•Where Pastor Tunde Bakare got it wrong

By Tony Eluemunor

Mr. Tunde Bakare is a Pastor, so he should be in a position to appreciate the rather curious words of St. Francis of Assisi: “Pray that not all your prayers are answered”. His fervent prayer that Gen. Mohammadu Buhari became Nigeria’s President was answered after Buhari’s several attempts. Yet, his complaints against Buhari’s track records have been about the most trenchant lately.

Then, within the week, Bakare dropped a bombshell; he was exposing what inspired Buhari to break his words that he would not seek to be President after the failure of his 2011 attempt. Bakare provided the inspiration. And instead of asking himself if the fault actually came from him, that is if he misinterpreted God’s message to him, he appears to have embarked on the second leg of that message, to run for the office of President and possibly be one.

If an unexamined life is not worth living, to pursue a misunderstood dream could be pretty dangerous.

Dream! Dream!! Dream!!! When it pertains to President Mohammadu Buhari, lightning (yes, the dream lightning) has struck the same place twice. Two times, he has emerged Nigeria’s ruler, first as a military Head of State in January 1984 and second, as a democratically elected President in 2015 – owing to nothing but dreams. He is now serving his second term of four years, powered by the ordinary dreams (not as in ideas, profound thoughts, imaginings or remarkable plans) other persons had when they were sleeping peacefully on their beds.

This most unusual story about this most unusual trajectory to the presidency was reignited by a most unusual man; Pastor Tunde Bakare Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly now renamed  Citadel Global Community Church, which in 2019 commissioned its N18 billion single church building.

It was in the morning of Tuesday 24th August 2021 when the Channels Television station interrupted its morning sports programme to accommodate the lawyer-turned Pastor, who is also the one-time Buhari supporter who recently turned his most trenchant critic. The Pastor had actually said all he planned to say and had arrived at that tail end of the interview when a gifted journalist would be attempting to squeeze water out of a stone by striving to get the interviewee say much more than he ever planned to divulge as the discussion was winding down, when the most informative detail from that interview dropped, casually, most casually, from the Pastor’s lips. 

How could it be explained that he, a former confidant of President Buhari, has turned a critic? He replied: Yes, there is gross failure, it is apparent to everyone, but you can fail forward… I said I have served, I had respected, loved but I will not keep quiet and then things fall apart. You do not sacrifice truth on the altar of friendship. Any friendship that ends, never started. So, do not think that there is a crisis, that we are not talking or that we are not seeing each other, no, no, no, it is not like that. But I had to cry out in case he is not aware of all these things that are happening around him”.  

When reminded that from the way he spoke it appeared that he had parted ways with Buhari or at least their friendship was shredding, Bakare said they were still great friends. The Channels Reporter reminded him that he said he was not afraid to speak out, as though he was aware that any who spoke against the Presidency was moved against,  he let out perhaps the most excoriating criticism of despotism against any Nigerian administration, ever. Bakare said: “Let me tell you what led to that statement. It was horrifying to me to live in a country, where security men will invade the home of a private citizen who has not been charged for any crime and they will kill people, and drag the blood of those people on the floor.

That can happen to any person. I don’t think it was President Buhari who went to the home of those people to do it.  We are in a civilized world. Unless we are beasts or are in an animal kingdom, you don’t do that. Where is the place of the rule of law? If someone has done something wrong, arrest him, prosecute him. But don’t invade his privacy in the dead of the night like a gestapo and kill people and damage his house.  

Look, I’m not in support of any secessionist move. We are better off together, but in a free and fair environment where the rights of citizens are protected. Nobody is above the law. Respectfully, I will say not even the president of a nation is above the law. They may have immunity today but what about tomorrow? Do you know how many presidents have ended up at the International Court of Justice or whatever, the I CJ? That was my concern and those who could do it at the dead of the night could do it to any citizen. So, I was addressing them directly”.

 Further question: “you trusted him and even ran with him in his quest to rule Nigeria, that is why I’m asking, is he the same person you trusted? Bakare said it was better to trust God than any human being. Then another question came: “What is God telling you now”?

Bakare: “President Buhari spoke in public(that he would never contest for office of the President again), he wept and I wept. Then God visited me in a powerful vision. And I realized he must still come back. Then I said to him, Your Excellency, let us do the right thing first, let us work out a merger first. It was my privilege to move the merger of the parties that fused.

Another question: “Do we have the privilege today to hear what God has told you about the nearest future”?

Bakare: “Yes, you do: In the vision that I saw, that led me to run and tell him that you are coming back, in that vision, we were in a Bolekaja (old-fashioned bus), and we were going towards the South West to meet the political leaders, juggernauts of the Southwest to form a merger. And we got to a very steep slope and he parked the vehicle that way and came down and said ‘I would like to ease myself and I will join you soon.’

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When he left I spoke to the two people behind my back, Late Yinka Odumakin and Nasir el-Rufai. I said where we are is dangerous, let me re-park this vehicle as we wait for him and I went to the driver’s seat, and behold, there was no steering, no ignition key, no gear box, no pedals, no hand brake; he took everything down with him and I came to myself, and said wow, there is still something for this man to do to move the vehicle of this nation forward.”. That was how Bakare interpreted his dream and pulled all strings to convince Buhari to contest again. He called Buhari and told him it was possible. He worked for it. It happened but Nigeria, he said, is now far from what he expected. He bared his mind in the interview.

“And when all the things began and we all were seeing it, lopsided this, lopsided that, nepotism here, this there, and all kinds of things, and those who could influence change tried their best. Well, I have implicit faith in God because the engine is still there”.

And one would be correct to assume that the same dream that made the Pastor to take two witnesses with him when he was pursuing Buhari across the Atlantic, some 3000 kilometres away to the UK is the same “message” or “vision” where God “told” Bakare that he has a political assignment; to become Nigeria’s President. The fiery and truly cerebral Pastor piles witty chats into his ever-serious sermons but this time he appeared to interchange vision and dream and the voice of the Holy Spirit like a neophyte preacher which he is not. He cannot, today, defend his interpretation of that dream – that a man who cannibalized a vehicle still has the calling of God to drive same car out of doldrums . He certainly couldn’t have interpreted that dream rightly. Worse still, he appears to interchange an old message for the new.

For instance, it was when the Channels TV interviewer asked him, pointedly, and in a really straight-forward manner the simple question of what message he has from God on Nigeria’s future that he dropped the bombshell of the dream of a cannibalized or far from road-worthy mammy wagon that actually belongs to a by-gone age which Buhari was driving down a steep road. Put differently, he was asked about the future. Instead of pointers to the future or saying that God has not spoken to him about the future, he went on to speak remarkably about the past – a dream that would not be less than, at best, six years old.

Or, please wait for it, could it be that the cerebral Pastor Bakare was totally in control of the interview when he decided to pass off the past as the future? Could it really be that in Pastor Bakare’s mind, the first part of the dream, where Buhari went to the road side to urinate, had run its course? And the second part of that dream, where he moved to the driver’s seat, was about to take off? From his narration, there is nothing to render this interpretation the way he did. Like the mammy wagon (bolekaja) the vehicle had no ignition, steering, break or gear facilities and perhaps even the horns and headlamps as well as wipers could have been gone too – a lorry as battered as Nigeria is today and on auto-pilot and akin to a rudderless ship which Nigeria is today. So, Pastor Bakare may have interpreted the dream to mean that he would succeed Buhari. Actually, he dropped that “prophecy” before. The Vanguard of January 3, 2018 gave the report this headline: “God told me to run for president — Tunde Bakare”.

Really, at best Bakare could have had a spirit-inspired dream, but he was mistaken to call it a vision or message.  It will be surprising if Pastor Bakare, who heads a church, does not know that visions generally have more clarity than dreams. So, someone versed in dream interpretation should have been consulted. Instead Bakare rushed to a conclusion. What if the dream was a warning that if Buhari became President, the Nigerian vehicle would be in a poor state and would be driven downhill instead of up the mountain of development? And have we not been going downhill since 2015? If so, has Bakare not been wrong to jump to another conclusion; that he should become the next driver of the outdated and dilapidated Nigerian mammy wagon?

Dream! It was the same ordinary dream that ‘made’ Buhari military Head of State. In an interview in The SUN newspaper of 7th April 2018, Major Muastpha Jokolo, who was ADC to Head State Mohammadu Buhari said: “Now, 1983 coup was conceived in 1981 and it was through a dream. My uncle, the elder brother of my father, had a dream where he saw one tall, lanky, light complexion officer.

That officer came and saw my father on a white horse and asked him how he was feeling about the situation in the country. My father told him things were not good. Then he told my father, okay we are going to change things. So, when I heard that, I told them it was Buhari. So, I drove to Jos to meet General Buhari who was the GOC at that time to inform him of the dream. The rest is not just Nigeria’s contemporary history…a history powered by, yes, ordinary dreams, dreams, dreams.

Vanguard News Nigeria