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 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 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. 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
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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