Remembering the seers of the good old days -By Kola Johnson

For over three decades, dating back from the glorious era of the 70s, 80s and the 90s, the Nigerian socio-political landscape fell into the pervasive influence of seers, who dominated the scene with their acclaimed paranormal ability to foresee the future.

This class of esoteric confessors held the reading public spell bound, including even the government of the day – which though exuded the pretentiously outward facade of ignoring them – placed nevertheless a high premium-reckoning on them, in the inner closet of their secrecy.

In those days, their prophetic outpourings as often not devoid though – of gestural dramatics, theatrics and apocalyptic affectations, were such that exuded a vent of colour, hysteric excitement and awe, defining the climatic landscape of the yuletide.

Heart skipped a beat, as immediately it gasped for breathe at the pronouncement of this peculiar quartet of notables conjuring in their gravitational mass appeal a focal point of widespread debate generating beyond ripples, to storm, across the landscape – celebrated even in the exclusive space of discourse of leading columnists of the day – greeting even beyond the foregoing, the celebrative glare of front page spectacles.

The special month of December ending and particularly January of each successive year; stood out as a particularly special season, when they dazzled and mesmerized the general public with their acclaimed esoteric insight of what the new year portend for the nation and the teeming mass of the populace.

Foremost within this bracket of prophets and star-gazers, were Professor Godspower Oyewole, Dr. Gabriel Okunzua, a notable parapsychologist, Prophet Samuel Adewole of the Celestial Church of Christ and Primate Theophilus Oluwasanu Olabayo of the Evangelical Church of Yahweh.

To be sure – that is talking of the success-failure equation of their prophecies – some of them-landed off the mark; just as a good number of them, actually came to pass.

For instance in the 70s during the Gowon era, when the idea of the Ajaokuta steel industry was launched by the government of the day, with every glee, glamour and fun fair, as an anticipated cornerstone to Nigeria’s arrival at strategic industrial and technological breakthrough, it remained a tribute to the memory of the elderly parapsychologist and university lecturer – who deploying his much vaunted power of the mental art – insisted that the otherwise laudable scheme, was in the ultimate analysis, illusively fated for the harbour of failure.

Predictably as it turned out – several years after Okunzua’s death, and over four decades after toddling in the labyrinth – the project has continued to recede into a progressively abysmal fiasco.

It need also be noted that in 1999, optimism ballooned in influential quarters, especially among the Hausa-Fulani north – of the world of limitless possibilities that Obasanjo’s presidency stood to usher, towards the realization of an egalitarian Nigeria.

The foregoing, apart from the pivotal support of Ibrahim Babangida was underscored in the resolute bent of General T.Y. Danjuma who not only spent massively according to reliable sources in his avowed bid to bring about the realization of Obasanjo’s presidency, but swore to embark on self-exile in the event that Obasanjo’s presidential bid ultimately hits the rock.

However, apart from his Yoruba kinsmen, especially of the Afenifere socio-cultural group, whose non-support of Obasanjo at that time, was purely for political reason, rather than the core question of competence – Okunzua stood out as the lone voice who insisted that nothing good could emerge from the Bethlehem of Obasanjo’s sojourn in the presidency. The rest today, as the saying goes, is history.

This said, it need however be noted that for all his clairvoyant precision in those vitally significant aspects – when his wife to whom he was married for decades, dramatically bade a parting bye to the world beyond – her death was to attract a popular wave of condemnation by the public, which lampooned him to no end, for the ability to see the mote in other people’s eyes – while ironically falling short of the same magic wand at the time it mattered most – to counteract the sanguinary agent of death, which with the stealthy con of an accomplished thief – stole into the otherwise spiritually fortified portals of his impregnable home-stead, to snatch away his jewel of inestimable value.

One other intriguingly bizarre dimension to the character of this esoteric confessor of mental art, was the propensity of a notoriously maverick dimension he paraded in the imperial braggadocio with which he pontificated at every chance or medium on the superiority of his religion of mental art, to which he had never ceased to impress the world; of his pre-eminence as the universal grandmaster.

Can you imagine for instance, a mere mortal, claiming with unequivocal magisterial fiat, an overbearing superiority over the Almighty God, the supreme deity and creator of heaven and earth, men and women, and everything there in? Yet, when death came knocking, he was crassly out of depth to challenge, let alone rebuff it – just as he found himself in stuporously unguarded imbalance to do same at the critical point at which the venomous fang of the great ripper stalked to pluck away his beloved wife.

In this connection, one remembers a particular occasion, in which the Edo-born mental art master had cause to complain over the noisy session of worship by Christian devotees of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, near his lya Oloye Street residence, in Idi-Iroko, near Maryland, Lagos – as he threatened to deploy his mental art weapon of mass destruction, to devastate the parishioners, who in turn swore to let loose the full force fire of the Holy Ghost to consume the man and his oft-flaunted power of the mental art.

But beyond seeming garrulously maverick exhibitionism with his esoteric mystery of the mental art – there was no doubt that the elderly gentleman – who in private life radiated a remarkable depth of meekness and love that could not hurt even a fly – sure knew his onion – within the context of his esoteric depth and profundity and the appreciable rating of his predictions, a good number of which indeed often came to pass.

Prophet Samuel Adewole of the Celestial Church of Christ predicted with apt precision, the death of General Shehu Musa Yar”Adua and what eventually turned to be the jinxed presidential bid of Chief M.K.O Abiola – the billionaire business mogul and acclaimed winner of the June 12, 1993 election, which was debunked by the judiciary, with the active connivance of the Ibrahim Babangida-led cabal of top military chiefs.

As for Primate T. O. Olabayo – his fame was such that spread across the vast global space, including the revered portals of the United Nations – where no less a personage of such exalted placing as the then U.N. Secretary-General not only received him in audience – but also took a photograph with him and his beloved wife within the paradisial ambience of the United Nations headquarters.

Such was the height of his fame and glory, until the contagion of an adultery scandal, in which he was implicated, whether rightly or wrongly – suddenly set in.

While it might be true, according to authoritative sources – that his prophetic precision had remained ever intact in its original integrity – in spite of the incident, which transpired some twenty-five years ago, one factor which remained indubitably clear, was that with the seer – things have never remained the same ever since, within the comparative paradigm of his old glory. You might attribute it to the ecclesiastical pontification that there is time for everything; just as some people are also wont to attribute it to the debilitating bout of stroke rattling him some years back, all said and done, what is, however, certain is that things have never remained at least exactly the same again for the man ever since.

This writer also remembers Professor Godspower Oyewole, the Indian trained parapsychologist and seer, who then maintained a regular page in the Lagos Weekend of those days – in which he treated the public – even to a point bordering on showy dramatization – to his fancy-stuff pastime of the scenario in the incorporeal sphere of the unseen – as perceived from his crystal ball.

I remember as if it were yesterday, the sensationally dramatized danger alert inspiring fear and trepidation usually sounded by him – like a supposed conference of witches and wizards billed to hold at a particular destination or the other – at which they planned to wreak one havoc or the other, detrimental to corporate national interest – and how he was already prepared to engage them in a heluva of a duel – in the Astral habitat – in the bid to counteract their machiavellian agenda.

One also remembers in those days, how the Indian-trained star gazer had dramatized the event of Awo’s death by his supposed paranormal communication with Awo in the invisible world of the spirit and his step by step account of the departure of the spirit of the great sage immediately after his fateful fall in the private closet of his bathroom.

This obsessive concern with the Awo other-worldly transmigration, he (Oyewole) capped up, by journeying all the way from his Lagos base, by attending Awo’s historic burial of the century in Ikenne – an event at which Oyewole never ceased to furnish those who cared to know, especially the formidable battery of press reporters ever milling around him – this writer inclusive – with endless tales of his paranormal perception – on Awolowo’s minute by minute activities in the surreal world of the invisible, on the day of the burial.

Those were days in which every inch of the horizon was suffused in the elemental waters of bizarre esotericism. Paranormal imageries and terminologies inundated the psyche almost to the point of conscientisation.

Today they are gone, except for the old sage Primate Olabayo. Not only gone, but gone with their art, leaving none behind, even for succeeding legatees. For those of us who knew them, we miss their drama, excitement, panache; including their little failings.