When a nation misuses God (1), By Ayo Akerele

According to George Hegel, “The only thing we can learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.”

In an article written and released by Pastor Bosun Emmanuel in the early part of 2022, he said, and I quote, “Three things defile a land and bring curses upon the people, Bloodshed, Adultery, and Idolatry. When a land goes astray in this manner, it is the judgment of God that purges the land and restores righteousness.”

Benue is bleeding. Plateau is bleeding. In my personal estimation, Nigeria has excelled meritoriously in all of the three vices. Consequently, the land is under divine judgement, believe it or not.

Going further in his sermon, Pastor Bosun said, and I quote, “It amounts to spiritual irresponsibility for any Pastor or any preacher in Nigeria to preach any sermon apart from holiness, righteousness, and morality in this season. Preaching “breakthrough” and “prosperity” in this season is an act of irresponsibility that must be judged by God. Evil is overtaking the land because the Church that “s” meant to restrain evil has yielded ground to evil. Many current Church leaders have accommodated and consorted with evil and provided Satan with legal ground to ravage the country. If the Church had not endorsed evil and corruption, evil would not be so emboldened to devastate Nigeria.”

Gilbert Chesterton once said, “Coziness between church and state is bad for the church but good for the state.” Where things have taken an unfortunate turn is this, the Nigerian Christians, many of whom, in my estimation, are not true disciples of Christ, have been conditioned to deploy prayer as the sole remedy for fixing their nation’s rot. It is as clear as the night is to the day that an average Nigerian Christian is very docile when it comes to understanding their rights and responsibilities in fighting for what is right and choosing good over evil in the time of elections. The people have, sadly, been conditioned to accept any leader that emerges as God’s will. The rest, they say, is history. This “God’s wills” have repeatedly collaborated with both local and foreign actors to destroy Nigeria, end-to-end, year-over-year, and regime-over-regime.

But of importance to today’s write up is the economic collapse of Germany, and how Hitler and the Nazis weaponized this collapse to their best advantage. Of importance is the fact that there is a striking ideological similarity between the German leaders of the 1940s and those that have ruled Nigeria since 1960s. The only difference is that the Nazis operated at a higher scale of evil, plunging their nation and the entire world into a full bloodbath, while Nigerian past and present leaders have successfully plunged their own nation into social, mental, political, and economic collapse. Let me take you back to history books of the second world war.

After the first World War, Germany which was largely blamed by the western power houses, Britain, America, France, and the rest of the world for starting the first world war, entered into a severe economic crisis, partly due to the great depression that led to the collapse of the US stock exchange market, ultimately leading to the withdrawal of the loans that Germany received from many of her American lenders. Additionally, the economic collapse of Germany was also due to the hefty reparation costs of war that were levied against Germany.

If Germany was responsible for starting the 1st world war, it followed that she must pay reparations in dollars as a punishment for starting the war. Aside from other penalties and punishments that were placed on Germany, The treaty of Versailles, signed in 1919 mandated Germany to pay the initial whooping sum of $33 billion as compensation for the human cost of lives during the 1st world war. Because Germany could not afford this hefty fine, the government resorted to printing money, and boom, their economy collapsed. Unemployment soared to the highest level in their history, inflation skyrocketed. There were mass layoffs. People queued for food in their thousands and could only receive little. The German currency called “Mark” exchanged as one trillion Mark for one $USD. Things were so bad that unused “Marks” were used to light fire, while children used the “Marks” to build toys and castles, it was completely useless.

Join the Premium Times WhatsApp Community For Quick Access To News and Happenings Around You.

Open in WhatsApp

There was a popular story in the 1930s that described the experience of a woman who pushed wheelbarrow filled with bundles of “Marks” across the street of Berlin. On her way to a particular destination, she packed the wheelbarrow outside of a coffee shop to buy a cup of coffee in a shop.

When she returned, thieves had offloaded all her bundles of money to the floor and had stolen the wheelbarrow. That was how bad the economy of Germany was. It was in that economic environment that Hitler became the chancellor, and ultimately the supreme leader of Germany. The rest they say, is history. He weaponized the collapsed economy to present himself as the messiah of Germany until 60 million people were massacred in the second world war.

Come back to Nigeria in 2025. It is an open secret that Nigeria has been fully captured by the evil forces of ethno-religious politics. But my point isn’t really about the obvious, but about the impending collapse and disintegration of Nigeria, which of course, is a sign of progress to many people, particularly to some of us who see no future in the present evil system that is binding Nigeria together.

Not that the majority of Nigerians don’t know the difference between evil and good. It is much worse. Past and present state actors have silenced the voices of opposition that could potentially challenge them to move the ship of the nation in the right direction. What can you do in a nation where the slogan, “go to court” is the norm in the camp of the captors. For as long as this breed of leaders, sorry, dealers, remains in the picture, what happened in Germany would be a child’s play compared with what will happen to Nigeria.

We are in a season of God, state, and mind capture, the capturing of the levers of government, the capturing of the minds of the people, the capturing of common resources, the capturing of the will and resolve of people to fight for their rights, the capturing of the levers of the law, and most importantly, the capture of God–arm-twisting God to take on our own responsibilities, a duty that the God of heaven will never ascent to. To sum it up, we have achieved the complete conditioning of the mental capacity of the Nigerian people with religion, telling the people to pray to God to use corrupt leaders to favour them; telling the people to pray to God to protect them; telling the people to pray to God to change the economy; telling the people to pray to God to judge terrorists, and telling the people to pray to God to fix Nigeria. It is called, “God capture.” Hear this again, Dr David Jeremiah once said that if Jonathan Edwards famous book, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God should be written in our days, it should have been, “God in the hands of angry sinners.” To be continued

Ayo Akerele is the senior pastor of Rhema Assembly and the founder of the Voice of the Watchmen Ministries in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached through [email protected]