By Prof Moses Ochonu
Seriously, some pastors need to stop promoting fraud and breaking homes and relationships.
It’s now evident that there is a connection between the proliferation of Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent enterprises and the actions of some pastors, who put their spiritual imprimatur on some of the schemes or outright promote them.
I have just been told that a relative of mine lost almost 1 million Naira to a Forex scam. The same relative convinced his friends, a couple, to invest N4 million, which is now also lost.
My relative was in turn convinced to invest in the scam by his pastor, who enthusiastically fronted and promoted the fraudulent investment program his congregation.
The most viral and emblematic visual reminder of the MMM scam that gripped Nigeria three or four years ago is a photo of a woman giving a presentation beside a huge MMM poster/banner in a parish of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.
I attend a Redeemed parish and I know that no one gives a presentation to the congregation without the endorsement, vetting, or involvement of the head pastor and the church leadership.
If the pastor didn’t do their due diligence on MMM, a global, mobile scam that had already been exposed and had ravaged people’s life savings in other countries before it made its way to Nigeria, then that’s on them.
The most likely explanation is that the pastor, out of greed, was in on it or was willing to donate the altar to the MMM promoter for her presentation so as not to lose a valuable tithe payer and revenue stream. Either way, the pastor was culpable.
The CEO of the multi-billion Naira scam called MBA Global, with headquarters in Port Harcourt, Maxwell Odum, received the award of highest donor/giver two years in a row in Pastor Oyakhilome’s Christ Embassy. Oyakhilome himself feted and celebrated Odum (photos are all over the internet) for donating what was reported to be in the hundreds of millions of Naira to the church from what we now know to be his Ponzi scheme investors’ funds.
There is clearly an emerging nexus between the Nigerian Pentecostal prosperity preaching industry and the explosion of high profile investment scams and Ponzi schemes in the country. Some scholar should be studying this phenomenon in which pastors and Christian clerical figures are lending credibility to fraudulent endeavors and enabling their flocks to become credulous towards such scams.
Many Nigerians are notoriously beholden to their pastors and are amenable to their counsel and recommendations even to the point of going against Christ’s clear teachings, so it would be interesting to research how many “victims” of these scams invested because their pastors endorsed or promoted the frauds or allowed presentations to be made about them from their pulpits.
In addition to catalyzing and providing tacit support for fraud, some pastors, especially those claiming to possess the prophetic ability to see visions and peer into the spiritual realm to see the cause of problems and imminent dangers, are in the habit of breaking up homes and relationships.
I know someone who cursed out their mother, cut off any interaction with her, and, when the mother passed away, refused to attend the funeral, all because a “man/woman of God” told them that the mother was behind the person and their spouse’s infertility.
A relative of mine traveled all the way to the village to confront and curse out their older sister because some “man/woman of God” told them that the sister was responsible for their failure to have a child. To this day, they do not relate. The relationship, and by extension the family, has been fractured.
I know of a case in which the “man/woman of God” was outright manipulating the couple, pitting them against each other. In their consultations and counselling sessions with her/him, the “prophet(ess)” would tell the husband that his wife was a witch and an adulterer, and the same prophet(ess) would then turn around and tell the wife that her husband was a wizard and a cheater.
Both spouses came to believe that the other had not only betrayed the marital oath of faithfulness but was out to get them spiritually/physically. Needless to say, the “prophetic” counsel put a severe strain on the relationship, with each spouse avoiding the other and lobbing accusations—without evidence—against the other.
It was only after they compared notes in a rare moment of sobriety and rationality that they both realized that the “man/woman of God” had been selfishly manipulating them towards a divorce and the destruction of their precious family while bilking them of a lot of money in the process.
In my local congregation, I have asked the question of why, nowadays, most “prophets” and “men/women of God” blame family members (parents, siblings, uncles, grandparents, and even one’s own children) for misfortunes that are, in the words of Bamidele Ademola-Olateju, results of “the randomness of life and the banality of chance.”
If misfortune afflicts you, you did not offend God. Chances are that you’re not being punished for your sins. You did not offend a relative who is “doing you,” and no one is after you. Read the wise words of Bamidele:
“Be prepared for bad luck…… If you have cancer, you did not offend God, it is either bad genes, a bad environment, or an unlucky mutation. We live in a world of unguided complexity even though there are laws that seems to set things in order. Faith is to help you cope with adversity, it cannot shield you from it. Our brand of religion is a robber of faith. If you subscribe to it, you will feel anguish and great sense of abandonment when affliction hits.”
This explanation is the crux of the matter. But it is neither comforting nor complicated. So, instead of “men/women of God” to reinforce this eternal truth and prepare the faithful to best cope spiritually and physically with adversity, they prey on their fears, insecurities, emotive suspicions, and anxieties. More importantly, the “men/women of God” take selfish pecuniary advantage of the desperate human desire for mysterious, visible, proximate causal explanations and culpabilities when misfortune strikes.
By the way, I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question of why almost every problem that’s taken to a “man/woman of God” nowadays is traced and attributed to the afflicted person’s family member(s).