EJIKE Mbaka, a reverend father and Spiritual Director of the Adoration Ministries in Enugu, is always scathing both when he praises and when he criticises. First he exalted former president Goodluck Jonathan; then he took him and his restless and overbearing wife, Dame Patience, to the cleaners. Later he rhapsodised then Candidate Muhammadu Buhari, and now he has all but taken him to the cleaners. Accused of being a courtier, pilloried in acerbic language, and assailed by his superiors in the Catholic Church, Fr. Mbaka has kept faith with his own peculiar brand of liberation theology, almost like a modern day Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, a former and now late Archbishop of Managua, Nicaragua.
It is a mistake to think Catholic priests know only the scriptures. They know politics too, as Cardinal Obando said in the years when he intervened vigorously in Nicaraguan affairs, particularly trying to restore peace during the Sandinistan insurrection. Said the cardinal: “We (the bishops) as a hierarchy feel that we can’t be active in party politics, but we are active in politics in the broader sense, and the broader sense means looking out for the people’s common good, trying to orient them. In the broad sense, we’re active, even as a hierarchy we’re active. Who isn’t active in politics in the broad sense? Everyone is! What we believe is that we shouldn’t be actively involved in party politics.” Fr. Mbaka is probably conversant with Cardinal Obando’s legacy.
But conversant or not, Fr. Mbaka is undoubtedly active in Nigerian politics, and perhaps hopes to play a very colourful role in making and unmaking presidents, a little like Cardinal Obando did to ex-president Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua when the latter lost the presidential election to Arnoldo Aleman in 1996. No one forgets the searing criticism Fr. Mbaka levelled against Dr Jonathan in January 2015, nor his definitive pronouncements against the first family that foreshadowed their electoral debacle in that year’s election. Nor can anyone forget how imprudently but unequivocally he composed a doxology in favour of President Buhari’s election. But whether in denouncing a president or elevating another, the controversial, fire-eating priest always prefaced his prophecies with God’s imprimatur. Now, as everyone knows, the most difficult thing about prophecies is determining beforehand whether God truly spoke or not.
Fr. Mbaka’s Adoration faithful do not doubt their priest hears from God. The Catholic hierarchy may be less taken in by his periodic fulminations and bombasts, but they have no doubt how influential the priest has become, nor how sometimes unerringly his prophecies cum judgemental political assumptions have turned out right. In his latest pronunciamento, Fr. Mbaka dismisses President Buhari’s anti-corruption war as barbaric and archaic, his style as indolent and ineffective, his presidency as entrapped by a cabal, and that, by his selective punishment of his opponents, he has become a purveyor of moral corruption. Then curiously, by a deft use of poetical statements, he admonishes the president to ‘change or be changed’. While leaving a little room for the president to change and presumably salvage his presidency, he also bizarrely discloses that God asked him to advise the president not to seek re-election.
It may never be known where, in all his diatribe against presidents, God stops and Fr. Mbaka begins, whether prophecies are at play in his verbal and prophetic explosions, or he is merely voicing his own private instincts. He has used some words that cannot be described as godlike, and he has passed on messages that make him appear to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. But whether it is his messages or instincts, he had in the past proved a somewhat accurate and deft reflector of the feelings and aspirations of the public. President Buhari is of course not popular in the Southeast and South-South, and his following in the Southwest is greatly tested, if not altogether unnerved. If Fr. Mbaka is simply mirroring these realities, he seems to be doing a good job of it. He, however, takes care not to ever burn his bridges when he conveys God’s messages, regardless of the extremeness of his prophecies. Indeed, his New Year’s Eve message is unlikely to have been influenced by the president’s New Year shocker which virtually shut the door against political change, whether it is called devolution or restructuring.
Fr. Mbaka will still speak before the general elections, either to reiterate God’s message, as he describes it, or to countermand or modify it once he sees which way the cat is jumping. The country has definitely not heard the last from him. But notwithstanding the discomfiture his superiors in the Catholic Church experience over his hard prophecies, or the trusting naivety of his Adoration faithful, the priest will remain active in politics, as Cardinal Obando surmised about liberation theology in 1996. The nimble Adoration Ministry priest will always leave himself enough room to be wrong and ample room to bask in vindication. In a county that has tragically become a gymnasium where promises and manifestoes do triple summersaults, Fr. Mbaka’s pronunciamentos will walk a tightrope gingerly, expertly and remorselessly, sometimes impassively right, and at other times far-fetched.
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