The Day God Wept For Nigeria -By Banji Ojewale

Banji Ojewale

The other time I wafted through a chink in the sky on a day God was attending to mails, special supplications, visitations and sundry demands from earthlings. Angel Gabriel ferried me through a thousand and one skies, and portal after portal swung free of their log-like locks to admit us.

We made no stop over. And I observed when we approached a narrow, ornate gate in the distance that we were gradually dropping. Angel Gabriel told me we were only a billion celemetres away from the scene where the Almighty was conducting the audience session.

I was soon dumped into a mansion and told peremptorily by a departing Gabriel that I was already in the presence of the invisible Almighty. He said God had, before our arrival, read many billions of mails, and heard murmurings, wishes, complaints prayers, curses, oaths, etc, numbering several trillions from men, women, foetuses, children, plants, animals etc., who ceaselessly invoked His Name. I was lucky, he said, as presently three great personages from earth would be brought before the Almighty to deliver their cases.

Angels milled around the spot where God sat in judgment. It was as I seethed in mystery and confusion that an African angel, he had a Nigerian name which I can’t recollect, ushered another African into the great hall. He collected a fat document from the new arrival and gave it to God, who set it aside and asked His guest to state his case.

“Everlasting Almighty,” he commenced, “You will live forever and ever. Down there on earth hosts of crisis are conspiring against order. The outcome might be a conflagration which would reach Your Empire and disturb Your reign. Let me speak especially of my country, Uganda. Our president is bent on a one-party state.”

He had been offered an arm-chair which he refused at the onset. Now he slipped into it and thundered: “The real issue, Almighty, is that the man and his cronies are going ahead with their plans despite the opposition of the overwhelming majority, which I lead. If he persists, Lord, we shall resist and only carnage of Your beloved creation would ensue.”

God is long-suffering. He remained still as the Ugandan poured out the stories of the deprivations of the people under the one-party state programme. Finally, the Almighty said He would help him frustrate the project. Could he, however, let the Lord of the universe know what he would do for God if he, now the opposition leader, reached government house later?

The African said he would first execute the man at the head of the idea of political monolithism. And then to reward God for His assistance, he would establish a concentration camp for the country’s atheists, agnostics, and others of any religious unorthodoxy. There, he would willy-nilly convert them to Christianity. More details, he said, were contained in the document with the Almighty.

God trashed the document into the nearby Kingdom of Turmoil. Thereafter, He notified the Lord of Extremists in the contiguous Kingdom that he would be having a guest from Uganda soon.

The next visitor the Almighty Lord had was a woman from the United States. She told God she was aspiring to perpetuate in America the tradition of Sirleaf Johnson, Indira Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, Bandaranaike, Violetta Charmoro, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Angela Merkel and Corazon Aquino. But the men had, each time at the polls, conspired to rob her of victory, even when the preponderance of women voters was not in doubt. She told God that her husband and male children too had cast their votes in favour of her male opponent. Were this merely so, she contended, she could still have accepted her successive electoral losses. But her brothers and sisters had also been venalised. Four times in her six-time attempts, the electoral battle had deadlocked and the law courts became the scenes of arbitration.

“What happened?” She asked rhetorically, leaving her low armchair and moving towards God’s throne. An Eskimo female angel stood between her and the Almighty and led her back to her seat as the American wiped off beads of sweat that stood like pus over her face.

Recovering her composure, she stood up again but stayed in her spot and declared: “Female judges, some of the best in the country, presided over the proceedings and returned verdicts unfavourable to me. In two of the cases my female lawyers failed to turn up, sending rather their male neophytes who bungled the matter. Almighty, I’m law abiding and I have resorted only to the laws of the land for justice. All I’ve asked is I wish to be president of my country, I intend to use the talents You’ve given me to uplift my people, especially the women folk and the children. I’ve prayed to You Almighty, but to no avail. I desire You to intervene now in the interest of justice, which You stand for.”

Rapt in attention, the Almighty said that He endorsed the American’s desire to be the president of her country. But would she then be kind to intimate Him of the revolutionary changes she had in store for her people?

She told God that she would initiate far-reaching researches to make for reducing pregnancy from nine to three months; she would break the monopoly of child-birth by women, so that if a couple desired four children, two would be born by the man and the other two by the woman; she would double the population of women; she would make lactation a joint affair for mother and father, and finally, she would create a race of hermaphrodites, all these to the eternal Glory of God.

The Almighty showed no emotion. He merely reached for a button on the arm-rest and, getting in touch with the lord of cranks, handed the American over to him.

Next summoned before God was a Nigerian dressed in mufti form, a heavily embroidered attire with simultaneous agbada and military accoutrements.

He’d come to God, he said, to notify Him that there were some malcontents preparing a case to bring to God calling for his head, he who had relentlessly been spotless through seeking the Kingdom of God via Islam, Christianity, Fetishism, Coupism and Epicureanism.

He asked God to regard his detractors as mischief makers. The man admitted that his domain in Nigerian constituted an organised inertia riddled with corruption and bestiality. Claiming he was not the cause of this bedlam, he named his predecessors as the evil geniuses. He had favoured some of them with juicy appointments, but they had turned round to work against him.

No Nigerian, according to him, was to be trusted, except his friends and family.

God was pleased with this simple presentation. It was uncharacteristic of the webbed, soporific encumbrances of preceding Nigerians. So, He asked the Nigerian what he wanted.

The Nigerian replied tersely: “There is a move to move me, to stop me from continuing in power, from playing god like You, and I am resisting it. So I need heavenly lieutenants, 36 Angels, including Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael to follow me to Nigeria to help me clear the mess my people have created. In the alternative, Almighty, grant me permission to transfer Nigeria to Heaven!”

God Almighty burst out, not laughing, nor swearing, nor deprecating, but weeping and poeticising: “Nigerians, what manner of day! What manner of clay!”

Banji Ojewale writes from Ota, Ogun State.