Quintessential Bakare

I am glad that the PDP people have ‘demarketed’ themselves greatly by showing disdain for the Nigerian people.  They have shown that they prefer fraud, wheeling and dealing with corrupt businessmen and confusing the poor people, than engaging Nigerians intellectually and saying what their plans are.  The PDP is an elitist party, compromised by dirty […]

I am glad that the PDP people have ‘demarketed’ themselves greatly by showing disdain for the Nigerian people.  They have shown that they prefer fraud, wheeling and dealing with corrupt businessmen and confusing the poor people, than engaging Nigerians intellectually and saying what their plans are.  The PDP is an elitist party, compromised by dirty donations and of course, that party has too much of taxpayers’ money on its campaigns, in contravention of the extant electoral laws.  People who think that only the rich people need debate, forget the influence that enlightened people can have on those less fortunate.  But the focus here is on Bakare, whom I think I should introduce properly to my dear readers.

 

I attended the Latter Rain Assembly for about two years while I lived in Lagos.  It was the only church that ever captured my imagination and encapsulated my sense of fairness and reasonability.  While I attended that church, I recall some critic telling me of his suspicion that Bakare has American connections.  Now, no one is sure of such things in this fuzzy world.  But if indeed Bakare is very connected to the Western world, that will serve as a bridge to the West for Muhammadu Buhari… a much needed bridge indeed.

For we have come to the point at which we must negotiate with the superpowers.  The strategies that they have at their disposal is enormous and intractable.  And we don’t have any.  If we are belligerent, we will not get anywhere.  Therefore, the best we can do is to ask them to allow us make some progress in a few areas.  That is what people did in places like the UAE and the rest of the Middle East.  We have to get some things right about how this world works. One, there is no country where everybody is rich, so we must be reasonable and methodical in our quest for development.  Two, the level of depression and despondency in the countries we look up to, especially Western countries, is appalling.  Three, we will advance one step at a time, slyly, coyly because we live in a ‘stoop-to-conquer’ world.  Our current ebullient ways, our quest to ‘conquer the world’, our ‘dominant’ attributes, is what has held us down thus far.  It is not enough to rail against the atrocities of the superpowers, it is important that we find the best way of sitting with them, showing them in graphic details the havoc they have contributed in causing, letting them know the attitudinal changes we are ready to commit to, and only in that manner will we achieve an ‘IMPROVED’, not perfect, society.

Yet we are on a quest for perfection.  Some of our religious beliefs don’t help us in being circumspect or pragmatic.  Most people want to ‘be at the top’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘dominate’, ‘oppress others’, ‘shine’.  Oftentimes, there is little emphasis on how all these self-centred ambitions are achieved by dint of hard work; the concentration is on the results and perhaps on the ability of God to perform the magic.  That is the reason why we are on this spot today, looking forward, but rowing backwards.

My attendance of Bakare’s church moulded my thinking in many ways.  That I am not a church regular today (and that’s okay), is because Bakare’s church, the Latter Rain Assembly, has no branch anywhere.  He refused to open branches all over the place, because churches are not Tantaliser or Mr Biggs.  The effect of unnecessary church proliferation in Nigeria is the current harvest of fast-talking pastors.  If a junior pastor comes to tell Bakare that he has received a ‘calling’ to form his own church, Bakare blesses him and instructs that his new church should bear any name, not Latter Rain Assembly.  He also warns them never to send him contributions from their church members as he is content with the one-stop church that he supervises.  I think that is magnanimous in our times.  I know of a pastor of one of the more popular churches with branches everywhere, who is currently thinking of leaving that church because the donations of his church members cannot be used to assist other church members because EVERYTHING is sent to headquarters.  That is the reason why many of our church leaders have become ‘stinkingly’ rich, riding private jets around, while their church members become increasingly, desperately poor!  And the country has become more corrupt and desperately fear-filled.

At LRA we do not emphasise tithes.  Bakare stated rightly that ‘tithes’ did not occur anywhere in the New Testament of the Bible.  And that we are called ‘Christians’, because we believe in Christ as a Messiah.  Bakare encourages people to give to God only as their heart pleases, or ‘as the spirit leads them’.  Since God is not a tax collector, Bakare reckons that He will not be interested in any particular percentage of one’s earnings. Therefore, if it pleases one to give 50% of one’s earnings in one month (maybe for a church project), and 0% in the next, that will not be a sin.  He also abhorred frequent monetary contributions by church members

It may interest readers to know that in LRA, Bakare instructed that any couple getting married must have the name of the husband first before the woman.  Therefore, it was no longer a case of Margaret weds John, but John weds Margaret.  This is very significant, because it seems the decision to marry is that of the woman and not the man in today’s ‘modern’ world, when it should be the other way round.  We now live in a world where the man has surrendered his sovereignty to the woman in the homefront.  In the ‘advanced’ countries of the West, women throw out their husbands from the houses that the men pay for, and bring in boyfriends (ask OJ Simpson), while the former husband will be required by law to come and fix the roof and throw out the garbage.  The deviation from reason, in my view, starts from the point where Margaret WEDDED John.  This is in line with what the Muslims do, and I very much believe in it.

These are just a few points from what Bakare stands for.  The summary is that this is a pragmatic man, well-exposed, reasonable and perhaps as alleged, a much needed bridge to the West.  This is also a simple man, a contented man, and perhaps a great and timely reformer of our misused and abused religion.  For at LRA, we emphasise hard work and miracles are not sold like ‘akara’.  We do not practice ‘magic’ and miracles, but faith and work is what heals weary souls!