The Spiritual Side of Aso Villa
By Reuben Abati
People tend to be alarmed when the Nigerian
Presidency takes certain decisions. They don’t think the decision makes sense.
Sometimes, they wonder if something has not gone wrong with the thinking
process at that highest level of the country. I have heard people insist that
there is some form of witchcraft at work in the country’s seat of government.
I am ordinarily not a superstitious person, but
working in the Villa, I eventually became convinced that there must be
something supernatural about power and closeness to it. I’ll start with a
personal testimony. I was given an apartment to live in inside the Villa. It
was furnished and equipped. But when my son, Michael arrived, one of my
brothers came with a pastor who was supposed to stay in the apartment. But the
man refused claiming that the Villa was full of evil spirits and that there
would soon be a fire accident in the apartment. He complained about too much
human sacrifice around the Villa and advised that my family must never sleep
overnight inside the Villa.
I thought the man was talking nonsense and he wanted
the luxury of a hotel accommodation. But he turned out to be right. The day I
hosted family friends in that apartment and they slept overnight, there was
indeed a fire accident. The guests escaped and they were so thankful. Not long
after, the President’s physician living two compounds away had a fire accident
in his home. He and his children could have died. He escaped with bruises.
Around the Villa while I was there, someone always died or their relations
died.
I can confirm that every principal officer suffered one tragedy or the
other; it was as if you needed to sacrifice something to remain on duty inside
that environment. Even some of the women became merchants of dildo because they
had suffered a special kind of death in their homes (I am sorry to reveal this)
and many of the men complained about something that had died below their waists
too. The ones who did not have such misfortune had one ailment or the other
that they had to nurse. From cancer to brain and prostate surgery and whatever,
the Villa was a hospital full of agonizing patients.
I recall the
example of one particular man, an asset to the Jonathan Presidency who
practically ran away from the Villa. He said he needed to save his life. He was
quite certain that if he continued to hang around, he would die. I can’t talk
about colleagues who lost daughters and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and
fathers, and the many obituaries that we issued. Even the President was
multiply bereaved. His wife, Mama Peace was in and out of hospital at a point,
undergoing many surgeries.
You may have forgotten but after her husband lost
the election and he conceded victory, all her ailments vanished, all scheduled
surgeries were found to be no longer necessary and since then she has been hale
and hearty.
By the same token, all those our colleagues who used to come to
work to complain about a certain death beneath their waists and who relied on
videos and other instruments to entertain wives (take it easy boys, I don’t
mean nay harm, I am writing!), have all experienced a re-awakening.
Everyone who
went under the blade has received miraculous healing, and we are happy to be
out of that place. But others were not so lucky. They died.
There were days
when convoys ran into ditches and lives were lost. In Norway, our helicopter
almost crashed into a mountain. That was the first time I saw the President
panicking. The weather was all so hazy and he just kept saying it would not be
nice for the President of a country to die in a helicopter crash due to pilot
miscalculations. The President went into a prayer mode. We survived. In Kenya
once, we had a bird strike. The plane had to be recalled and we were already
airborne with the plane acting like it would crash.
During the 2015 election
campaigns, our aircraft refused to start on more than one occasion. The
aircraft just went dead. On some other occasions, we were stoned and directly
targeted for evil. I really don’t envy the people who work in Aso Villa, the
seat of Nigeria’s Presidency. For about six months, I couldn’t even breathe
properly. For another two months, I was on crutches. But I considered myself
far luckier than the others who were either nursing a terminal disease or who
could not get it up.
When Presidents
make mistakes, they are probably victims of a force higher than what we can
imagine. Every student of Aso Villa politics would readily admit that when
people get in there, they actually become something else. They act like they
are under a spell. When you issue a well- crafted statement, the public accepts
it wrongly. When the President makes a speech and he truly means well, the
speech is interpreted wrongly by the public.
When a policy is introduced,
somehow, something just goes wrong. In our days, a lot of people used to
complain that the APC people were fighting us spiritually and that there was a
witchcraft dimension to the governance process in Nigeria. But the APC folks now
in power are dealing with the same demons. Since Buhari government assumed
office, it has been one mistake after another.
Those mistakes don’t look
normal, the same way they didn’t look normal under President Jonathan. I am
therefore convinced that there is an evil spell enveloping this country. We
need to rescue Nigeria from the forces of darkness. Aso Villa should be
converted into a spiritual museum, and abandoned.
Should I become
President of Nigeria tomorrow, I will build a new Presidential Villa: a Villa
that will be dedicated to the all-conquering Almighty, and where powers and
principalities cannot hold sway. But it is not about buildings and space, not
so? It is about the people who go to the highest levels in Nigeria. I really
don’t quite believe in superstitions, but I am tempted to suggest that this is
indeed a country in need of prayers.
We should pray before people pack their
things into Aso Villa. We should ask God to guide us before we appoint
ministers. We should, to put it in technocratic language, advise that the
people should be very vigilant. We have all failed so far, that crucial test of
vigilance. We should have a Presidential Villa where a President can afford to
be human and free. In the White House, in the United States, Presidents live
like normal human beings.
In Aso Villa, that is impossible. They’d have to
surround themselves with cooks from their villages, bodyguards from their
mother’s clans and friends they can trust. It should be possible to be
President of Nigeria without having to look behind one’s shoulders. But we are
not yet there.
So, how do we run a Presidency where the man in the saddle can
only drink water served by his kinsman? No. How can we possibly run a
Presidency where every President proclaims faith in Nigeria but they are better
off in the company of relatives and kinsmen. No. We need as Presidents men and
women who are willing to be Nigerians. No Nigerian President should be in
spiritual bondage because he belongs to all of us and to nobody.
Now let me go
back to the spiritual dimension. A colleague once told me that I was the most
naïve person around the place. I thought I was a bright, smart, professional
doing my bit and enjoying the President’s confidence. I spelled it out. But
what I got in response was that I was coming to the villa using Lux soap, but
that most people around the place always bathed in the morning with blood. Goat
blood. Ram blood. Whatever animal blood. I argued. He said there were persons
in the Villa walking upside down, head to the ground. I screamed. Everybody
looked normal to me. But I soon began to suspect that I was in a strange
environment indeed. Every position change was an opportunity for warfare. Civil
servants are very nice people; they obey orders, but they are not very nice when
they fight over personal interests.
The President is
most affected by the atmosphere around him. He can make wrong decisions based
on the cloud of evil around him. Even when he means well and he has taken time
to address all possible outcomes, he could get on the wrong side of the public.
A colleague called me one day and told me a story about how a decision had been
taken in the spiritual realm about the Nigerian government. He talked about the
spirit of error, and how every step taken by the administration would appear to
the public like an error. He didn’t resign on that basis but his words proved
prophetic. I see the same story being re-enacted. Aso Villa is in urgent need
of redemption. I never slept in the apartment they gave me in that Villa for an
hour.
Culled from the Newspot Nigeria
