life. He was
quite certain that if he continued to hang around, he would die. I can’t talk about colleagues who lost
daughters and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and fathers, and the many
obituaries that we issued. Even the President was multiply bereaved. His wife,
Mama Peace was in and out of hospital at a point , undergoing many surgeries.
You may have forgotten but after her husband lost the election and he conceded
victory, all her ailments vanished, all scheduled surgeries were found to be no
longer necessary and since then she has been hale and hearty.
By the same token,
all thoseour 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 wives (take it easy boys, I don’t mean nay harm, I am writing!), have
all experienced a re-awakening.
Every one who went under the blade has
received miraculous healing, and we are happy to be out of that place. But
others were not so lucky. They died. There were days when convoys ran into
ditches and lives were lost. In Norway, our helicopter almost crashed into a
mountain.
That was the first time I saw the President
panicking, The weather was all so hazy and he just kept saying it would not be
nice for the President of a country to die in a helicopter crash due to pilot
miscalculations. The President went into a prayer mode.
We survived. In
Kenya once, we had a bird strike. The plane had to be recalled and we were
already airborne with the plane acting like it would crash. During the 2015
election campaigns, our aircraft refused to start on more than one occasion. The
aircraft just went dead. On some other occasions, we were stoned and directly
targeted for evil. I really don’t envy the people who work in Aso Villa, the
seat of Nigeria’s Presidency. For about six months, I couldn’t even breathe
properly. For another two months, I was on crutches. But I considered myself
far luckier than the others who were either nursing a terminal disease or who
could not get it up.
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 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.
Should I become President of Nigeria
tomorrow, I will build a new Presidential Villa: a Villa that will be dedicated
to the all-conquering Almighty, and where powers and principalities cannot hold
sway. But it is not about buildings and
space, not so?. It is about the people who go to the highest levels in Nigeria.
I really don’t
quite believe in superstitions, but I am tempted to suggest that this is indeed
a country in need of prayers, We should pray before people pack their things
into Aso Villa. We should ask God to guide us before we appoint Ministers. We
should, to put it in technocratic language, advise that the people should be
very vigilant.
We have all failed
so far, that crucial test of vigilance. We should have a Presidential Villa
where a President can afford to be human and free. In the White House, in the
United States, Presidents live like normal human beings. In Aso Villa, that is
impossible. They’d have to surround themselves with cooks from their villages,
bodyguards from their mother’s clans and friends they can trust. It should be
possible to be President of Nigeria without having to look behind one’s
shoulders. But we are not yet there.
So, how do we run a
Presidency where the man in the saddle can only drink water served by his
kinsman? No. How can we possibly run a
Presidency where every President proclaims faith in Nigeria but they are better
off in the company of relatives and kinsmen. No. We need as Presidents men and
women who are wiling to be Nigerians. No Nigerian President should be in
spiritual bondage because he belongs to all of us and to nobody.
Now let me go back to the spiritual
dimension. A colleague once told me that I was the most naïve person around the
place. I thought I was a bright, smart, professional doing my bit and enjoying
the President’s confidence. I spelled it
out. But what I got in response was that I was coming to the villa using Lux
soap, but that most people around the place always bathed in the morning with
blood. Goat blood. Ram blood. Whatever animal blood. I argued.
He said there were persons in the Villa
walking upside down, head to the ground. I screamed. Everybody looked normal to
me. But I soon began to suspect that I was in a strange environment indeed.
Every position change was an opportunity for warfare. Civil servants are very
nice people; they obey orders, but they are not very nice when they fight over personal
interests.
The President is most affected by the
atmosphere around him. He can make wrong decisions based on the cloud of evil
around him. Even when he means well and he has taken time to address all
possible outcomes, he could get on the wrong side of the public. 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. Hetalked 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.
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