People tend to be alarmed when the
Nigerian Presidency – Aso Rock – 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 those our
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 any harm, I am
writing!), have all experienced a re-awakening.
Everyone 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 Rock, 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 Rock 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 All Progressives Congress, 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 Rock 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. He talked 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 Rock is in urgent need of redemption. I
never slept in the apartment they gave me in that Villa for an hour.
Dr. Reuben Abati was
spokesman and special adviser, media and publicity to President Goodluck
Jonathan (2011 – 2015). He tweets from @abati1990
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