In probably one of the amusing developments of the season, the police service system in Ghana warned religious leaders against issuing prophecies of doom during the crossover service night. Anyone who transgresses risks five years of imprisonment, they stated. According to the police, those prophets whose spiritual antennae never picks up any other future probabilities other than impending harm, danger, and death, ultimately create tension and panic in society, thus making those prophecies self-fulfilling. As the police service astutely noted, the implication of prophesying doom is that people’s belief makes them act on their fear enough to turn the moral panic that attends doomsday prophecies into social reality.
While the observation by the police is interesting enough, they might also be ascribing too much of the power to spin mischief to prophets. The police accusing the prophets of shaping reality through their pronouncements might be overhyping the social relevance of those prophets just to blame—and punish them—for social breakdowns. Do people take those end-of-year prophesies seriously enough to warrant threatening prophets with jail terms? Rather than resorting to punishment and trampling people’s freedom of religion, thought, and speech in the process, would it not be more effective to undercut the basis of the public’s belief in those prophecies?
The threat to prosecute doomsday prophets is amusing but only in the ways even a tragedy can make for good comedy. The Ghanaian police remind you of certain Nigerian leaders who make similar devious propositions to regulate social media to forestall an impending doom. There is something about the police system in our African society that makes threats and concomitant punishments more attractive means of social regulation than a measured thoughtfulness of the forces that makes certain actions inevitable. A part of me hopes that a Ghanaian prophet would dare contravene the police so that we can see how the prosecutors and the defense counsel thrash out such a case in the court. How do you jail a prophet for merely prophesying without also dealing with the complex dynamics of religious beliefs and democracies? By what parameters does one even measure what constitutes a doom prophecy?
According to the statement released by the police, “it is a crime for a person to publish or reproduce a statement, rumour or report which is likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace, where that person has no evidence to prove that the statement, rumour or report is true.” But what could possibly constitute “evidence” in a prophecy, a form of speech-making supposedly inspired by a supernatural force? Prophecies or maybe even prophetic declarations are a mode of saying what could or would happen in the future, so how can they be evidence-based? They are not supposed to be mere factual observations but projections. Besides, prophets were rabble-rousers and a social conscience in much of Bible history. Asking them to speak only peace and goodwill is undemocratic, against the ontology of their faith, and a step towards fascistic state policies.
In some ways, the directive is also an indictment of the prophecy and prophetic declarations that have been so banalized by the men of God desperate to trend for 24 hours. Otherwise, prophecies offered at the end of the year should be an opportunity to reflect on a passing year while also charting directions for the new year. Such tasks, of course, are not solely for the religious or the intellectual. It should be a rite of collective introspection into how the year was spent, the seized and missed opportunities, and the resolutions toward what could be better. The year 2021 that wraps up in about 48 hours, to tell the truth, was largely without much social progress for Nigeria. Right now, we could do with some informed projections into the coming year. 2021 was wasted time because Nigeria achieved practically nothing throughout the period. From the perennial issues of power generation to healthcare, education, economic development, and security, the country regressed so quite badly that even the administration’s familiar spin doctors have yet to muster enough disingenuity to score their paymasters.
At this stage, nobody needs a prophet to paralyze the polity with pessimistic prophecies any further. Even a child born last night knows the country is adrift. There is no sense of governance or even a basic purpose guiding us as a nation. Wherever there is an abundance of gloom and doom, there will always be prophets who will ride on the wave of bleakness and despair endemic in the social atmosphere to foresee even more darkness. In a society like Nigeria, predicting evil does not require much creativity beyond a superficial probe of the human imagination. You could make virtually any negative assertion, and it would likely come to pass. In such a context, doom prophecies merely speak the obvious and anything to the contrary looks like opiating society into delusions.
Recently, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) said that the Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) regime has successfully tackled terrorism and insecurity in Nigeria because he had not heard of attacks on markets and worship houses for a while now. Now one does not need a prophetic unction to authoritatively state that this regime’s senses of perception have been deadened and that the official blindness and deafness exhibited by Malami will get even more acute in the coming year. With the recent spate of attacks in states like Sokoto, Kaduna, Adamawa, Taraba states—and even factoring in the ever-rising rate of professional abductions by “bandits”—Malami should not have had to “hear” about violent attacks. The fact that a whole AGF abjures self-evident reality while also announcing that he bases his assessment on mere hearsay shows these people have resorted to merely marking time. A prophet does not need much wit to project what the coming year would look like under the watch of such leadership that possesses neither a sense of duty nor the urgency to drive an agenda of social change.
Despite the stagnation that defined this year, one need not be a prophet to also project that the new year will be an extremely vibrant one. The year 2022 will be Nigeria’s year of politicking, the culmination of the horse-trading of the past few years and the desperate wresting of power by the members of the political class who have been waiting in the wings. In a country where what defines the idea of time is the space between two presidential elections, we can also take it for granted that the intense politicking of 2022 would be shorn of actual governance. All the political actors and hopefuls, from every nook and cranny of the country, will be camped out in the Federal Capital Territory throughout 2022.
If Malami of 2021 says he no longer hears the cries of the many Nigerians, whose lives have been diminished under their administrative watch, one can expect that Malami of 2022—as well as the rest of his ilk—will grow even deafer within the din of political activities that will surely take over every minute of the coming year. Much of the wild flurry of activities that will take place will bear no relation to the deepening multi-dimensional poverty that increasingly assaults the people. That disconnect between the vibrant political sphere and the reality of average Nigerians will constitute a significant problem. For instance, we have spent the past few weeks discussing the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2021 that did not become law. There are some speculations that when the National Assembly resumes early next year, they will resolve the contentions of that bill along with other issues. Those are the debates that will suck oxygen from the social atmosphere such that by this time next year, political progress will be defined through the prism of which public official still manages to pay salaries. Within such a social context, the prophet who sees doom will be the realist while the one who sees the possibility of boom will be taken for an anarchist.
END
Be the first to comment