*Photo: Bamidele Johnson*
A couple of days ago, I told a friend that one or more of Nigeria’s private jet-owning pastors will someday say, to lusty cheers, that his aircraft flew from here to London without fuel. Or that fuel got finished mid-air and he spoke in tongues, raised his hand or laid it on the emergency exit and the plane had full tank of aviation fuel supplied by birds. Or any other story in the same range as Aladin and the Lamp. Safe bet after one of them drove over 200km on an empty tank and another facilitated international travel through ulo nsi.
Flying a plane on empty tank hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen and it won’t be long. Two days ago, Aanu Ojo, a preacher about whom I just heard, narrated what he claimed to have seen at a three-day miracle crusade held by the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa, a money-mongering and peacocking preacher of yore. On the last day of the crusade, a female member in the grip of excitement at the miracles wrought fell from the church gallery.
Her head cracked open like a melon, spilling her brain, blood and whatever else her cranium held. I am assuming that the eyes also leapt out of their sockets, while the impact launched her teeth into space like rockets. Idahosa, who was making announcements at the time, didn’t flinch despite his audience freaking out and wailing hysterically. He was said to have continued making the announcements.
Ojo named Apostle Johnson Suleman, a chorister in Idahosa’s church at the time, as a witness. Even if I wanted to believe his story, the mention of that career fibber’s name woulda made that impossible. Well, Ojo claimed Suleman rushed to where the woman was sprawled like a battlefield casualty and could do nothing. When Idahosa finished reading out the notices, he asked his traumatised followers to give way. They did and he commanded the woman to rise. The brain obeyed and went back into the shattered cranium, with the blood also going back to from whence it came!
I’ve also seen another video of some other pulpit swindler telling a story about Idahosa. The plainclothes clown said the bricklayers at a building site owned by Idahosa ran out of gravel and they told the preacher. He simply commanded the gravel to be rising like aroso or dough with a lot of yeast. The workers never ran out of gravel until work was completed at the site, the plonker said.
These guys don’t rate their followers. The followers don’t rate themselves. I’d have said Idahosa would be turning in his grave on account of the fables woven around him. He wouldn’t because the dead don’t and can’t turn, but more importantly because he was of a similar hue.