By Iboro Otongaran
Let’s start this response with the declaration that Pastor Yinka Yusuf was speaking from the fulness of his heart when he said that Akwa Ibom and “Calabar” states were made up of nitwits, zombies and the wretched of the earth. We have a religious justification for that conclusion.
Proverbs 23:7 of the holy Bible says, “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Now the challenge is that the poetic cadences, beauty and meaning woven into the rich text of the old King James Bible, where the above quote is taken from, is often lost on the modern reader. So let’s flip it into everyday English and say, ‘As a man speaks with his mouth, so is his heart.’
This allows us to look at the heart of a pastor named Yinka Yusuf. And what have we found? Ignorance! Mind-numbing ignorance that defines a pastor who boasts of wealth and trashes a whole state as made up of wretchedly poor people, yet rich Pastor Yinka Yusuf does not know that of the 36 states in Nigeria there is none that is called Calabar State! There is poverty and there is poverty!
Rich Pastor Yusuf went on to further demonstrate how terribly knowledge-poor he is by suggesting that Akwa Ibom State is the richest oil-bearing state in Nigeria because, according to him, it receives the highest amount of derivation revenue.
By Yusuf’s standard—given his inability to know names of states in Nigeria—I would say issues around derivation revenue is rocket science to him and he may be forgiven his ignorance for believing that Akwa Ibom State gets the highest share of derivation revenue.
However, Yusuf’s level of ignorance brings two issues to mind. The first is the knowledge-gap hypothesis; the second is the extent of a typical pastor’s understanding of the world he lives in and what he is feeding his flock with.
The knowledge-gap hypothesis divides humanity into two halves: those who are knowledge-rich and those who are knowledge-poor. By this categorisation, the resource-rich can be knowledge-poor. Where do you put the resource-rich Pastor Yinka Yusuf in the knowledge brackets?
The second point to ponder is what the usually knowledge-poor Nigerian pastor feeds his flock with. This point is critical.
The pastor projects himself before his congregation as an elect of God, who communes with and hears directly from God in Heaven. So the congregation believes when the pastor says he is indeed hearing from God. The congregation questions nothing and resists nothing—because God is all-knowing.
So when Pastor Oyakhilome tells a full church that 5G mobile telephone technology is the cause of Covid, and advises his flock against taking vaccines, what kind of life decisions do you think a large swathe of humanity living under his influence would be taking? A pastor is a critical vector of influence. In what direction is he influencing life?
In another real-life instance, Bishop Oyedepo preaches to a full church of more than 400,000 worshippers at Canaan Land that the man governing Nigeria from Aso Rock is a certain Jubrin from Sudan, referencing a satire by Professor Olatunji Dare as his evidence.
With this type of display, the state of knowledge of the pastor and the impact of his preaching thereby become issues of concern.
If a pastor of such catholic influence cannot tell a satire from factual writing, what then does he know? And what level of baleful impact does he have on his congregation—in this case, a congregation of more than 400,000 people, which is about the population of Malta!!!
Let’s go back to the heart of Pastor Yinka Yusuf. Remember as a man speaks, so is his heart.
Proceeding from his speech, I see hate in Pastor Yusuf’s heart, not love—which is the nature of God that Yusuf claims to represent to his congregation.
I see ethnic profiling, not ecumenism that godliness seeks to plant among God’s people. I see pride, and not the humility that Jesus the Christ demonstrated when he washed the feet of his disciples. When I look at Yinka Yusuf’s heart,
I see arrogance, disdain for others, as well as smugness, and not empathy which Jesus the Christ taught the world at Capernaum when he told his disciples not to dismiss those who had come to his crusade at the end of the programme, because they had been with us all day without eating, and might faint on the way if they went away on empty stomach.’
Going by the theory of emanation that light cannot give rise to darkness, what is coming out of Pastor Yusuf is darkness. God is light, and his messengers are carriers of light, and so cannot give rise to darkness. So what does Yinka Yusuf represent, light or darkness?
What Pastor Yinka Yusuf’s preaching implicates is dark, very dark. For me, Pastor Yusuf’s instant outburst represents a metaphor for all that is wrong with the modern Nigerian pastorpreneur.
When a captive slice of humanity, like the church congregation, is subjected to misinformation, hatred, and hubris over time, what results is malformation of the cognitive structure. That slice of humanity unwittingly transitions from a rational state of consciousness into an irrational world of alternative facts. People behave based on their beliefs.
This was clearly made plain between 1933 and 1945, when Hitler herded some of the most rational men and women in the world into that alternative universe through a deliberate programme of untruths, what the Trumpists euphemistically call alternative facts. The outcomes were catastrophic.
The world has yet to fully recover from that calamity, though Trump is currently proving that the Hitler nightmare is replicable.
Outside the nation states, mind-bending programmes had been carried out by church organisations with catastrophic consequences in Waco of Texas, USA; by Jim Jones of Guyana; Reverend King of Ajao Estate, Nigeria; the starvation cult of Uganda; and Jesu Onyibo of Maryland, Lagos.
Each of the cited tragedies has shown that the ignorant, prejudiced, conceited pastor represents a real danger to the society.
Pastor Yusuf’s emptiness knows no limit. He believes that the run of the mill Akwa Ibom man he mocks as the wretched of the earth is to blame for the suboptimal management of the state’s resources. That is the extent of his knowledge.
He doesn’t know the average Akwa Ibom man is a victim of alienation from his heritage by poor leadership, the same way ineptness has turned Lagos, for instance, into an impenetrable thicket of vehicular traffic and flipped daily commute in the city into a snarl that cuts lifespan and costs government and corporations inestimable loss in revenue.
In a one liner I posted earlier on the Yusuf insufferable mindlessness, I said pastors like Yinka Yusuf are the reason I’m not in church. That drew some flak from people who suggested that the reason we are in church is not the pastor.
But how do you do without the pastor and the group dynamics he conjures in that captive humanity I referenced earlier? Group dynamics is a creeper. You’re ensnared before you know it. Then you find yourself a victim of the herd instinct. Even professors have been so ensnared.
Let’s even suppose one is able to stay above the folly one is regaled with weekly in church by way of ignorant, wayward, stupefying sermons, how does one cope with the cognitive dissonance generated therefrom?
Cognitive dissonance, which is the conflict between belief and experience, can be very disconcerting. True religionists live by their heart and not mind, and may be blissfully unaware of the heart and mind conflict. But those who are informed experience the conflict. How does one live with such mental tear all the days of his life because of church membership?
Cognitive conflict is usually resolved by acquiescence or rejection. Bertrand Russell resolved it through rejection, which he explained in his book, _Why I am Not a Christian._ I am a Christian, but I find it hard to cope with the ignorance, superficiality and hate-mongering of the modern Nigerian pastor.
Mr Otongaran, a public affairs commentator, lives in Abuja.
