God’s Ponzi

By Hymar Idibie

 

Recently, Pastor Paul Adefarasin, founder of the House on the Rock church, a middle-and-upper-class targeted church based in Lekki, hosted his annual The Experience gospel music concert.

The Experience has been holding every December for the last seventeen years. And each year, the program, its main appeal resident in the lineup of global and national gospel music superstars, has never failed to draw crowds.

This year was supposed to be different.

Because 2023 was the year of the presidential election that was supposed to remove APC from 8 years of waste and destruction in power. 2023 was the year the country had the chance to make perhaps the most important change in its history. 2023 was the year APC showed brazen disregard for the will of the people, fielding the worst of the worst in a drug dealer and a religious extremist.
It was the year violent bigotry became a campaign tool.

It was also the year of unmasking. Religious leaders, especially megachurch pastors, took off their masks of piety and aloofness and volunteered themselves as willing mouthpieces for candidates whose personalities, histories and characters went against everything those pastors preached.

We saw pastors begin to twist portions of scripture to canvass support for drug dealers, agbero enablers, terrorist supporters, hateful bigots and thieves. We saw Paul Adefarasin mount the pulpit to deliver sermons trying to discredit a candidate who says ‘if you can bring evidence of corruption against me, I will withdraw from this race’ in support of a candidate who not only has a history of corruption and criminal prosecution, but has also shown signs of mental and physical fragilities; the exact signs we saw in the outgoing president Buhari before he presided over 8 years of sheer failure, mass poverty and deaths.

When the criticism against his utterances and attempts at manipulation began, it looked like Nigerians had finally woken up to the truth about shady personalities like Paul Adefarasin. It looked like 2023 was the year we would memorize the faces of our enemies and treat them as such.
2023 was going to be different.

But the crowd that thronged Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos for this year’s edition, showed otherwise. The culture of forgive-and-forget and leave-am-for-God was obviously more prevalent among Nigerians than their need to survive.
I remember seeing the same people who joined to aggressively condemn his utterances during the election period, making posts about going to the event, canvassing for more people to go. Some responded to criticisms with “Election is over, life continues”. “What is the difference between attending the Experience and a Burna concert? Why the hate for Christians?”

The problem is, election is never over. Because for the next four and eight years, we will be living with the consequences of the elections. Life will continue, but have you stopped to ask yourself the quality of life it would be?

The reason why, despite clearly showing himself as a member of the oppressive establishment, Paul Adefarasin and his likes enjoy mass patronage, is what I call God’s ponzi. Gather together and give God praise and small tufaif offering, then expect a floodgates of miracles. Doesn’t matter if you voted in career criminals and nepotistic opportunists. Miracle no dey taya Jesus, no?

People like Paul Adefarasin understand that it doesn’t matter how much you insult the collective intelligence of Nigerians or spit on their faces, their obsession with the supernatural is greater than their survival instincts.

As long as the culture of ‘I go manage’ and ‘God go do am’ still exists, criminals, thieves, murderers and incompetent frauds will keep having popular support and people like Paul Adefarasin will suffer no consequence for endorsing them. Their churches will stay full on Sundays, their concerts will stay crowded, their bank accounts will stay full, and they will still have an army of struggling, unemployed and endangered Nigerian Christians, who made up 90 per cent of an estimated 5621 murdered Christians between January and August 2023, Nigerian Christians, whose deaths have never been spoken up for by these religious Ponzi overlords, Nigerian Christians, who are currently praying for opportunities to japa, to call them “daddy.”