For those who haven’t taken time to carefully study the zigzag of Pastor Tunde Bakare’s political grandstanding, they would be taken aback by his encomium on ex-governor Bola Tinubu who is pursuing the office president of Nigeria Bakare himself has been self-prophesying to occupy in 2023. The seeming inconsistency of Bakare is actually a long thread of consistency in self-promotion and positioning. I’ll explain.
A few days ago, right from the pulpit of his Church, Bakare poured encomium on Tinubu, while viciously attacking those who raised issue with the dubious place-of-birth background of the former Lagos governor who has singlehandedly installed successive governors of the state since he completed his own two terms in 2007. Bakare went ahead to justify the pillage of the resources of Lagos state through so-called tax consultancy as “merely exploiting a loophole in the system”. Despite knowing how duplicitous he’s been, I shuddered at the unconscionable justification of banditry by a supposed Christian leader spewing such out right from the sacred pulpit of God. Even Satan would be a lot more subtle in his justification of such evil as the monumental pillage that has been going on in Lagos for 21 years.
But those who were genuinely shocked by Bakare’s glorification of Tinubu in his sermon a few days ago were so because they hadn’t forgotten what the same Bakare said of the same lord of Bourdillon barely a year earlier. Read him: “The foolish person would no longer be called generous. You can say ‘so so and so’ has stolen all the money in the state, but he is a very generous man, you are foolish.
“That’s why potholes are killing you, that’s what pools of water… you can’t drive now anymore because what is meant for road has been stolen since democracy began, they are living larger than life having jets here, having jets there, having house in Bourdillon, having house in this place, having house in that place, having house in every place at the expense of the public.
“You will not go without vomiting what you have stolen. Wait, and see. Because a king will reign in righteousness and princes will rule with justice. Unfortunately, Nigeria(n) people, you celebrate your villains and crucify your heroes.”
The villain Bakare rightly vilified in October 2019, he’s celebrating in December 2020. What changed, you would ask?
Nothing has changed. The villain is still a villain. The looting of the commonwealth of Lagos hasn’t abated. What has changed is the political calculation of the man of vision who must occupy Aso Rock by all means in 2023. He’s lobbying seriously that the APC presidential ticket be handed to him on the platter of gold by the cattle chief he deputized for three elections back. Part of the calculation is for him, by cant and flattery, to neutralize the powerful opposition of the Bourdillon lion who is also desperate for the same ticket. The advise from the Cabal is for the pastor to go make peace with the lion so that the latter will not actively work against him from the home front. That’s the mandate. Simple.
It is a measure of the low esteem that someone like Bakare has for the Nigerian public that he would think that people won’t see through shenanigans as this. But he should have known that Nigerians are not so dumb as to not see through his hypocrisy and duplicity. How possible is it not to know the Bakare that mobilized against subsidy removal in 2012 only to keep mute about its removal in 2020, and later actually later came out to justify it? Or that people can’t see the staggering hypocrisy of the Bakare that condemned Pastor Adeboye for building a N3 billion auditorium only for him to erect one for N12 billion that he pompously christened The Citadel? How about his many failed prophecies against then President-elect Olusegun Obasanjo that he swore God told him would never be sworn in as president in 1999? And then his many prophecies about a Nigerian saviour who would come from Adamawa in 2007? He described the fellow as “a gentle shoot” that would put Nigeria right. All that, of course, before he started prophesying about himself as the anointed of God for the Aso Rock seat.
Now, even if God told a man what he would do with him and for him, just a little knowledge of the Bible that Bakare carries about should instruct that self-help thwarts God’s agenda. Despite all the prophetic misses of Bakare on the political trajectory of Nigeria, I still won’t commit the error of saying definitively that God couldn’t have spoken to him along the line he’s claiming. But one thing I’m sure of as a Christian is that God isn’t the author of confusion. God doesn’t approbate and reprobate at the same time. The supposed God’s servant who condemned someone just yesterday and is praising that same fellow the day after couldn’t have been driven by the Holy Spirit of God.
The Spirit of God brooks not the kind of desperation that would make a Christian Minister sell out the Body of Christ as Bakare did in 2015 and 2019 and as he’s trying to do his Yoruba race for the prize of 2023. By their fruit you’ll know them, so says the Master Himself.
My counsel to this my brother-in-Christ is that he should relax and let God work out His purpose in his life and for Nigeria. The disposition to self-promote, defile the pulpit of God for inordinate ambition, lick the arse of a failed man of power, and consistently play on public intelligence are neither edifying nor promotive of God’s purpose. All the ongoing schemings of the power mongers will soon be revealed to be exactly as the counsel of Ahitophel. Bro, calm down; please calm down!
* Kawonise, former Commissioner for Information, Ogun State, is publisher/Editor-in-Chief, NewsScroll newspaper.
