A Christian convert from Islam, Pastor Tunde Bakare has also taken up politics alongside his pastoral duties. Successful beyond any measure in his ecclesiastical calling, the same cannot be said of his venturing into politics. Bakare lost the 2011 presidential election as running mate to Muhammadu Buhari of the Congress for Progressive Change. By the time Buhari won the same presidential election four years later as candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bakare was not anywhere near him. A pastor of a rival Pentecostal church made it to Aso Villa with the general. So it was in 2019 when Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo were re-elected. Unwavering in his assurance of divine backing and unrelenting in his, some now say, Quixotic quest, Bakare made a stab at the presidency in 2023 and recorded zero vote in the APC primaries. Notwithstanding, his political pronouncement do not count for nothing. In January 2012, he spearheaded Save Nigeria Group to protest proposed removal of fuel subsidy by Goodluck Jonathan’s Administration at the now famous Ojota sit-in. Three years later, Jonathan’s government was booted out like an irritant pollutant from Nigeria’s political space. Exactly a week ago and still on oil subsidy removal, this time from the inner recesses of a swanky church he presides over at Oregun – a glancing distance away from Ojota – Bakare made his by now famous State of the Nation address. To what end? THEWILL wonders. Michael Jimoh reports…
As a preacher, Pastor Tunde Bakare already has what politicians crave most: the ability to make people not only believe what he tells them but also take him seriously. Every Sunday without fail, thousands of worshippers rise to their feet at his command, pray, sing or dance as it is done in most other Christian worship centres.
The Citadel Global Community Church on 30 Kudirat Abiola Way Oregun where he holds court is one of the swankiest religious centres in Lagos, boasting of 5,500-seater auditorium and an events centre with over 2000 seating capacity. There is a free e-library, a swimming pool, parking space for over 500 cars as well as 250 toilet facilities. There is a pharmacy, hospital, banking halls, shopping malls and kindergarten school.
The capacious compound just by First Bank Bus stop is packed every day of the week with sundry visitors but mostly so on Sundays when worshippers fill the pews and traipse the aisles. For hours, they listen raptly to the Sunday sermon, look up to him as he paces right and left, back and forth, exhorting worshippers to follow the righteous path to become better Christians or better human beings. In bespoke suits, nifty shoes and fancy-framed spectacles, it is impossible to not listen up to this man of modest build with the physique of a jockey. Nimble as a tennis player, Pastor Bakare holds his audience spellbound with his mesmerizing performance, spouting off philosophers and theologians many of his congregation scarcely know or have heard of. No matter. Congregants do get the message anyhow, as they did on Sunday August 13 when Bakare surprised all with a State of the Nation speech.
“Vice, Virtue and Time: the three things that shall never stand still” was the theme of his special message, covering everything from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s removal of fuel subsidy, arrest and detention of two former principal officers and holdovers from President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to the recent coup in Niger and ECOWAS’s response to the change of government.
One thing must be said for Pastor Bakare though: he has the daring of prophets of pre-Christian era even though some of his predictions never come to pass. “God told me I will be president,” he boasted in 2018. On another occasion, he declared that he would become the 16th president of Nigeria after Buhari’s 15. Both failed. But what he had to say this time were far from out of context revelations from God.
The trouble was not so much with removal of fuel subsidy by PBAT as the problem of corruption, Bakare thundered from the pulpit. An obvious question to ask is: Why was he against the same subsidy removal in 2012 that he now supports? He seemed to provide an answer himself.
“Kill corruption,” he told his audience and, by extension, the rest of the world, “and not Nigerians.”
The removal of the subsidy has made life more challenging for Nigerians. “What is further clear concerning our domestic challenges is that by imposing hardship on Nigerians without going after those corrupt individuals, corporations and government officials, who have plundered Nigeria over the years in the name of subsidy, the president has picked the wrong fight.”
Worse still is that while PBAT devoted so much time to the faceless individuals behind the subsidy scam, he neglected to mention any one of them. It got the pastor’s goats, prompting him to ask: “Who are these select groups of individuals into whose deep pockets our national treasury has been funneled? Who are these smugglers and fraudsters that have been defrauding our nation in the name of subsidy? Who are these nameless characters that have fed fat at the expense of the poor? Or are they all sacred cows?”
As a card-carrying member of the APC and as a concerned Nigerian, Bakare has every right to question some of the government’s policies he isn’t quite comfortable with. Besides, in the body of the speech itself, he explains what progressive politics ought to be, ought to contend with and put squarely in its sightline.
‘’As progressivism eliminates a corruption-ridden subsidy regime, it would not hesitate to boost or underwrite access to factors of production such as energy, infrastructure, and human resource in an atmosphere of transparency and accountability.
‘’A progressive approach to the subsidy conundrum would have been characterised by a phased removal of subsidy, buffered by transparent investments in local refining capacity and social welfare, while the corrupt individuals and corporations that have bled the nation are compelled to return their loots.”
Rather than do this, the continued detention of Godwin Emefiele and Abdulrasheed Bawa of the CBN and EFCC respectively has a ring of vendetta to it. Citing the incident in a Lagos High Court where the DSS brawled with officers of the Nigeria Correctional Service of Ikoyi Prisons over who should have custody of Emefiele, Bakare pointedly noted that “the actions of the DSS have raised concerns about professionalism and adherence to the rule of law. Instances such as the reported invasion of the premises of the EFCC and the handling of the case of the suspended Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Mr Godwin Emefiele, have sparked discussions regarding the need for due process and equitable application of justice.”
The preacher equally criticized the continued incarceration of Bawa. “The same can be said of the detention of the suspended chairman of EFCC…Mr. Bawa was not only linked to the naira redesign policy, but he had also disclosed that the anti-graft agency would arrest and prosecute some outgoing governors after the expiration of their immunity on May 29, 2023.”
In both cases, Bakare averred, the DSS “has reduced itself to a pack of Napoleon’s dogs let loose on perceived opponents of the president when, in this same country, a militant like Asari Dokubo is openly breeding an armed militia in open support of the president, doing so with impunity and without as much as a slap on the wrist from the security agencies.”
On the international front, Bakare expressed his misgivings about ECOWAS military intervention in Niger. It will be counterintuitive on the regional body because it could turn out to “be a protracted conflict.”
For all his well-rehearsed and spot-on SoN address, some in the APC have dismissed Bakare’s special Sunday sermon on August 13. Responding on the same day, National Secretary of the party Senator Ajibola Basiru accused Bakare of “incompetence to speak on the economic reforms” of the president. The lawmaker availed himself of Channels Television’s “Politics Today” hours after Bakare’s SoN address to counter his claims.
“I must quickly comment on what Pastor Bakare said,” Basiru began by telling his interviewer on Channels. “Although I don’t see him as a politician and with respect to him, I don’t see him as being competent to say what he has said. The fact that we are talking of palliatives does not mean we are not talking about the dysfunctions, imbalances in the economy and addressing the fundamental problems. We are not limiting our problems to the issue of palliatives.”
Explaining further, Basiru insisted that the fact that the pastor is a Nigerian “does not mean he is an authority on all issues. I said competence on what he is talking about. The fact that you have ideas doesn’t mean you are competent in what you are saying. But he is entitled as a citizen.”
Which brings up the question of the pastor as a politician. As a politician, Bakare simply lacks what many politicians require to rise up in the political ladder: victory at the polls. In the minds of many, Bakare has not fared well in that regard. Despite his claims to commands from God himself to never give up his political career, he has not quite advanced from where he was in the beginning. In his New Year sermon at Latter Rain Assembly Ogba in 2018, Bakare told his congregation of 12 revelations received from God, the last of which concerned his political career.
“This twelfth one is a difficult one for me,” Bakare said at the time. “It may draw excitement or condemnation. I have tried my best to keep it to (myself) but the Holy Spirit will not allow me to do so. In my study around 4am on Sunday morning, God told me ‘you cannot bring your political career to a close; there is still more to do. Run for presidency. I will do it at the appointed time.”
Of course the appointed time, as most people now know, did not come in the 2019 presidential election. Nor did it in 2023 after boasting that he will succeed Buhari. “I will succeed Buhari as President of Nigeria, nothing can change it. I am number 16, Buhari is number 15. I never said it to you before. I am saying it now and nothing can change it. In the name of Jesus, he (Buhari) is number 15. I am number 16. To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world. I have prepared you for this for more than 30 years.”
Men of God in Nigeria making predictions about others or themselves that never quite come to pass are aplenty. The outspoken senior pastor of CGCC is not alone in that. Still in the same Oregun, his colleague and co-traveller on the same political path Chris Okotie of the Household of God Church also boasted he would be elected president of Nigeria. It never got to be, making both of them dreamers as far as the presidency of the country is concerned.
Even so, there is nothing wrong in dreaming. The charismatic senior pastor’s dream of becoming president of his own country may never get to be. But one things is for sure, as certain as the worshippers listening to him right now at CGCC. Pastor Bakare is the president of his own church, which possibly accounts for why he prefixed paragraphs of his State of the Nation address with “My fellow citizens.”
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
