By Suyi Ayodele

I would have agreed that protests would happen on August 1, 2024, if the graph had been plotted by Bola Ahmed Tinubu. But he is the sitting president, not the opposition leader he used to be. You can’t ride a goat to intimidate a master horseman. The media can cry themselves hoarse, the street can cry and weep. Nothing is happening. The powerful dey kampe.

“This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers. The spark-gap is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be salvaged by men who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly.” Lancelot Hogben said the above in his ‘Science for the Citizen’ (1938). The mass media can only make its usual noise. Tinubu’s government is not the Wall of Jericho. No noise can threaten it.

And this is not peculiar to our situation. Governments in Africa hardly pay attention to write-ups and editorials. Nigeria is in a class of its own when it comes to this. Apart from a very few, our leaders here have been the very dregs of humanity when it comes to literacy. A president once told us that he never read newspapers. One said he does not pay attention to social media. When a leader becomes naturally illiterate by closing his mind to any form of literature, we cannot but have the type of society we have in Nigeria. Worst still, the media aides of our leaders who are expected to fill in their principals on the daily editorials about their governments hardly do that. Whenever they get their principals to read what is in print about them, I bet it will be that third-party advocacy PR stuff planted. Those guys thrive in the illiteracy of their principals 

A senior political aide of former governor of my Ekiti State once told me that the governor was so alienated from the happenings in town such that when the people rained curses on him while driving through the streets of Ado Ekiti, the state capital, and he asked what the people were saying, the response he used to get was that the people were hailing him as the true son of his father.

What about those articles in the newspapers? I asked. The ex-governor’s aide laughed. I was embarrassed. Nothing was funny. He looked at me and answered: “So, of all the issues with Oga, it is the newspapers he will be reading?” We had the discussion in our Ekiti dialect. I gave up.

Our leaders don’t, or hardly read. Governors and presidents are projected by their media aides as the darling of the people. This is why nothing changes no matter the number of articles written. But we will continue to write; we owe that as a sacred duty to the generations yet unborn. Let posterity record it that when it mattered, we did not lose our voices!

This is why I don’t believe that anything tangible will happen on August 1. There may be nauseating noise here and there. There may be a bit of action in a few state capitals. But overall, nothing consequential will happen. The government will remain deaf. Hunger will continue to ravage the land. Inflation will not stop galloping. And our governments – state, local and federal, will remain lethargic. The pain will be more excruciating. The government won’t be moved a bit because it knows that the people’s goat will continue to shift even after hitting the wall.

There is no denying that things are hard, and the streets are not smiling. It is also a fact that as things stand now, the nation is standing on the edge of a cliff, precariously. The cord can snap, any moment, no doubt. But an organised protest remains ineffectual; it is never going to be the solution. I believe in protests. I believe that the people have the right to express their anger within the permissible limits of the law. Unlike Oga Bayo Onanuga, one of the media aides to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, I don’t believe that the hunger and pains in the land wear any ethnic garment. I don’t believe, like Onanuga tried to project in his reaction to the planned protest, that a particular ethnic group is behind the so-called planned protest.

Poverty is not a native of any land. Abject want and lack is almost evenly distributed among all nationalities that make up Nigeria. Residents of Maiduguri are hungry; the people of Ibadan don’t have what to eat; just as those living in Nnewi don’t know where the next meal will come from. It is a partnership in deprivation! It does not rain anymore; it pours all over Nigeria. If August 1, 2024, ever happened, unlike Onanuga, I believe with every fibre of my being, that President Tinubu, rather than Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), should be held responsible. I tell you why I strongly feel this way.

Nigerians elected Tinubu as president and not Obi. If for anything, the bulk stops on Tinubu’s table. He is the one who holds the yam, the knife and the bellows to fan the embers that roast the yam. He is the one who should do all he could to bring an end to the sufferings in the land. The president, elected by the people, is the one to initiate policies that will make life more abundant for the people. He is to secure the country, revive and revamp the economy and provide an enabling environment for business to thrive.

If he fails in those responsibilities, he has the opposition to contend with. So, whatever Peter Obi is saying about this government, he is only doing his job as an opposition leader.  Tinubu did worse, when he never contested election. I think Onanuga should stop acting like the old executioner who never wants the sword to be taken across his head. If the economy improves today, nobody will tell Obi to remain quiet. He has an audience because the government has gone to sleep. That should not be too difficult to understand.

But if I were President Tinubu, I would not lose my sleep over the August 1 protest. Nothing tangible will happen. The president, if you ask me, should be worried about the organic eruption that will happen should we continue in this parlous state that Nigeria is. Nobody will plan it. Nobody will be its leader. It will be all-encompassing. It will spare nobody. The time ticks for the nation. That is what should bother President Tinubu; the day the people will, on their own, say, enough is enough. That is the day of great calamity that should be of concern to those in power. And guess what: nobody will be able to stop it. It will be like an earthquake that does not give any pre-knowledge. It would have started before we all knew what hit us. And there will be no escape route, anywhere.

Why should any government panic because an Omoyele Sowore said there will be a ‘revolution’? How many Nigerians can he mobilise? What will be his selling point? That he has remained on the side of the people all these years, or that he has no friends among the real enemies of the people? Will he ask the people to come to the streets when they know that his family is tucked away somewhere very impenetrable? Is he the one to tell the people that there is hunger in the land? Or that inflation which has eradicated the middle class is about to wipe out the lowest of the lowest? No!

Is it the unknown Northern Initiative for Growth that will mobilise those in the North to hit the streets? Won’t the people ask where the group was when General Muhammadu Buhari slept off for eight solid years? Why should anyone be scared about any Obedient Movement that was spontaneous only for the 2023 presidential election? If Peter Obi were to be a candidate today, where would he get the over six million votes of 2023? The real planner of the impending revolt is hunger. When it gets to that level that the people don’t have anything to eat anymore, they, like the proverbial tortoise, will enter the rain without being prompted. And that time is close; the real one that will create panic in government circles!

This is what Gizachew Tiruneh, a professor of Political Science at the University of Central Arkansas, United States, had in mind when, while writing for “Sage Journal” on September 18, 20214, in an article titled: “Social Revolutions: Their Causes, patterns, and Phases”, published online, said: “…The point is that nobody would be able to anticipate or predict, before the onset of a spontaneous revolutionary uprising, that popular opposition and resentment against the state would be exploding and catching fire across a given country.”

Tiruneh listed the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 as satisfying the “spontaneous” pattern of revolution. He went further to say that spontaneous revolution: “…occur when long-term socioeconomic development is followed by short-term and sharp economic reversals. More specifically, as people experience improving economic conditions over time, they come to expect that they will be able to obtain more and more. When the sharp reversal in economic fortune comes, the ability to obtain goods declines while the peoples’ expectations as to what they believe they should be able to obtain continue to rise. The gap between what people are able to obtain and what they believe they should be able to obtain grows and turns into a crisis of rising expectations. And unhappy, unsatisfied, and frustrated individuals then resort to political violence.” The question to ask is: what is the situation with Nigerians today? The political scientist warned that “How the state addresses the demands of its people for political reforms and economic welfare as well as how the state uses its coercive force responsibly would matter whether or not it faces revolution.” Tiruneh mentioned “gap”. Hogben also talked about “spark-gap”. The duo wrote decades apart. That, to me, is more than mere coincidence!

President Tinubu can still change the tide of time. All he needs to do is to pay more attention to governance than politics. Let the president prioritise the welfare of the people. Mr President should pick one key area of the nation’s economic development, like power, and fix it. He does not have to put all his irons in the furnace at the same time. Fix power, fix insecurity and secure the food chain system. Get the farmers to go back to their farms and make food available Every other thing will begin to take shape. The distraction of a second term, when he has not done the first half of his first term, is one of the huge factors weighing Tinubu’s government down. This is what the hawks in, and around him are taking advantage of to exploit his human weakness. And, as for those, like Onanuga, who see every problem from the ethnic prism, may they have their day with the people when the bubble bursts!

By Lasisi Olagunju

An old friend reviewed the ways of this government and said he thought Bola Tinubu should be afraid of the Greeks. “Yes, especially if they come with gifts,” I added to my friend’s warning. He smiled; I nodded. In that short conversation, we had just gone through the mythical Trojan War, the Greek story of a siege, a gift, a city and its destruction.

For ten years, the Greeks and the Trojans fought a war which you and I would describe today as senseless. A Trojan prince eloped with the wife of a Greek (Spartan) king and because of that, a decade-long war had to ensue and thousands had to die. David Bevington, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and world authority on Shakespeare, says the causes of the Trojan war were “the betrayal of love, the absence of heroism and the emptiness of honour.”

More than once, you’ve read and heard about ‘Greek Gift’. That expression is from that war of the stone walls of the city of Troy and a grueling Greek siege on the city for a full decade. Troy’s igneous walls won’t let the Greeks in for ten bad years, the besieging warrior king dropped his spears and shields; he changed his strategy and tactics. He went for guileful warmth to get what swords and fires couldn’t fetch him. The Greek built a giant wooden horse and donated it to the gates of Troy. The Greek king dropped the artful gift and then sailed his army’s ships out of sight.

The Trojans thought the Greek had gone back home in frustration. The Trojans took the horse as a gift of peace from their enemy. They thought wheeling it into their city and even worshipping it wouldn’t be a bad idea. A lone voice belonging to a priest warned the Trojan General and his troops against having anything to do with the horse gift from the Greeks: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (Fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts).” The priest’s warning rang round the city. But the voice of caution was drowned in the Trojan ocean of a binge party. They said what is this one saying? They had defeated the Greeks who even left the horse as a gesture of peace. The ‘valiant’ Trojans wined, they dined and danced in a celebration of victory. Then they all went to sleep, blind drunk. One historian wrote that while they were in that state of stupid stupor, “a host of armed soldiers crept out from the belly of the horse and opened the city gates. Troy was overrun and destroyed and the ‘Trojan Horse’ became revered as one of the most successful military tactics ever.” The story is told in Homer’s Iliad; in Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde.’

Now, the Greeks are surrounding the Nigerian Troy. Some persons clapped or feigned sleep while Muhammadu Buhari’s regime raped town and gown, forest and flowers. They are now crying war and threatening to cross the Rubicon and confront Pompey. It is interesting. They are threatening a protest for early next month. “It is treason,” the government has warned. It has also told the dog handlers to put their canine on a leash. We hope they listen. We also hope the government shuts them up by doing good and draining its swamp of excessive wetland of mosquitoes.

The protest pledgers, like master wrestlers, even gave a definite date – August 1. We call it Ogun Àwítélè (Foretold War). There is a popular play of that title by Adebayo Faleti, late Yoruba playwright of excellence. A band of robbers write to a town of hunters that they are coming to rob and pillage the people and their palace. And the thieves truly come as promised. But how are they received? Well, the robbers fail, not because they are not worthy of their promise, but because their intended victims are not led by arrogance and ignorance. The community of hunters win because it is not commanded by chiefs who are deaf to reason and receptive to disruptive flattery.

The Nigeria we have today is a forest of the heartless – Igbó òdájú in Yoruba. In the last years of Goodluck Jonathan as president of Nigeria, he received many Greeks into his fold. And almost all of them came with one ‘gift’ or the other. A prominent politician (from the North) told one of my female friends: We will help him to make enemies. We will turn him against his true friends and turn the people against him. Nothing he works on will work. My friend reported that encounter to me and we agreed to watch as events unfolded. It turned out that the promise was delivered as promised. As I type this, I see Troy and its history repeating themselves.

I hope Tinubu takes ownership of himself at this moment and listens to his inner voice. I think his wife should get for him ‘Iwe Itan Ibadan’ published in 1911 by Oba I. B. Akinyele. It is a book of ambition, gallantry, treachery, bravery,
conspiracy, flattery, rebellion, private and public protests, justice and fairness, deposition, even, forced suicide. Tèmbèlèkun is the Yoruba word for mixtures of conspiracies and insurrections. There are more than a slew of it in the book. Reading it may help our man now that the jungle is maturing. But, why am I even writing this? Meddlesome interloper. A Lilliputian reporter telling the powerful how to use his limitless powers.

Some people advised President Muhammadu Buhari not to withdraw subsidy on petrol during the pendency of his presidency. They said if he did it, it would make him hugely unpopular. He sidestepped it. The same people are around his successor now telling him that today’s excessively expensive petrol can still sell for any amount per litre, and that nothing will happen if he endorses it. That is how you charge a child that is not yours – you send them on an errand with an order that they must come back home no matter how late. A child who would not get lost in the darkness of the way would take direct charge of his journey.

The West prescribed the bitter medicine which Tinubu has been administering to us. The western press hailed Tinubu when he pronounced subsidy dead on May 29, 2023 and pushed the naira downhill. They described him as a star reformer, almost putting on him the messiah’s cassock. But the patient is now in a coma and they say something else about their lovely doctor and his competence. Read this: “In the nearly 15 months since Bola Tinubu became president, he has forced his 220 million fellow Nigerians to swallow some bitter medicine. He removed a generous fuel subsidy, one of the few benefits citizens receive from their inefficient and corrupt state. He allowed the country’s currency, the naira, to enter free fall, fuelling imported inflation and triggering the worst cost of living crisis in a generation.” It is difficult to believe that this statement you just read came from an editorial published last week by the Financial Times. That is a newspaper that hailed Tinubu last year when he withdrew subsidy on petrol and floated the naira. In an October 3, 2023 editorial, the newspaper said he “started well” and “with a bang” by removing “a costly fuel subsidy and in shifting towards a market-driven exchange rate which has sharply weakened a previously overvalued currency…” Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Today’s lord of Abuja, just like his predecessors, loves Greeks and their graven gifts. Among the Greeks are the lawmakers housed in our federal capital. They enact any law that gives erection to their purse. Tinubu so much loves them because the gifts they give are what Caesar craved – imperator perpetuo. The losers, ultimately, are the lawmakers. Almost a century ago, Roger V. Shumate in his ‘A Reappraisal of State Legislatures’ published in January 1938 said the legislature was largely seen as a haven for “ward heelers, petty politicians and yokels”. He adds that the disquisition could even be worse with some people saying lawmakers “are more or less equally engaged in clowning and enacting laws designed to loot the public treasury or to favour some special interest at the expense of the common good.”

The battle for Abuja has always been intense because it is a Treasure Island. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 classic adventure novel of that title; read the sequel, ‘Return to Treasure Island’ (1985) by John Goldsmith; read the sequel to the sequel – ‘Silver: Return to Treasure Island’ (2012) by Andrew Motion. Read all about the ugliness of the pirates in those stories. Read about mutiny, about murder, sword fights, about treachery and – blood-curdling romance. The island called Abuja will always be in turmoil as long as unearned treasures are there for pirates to pillage.

All these take us back to the urgent need to make Nigeria work as a federation. At independence, our constitution provided enough safeguards and guardrails against ambitious corrosion from an excessively opulent centre. John P. Mackintosh’s ‘Nigeria Since Independence’ (1964) says it well. He says the independence constitution provided “both the Federal Government and the regions with adequate independent sources of revenue. The central government was allocated most of the import and excise duties, corporation taxes, and death duties, while the regions had income tax, export duties on primary produce, import duties on tobacco and petrol, and a half of mineral royalties and rents. Some revenues had to be paid by the central government into a distributable pool and this was then allocated according to fixed proportions among the regions.”

Read the above again: The regions took half of mineral royalties and rents. Crude oil and gold and other precious stones are minerals. The regions took export duties on primary produce. Cocoa, cotton, groundnuts and palm oil are primary produce. These are what a centralised structure took away from the regions when it splintered them into states. The federal government bites more than its share of the Nigerian cake. Yet, it wants more.

The federal government keeps creating offices and duties for itself because it has careless, excess funds in its kitty. The creation of a livestock ministry is one of such errant actions. The bill on federal agency for local government election is another. We don’t know what else is yet on their to-do list on how to undo this federation. At independence, the centre knew its limits and rarely went beyond its bounds. On the powers of the constituent units, Mackintosh recalls that the constitution provided as follows: “The Federal Government was charged with foreign affairs, defence, external borrowing, the currency, capital issues, customs and excise, control of the exchange rate, shipping, railways, trunk A roads, posts and telegraphs, and aviation. There was a concurrent list, the main items being industrial development, labour conditions and relations, water, power, and higher education, while the regions were left all residual powers. Of these, the most important were health, education, agriculture, public works, and secondary roads, so that the regions could engage in their own economic development.” That was the constitution the British gave us.

A leader is as good (and bad) as his advisers are. Look at how the planners of Abuja designed the axle of power there. There is in there the three-arms zone: The lawmaker, the law giver and the law breaker. The principalities of Nigeria lie right there – with all the puns embedded. Collectively they are leading us into a situation almost like Ruben Östlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’ – a 2022 comedy drama in which a couple “sails on a lavish cruise ship” led by a drunk captain. And, as a reviewer says “what seems glamorous at first comes to a horrific end, with survivors battling for life on a barren island.”

By Osita Chidoka

The NBA election for a new executive ended with my friend and lawyer, Mazi Afam Osigwe, as the winner. I publicly sided with him for his ability and character. Thankfully, most lawyers who voted agreed he could lead the NBA now. I am happy.

That said, I have a couple of lessons and issues about the elections. First, zoning and single-term tenure have created stability and enabled the Nigerian Bar Association to focus on the candidate’s qualities instead of stoking ethnic or religious tensions in the bid to win office.

The 2024 NBA election had three Igbo presidential candidates from the same town in Anambra State, and it did not matter to the rest of the country. The issue was their ability and voters’ preference.

I am of the considered view that the Nigerian state and political actors should learn a lesson from this and amend our constitution to entrench zoning among the six geopolitical zones. It will stabilise our politics and allow voters to focus on personal qualities like character, antecedents, and capacity.

The second issue is the technological advancements in the NBA election. Everybody could follow online as lawyers cast their votes from the comfort of their homes. While the country may not be ready for voting using our phones, we are prepared for online real-time visibility of results. INEC and State election bodies should learn from this.

It is on this note of widely acknowledged transparency that I found the letter of withdrawal of one of the candidates, Chukwuka Ikwuazom SAN, disturbing. He withdrew and alleged (in his words), “Since the commencement of voting earlier today, my supporters and I have observed disturbing patterns that do not align with the actual votes cast. It has become increasingly evident that the integrity of the electoral process has been compromised.

“Despite the overwhelming support from my dedicated supporters, the reported figures do not align with the true expression of our votes. It would appear that the system has been manipulated to favour a predetermined outcome, consistently placing me in third position.”

These are grave allegations from a Senior Advocate of Nigeria. I would have joined him to raise the alarm, as a Nigerian who has been at the forefront of the campaign for the use of technology in our elections and transparency of the process, if not that the learned silk provided no evidence of misconduct except that he was consistently in the third position. A position he was not happy about and did not anticipate.

I advise the NBA electoral body to quickly investigate these grave allegations and robustly defend the integrity of their process, which Mr Ikwuazom had placed on trial. The NBA should act like JAMB in the Mmesoma case, vigorously defend itself, and remove doubts about its widely praised system. Silence, in this case, would not be golden or wise.

In future elections, the NBA, if they are not doing so already, should appoint a respected and recognised audit firm with IT capability to conduct integrity tests on their voting system before elections and certify the results after elections. The example of Big Brother Naija, which used the global accounting firm Deloitte to certify the results of online votes, may be worth considering.

I also suggest that if the Senior Advocate’s allegations are untrue, malicious and intended to delegitimise the victory of his contender, then he should be sanctioned to deter losers from impugning the integrity of a process to overcome their embarrassment.

While elections in Nigeria, as a whole, have been widely acknowledged as opaque, we must resist the temptation to delegitimise elections without evidence. Moreso, of a body like NBA, which Nigerians look up to as a bulwark against bad government and enforcement of citizen’s fundamental rights. A delegitimised NBA executive would not augur well for everybody.

Osita Chidoka
22 July 2024

Not having sex before marriage ought to be good. Restraining yourself from all that tantalizing stuff is tough alright, but that is what the Bible says and we all (believers) know that God is always right. Uncle, no touching; aunty, no sneaking. Keep the marriage bed undefiled. All solid contents must be kept in the bra and the boxers.

You can look, even imagine (though that is a sin too) what is in there but you can’t weed or cultivate the land. You can salivate but you must not sip or suck before you say ‘I do’ and have been handed the license. Then and thereafter, can you start drilling and depositing, planting, and harvesting, as the licensed owner of the rig and land?

The waiting time can be mean for both the body and the spirit. Christian courtship is hard but the wedding night and the sweetness thereafter is usually very rewarding. I remember a young bride who ran to the pastor two weeks after the wedding, distraught, and confused.

“I can’t cope, pastor.”
“Cope with what, sister”
‘My husband wants sex every day. Is it food? I’m tired. I’m sore. I’m walking funny. I’m even afraid to go home after work. He is a Christian, why does he want sex every day? It is carnal, isn’t it?’

The pastor laughed and called in a female counselor (you can guess who) who explained to the frightened bride the coping skills. One, her brand new groom is a dude, a raging bull who has been kept in check until he got his license to do as he pleases. He’s making up for lost time. Two, sex is food for all healthy males, Christian or not. A dude is a dude. He wants his woman all day, if possible. There are strategies to avoid wear, tear, and bruises.

Whenever the couple waits, God happily endorses all activities and everybody is happy.
Unfortunately, it is not always so. It has been discovered, so, so sadly, that there are now terrible, embarrassing ungodly complications to this ‘no-sex-before-marriage’ part of Christian courtship. What is ordinarily supposed to be a beautiful worthwhile wait has been found to bring the kind of torture and nightmare that is confounding and debilitating. Too many Christians are evil, and too many courting couples are a disgrace to both God and the body of Christ. I’m restraining myself from calling them murderers because what they bring into a Christian union after saying ‘I do’ before God and man is nothing short of marital terrorism.

A man who professes to be a born-again, tongue-speaking, demon-binding Christian abstains from sex during courtship only for the bride to discover on their wedding night that the groom’s weapon is only for peeing! Yeah, he has only two legs. His third leg is virtually non-existent and divorce is not supported by the Bible except on grounds of infidelity and even then you are not allowed to remarry until your spouse dies. Someone help me out here. What if the person you divorced lives to be 100?

Or this other scenario: the turban-wearing, no-earrings but beautiful sister insisted on keeping her body holy, the marriage bed undefiled. Three years after the wedding and plenty of lies about why she was waiting on the Lord for the fruit of the womb, the real reasons for her childlessness came to light. Sister’s uterus was removed years ago after a tragic abortion at the university. She didn’t tell the man she professed to love. She didn’t confide in the pastor.

According to her, ‘I believe God will give me a new womb, a brand new beginning.’
Ah, faith is great. But what is wrong with letting the man you are going to marry into this great secret so he can decide whether he’s down with the arrangement or not? What is wrong in letting the guy know what he is getting himself into, what the total package is so he can join his faith to hers and they can have faith raised to power two (like faith2)?

The shocked husband recounted the horror of the heart-rending discovery this way: ‘She kept on insisting on prayers instead of going to have ourselves checked in the hospital. She was moving from one prayer mountain to the other, doing vigil and fasting around the month. Yet we couldn’t conceive. On my own, I decided to go and run tests on my system. I got the all-clear and that was when I became suspicious. I threatened to call the pastors, report her to the church marriage counseling unit, summon a family meeting, and finally I moved out. I told her I’d move back only if she agreed to the tests. That was when she broke down and confessed. I was devastated.’

Now, how does a pastor deal with that, dissolve the marriage, or remind the deceived husband that their marriage vows were ‘till death do them part’? Imagine you are a parent reading this, if the husband was your son, what would you do? How would you feel? This son of yours is 36, his wife is 32 and she has no womb! You are all members of a denomination where even breathing the word ‘divorce’ is almost a sin, will you happily accept your lot and wait for a new womb from your lying daughter-in-law or are you going to damn all consequences and tell your son to ‘throw the trash out and get a proper woman who will bear you children?’

Is the definition of unfaithfulness, infidelity, just about having sex with someone you are not married to? Is going into marriage knowing you are deceiving your partner in the worst possible way godly? How will the church stop its members from trying polygamy and extramarital affairs when the skeletons start dancing ‘shaku shaku’ outside the closet? How can the church stem the rate of failed marriages in the body of Christ when young men and women go into marriage for the wrong reason, wearing only bare-faced lies as wedding garments?

Should the church just accept this new trend of hiding very important details during courtship, as part of end-time turbulence or should pastors just remember that they are end-time shepherds who must do their jobs with wisdom?

Dear godly misshapen. That on the wedding night, your daughter who had kept her virginity till age 25 was the one who discovered that her husband’s manhood is the same size as her pinky, her smallest finger! The thing can pee but it can’t be put to work. It’s just there, like a toddler’s pecker. You spent millions of naira on the wedding ceremony, had high hopes for this marriage and here you are with a son-in-law who could not consummate the marriage. It’s not his fault that he was created with a weapon that can’t plunge or fire but it is what it is. Your daughter may have to resort to self-help at some point. Pastor, this is one member of our congregation who is most likely to look for sex outside marriage.

But Ariyike’s story is the most pathetic. She is the respected daughter of a respected pastor. She was even a youth pastor herself. So, of course, keeping her body as the temple of God was a given. Her husband is a petroleum engineer based in one of the South-South states. The couple relocated there right after the wedding. Six months later, Ariyike called her parents that she was coming to visit Lagos. Everyone had missed her, her parents were eager to hear the expected news that she was pregnant. She wasn’t but she looked different, subdued, withdrawn. One week became two weeks and Ariyike still refused to go back to her husband.

After a long sermon, she told her parents she was not returning to her matrimonial home, ever. Was he beating her? That was the only question on everybody’s lips. It seemed the only reason a young bride would run back home, right? It wasn’t Ariyike’s reason. Her husband is so oversized, his manhood off-kilter, heavy-duty, a scary weapon that scared the poor girl shitless the first time he confronted her with it.

“I tried to cope but he’s just too big. He left me bleeding sore and crying the few times we tried. It’s scary, I can’t go back. It will kill me. You don’t understand what I’m talking about because you have not seen it. Please don’t make me go back otherwise, I’ll run away.”
What does a pastor do when confronted with a case like this? What do parents do when their daughters-in-law or sons-in-law are discovered to have covered-up facts that are this important? True, it can’t be easy to fully disclose to anybody including your mother that you have deformities down there.

Imagine all the beautiful girls with crazy cleavages out there with private pains deep inside them, the men with abnormalities they can’t talk about below their belts. I read that one out of 165 male births may reproduce a baby with micro-penis. There is penile torsion and scrotal transposition too. I read that many men “suffer” from penile torsion in various degrees – corkscrew-like third legs that are sometimes competing with a horse’s weapon built to scare. The scrotal transposition is where the scrotal sac is situated above the shaft making the equipment look like elephant ears. The women’s troubles are broadly termed Mullein duct abnormalities and they come with all kinds of implications.

I’m not a doctor, just a Christian and a mother worried about protecting these young ones from unfaithful spouses-to-be, hiding important details, from the ‘absent’ uterus to python or pinky-sized penises. Should we test all ‘spirits’ and see which is true or just fly blind in that direction? I’m just asking.

Egbemode can be reached on [email protected].