After calling senior pastors of Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) “goats” for delivering another sermon after his father, Pastor Enoch Adeboye had given one on Thanksgiving Sunday, Rudolf Okonkwo imagines what Leke Adeboye will do when RCCG faces the upcoming leadership transition.

My dear brethren,

I send you all Calvary greetings and love from my daddy’s office. As we get ready for Easter, I have a recurring vision about death and resurrection that I want to share with all the over five million members of my daddy’s church. As you all know, our beloved Daddy G.O. has surpassed the three scores and ten years that God promised us. For all practical purposes, that he is still on the field playing is all thanks to injury time. We may need an urgent transition to new leadership in our ministry any time from now.

As Daddy’s most beloved son and his most senior special assistant, with whom he is well pleased, I need to address you about this inevitable transition in our church.

We cannot afford to leave things hanging the way primitive and local churches like the Cherubim and Seraphim and the Celestial Churches did. Ours is an international church with branches in over 196 countries. If we do not have a solid transition plan, we may find ourselves entangled in the type of embarrassing fights that made those poverty-ridden churches like Cherubim and Seraphim and Celestial the laughing stocks of the world when their founders died.

Having looked at the capacity of the current leadership of our church, having gone through their personnel files, I can authoritatively tell you that none of the people in those positions have what it takes to take our church to the next level. Apart from my late brother, Dare, all the other people out there in London, New York, South Africa, and Abuja, parading themselves as potential replacements of our beloved Daddy G.O. are nincompoops. They do not have the grandeur, the gravitas, and the sophistication we need in this jet-setting Bitcoin age to take the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) to a place that the Catholic Church did not dream of.

In our future church, it will not be enough to get an average of $1 for every five million of us each Sunday. We need to position daddy’s church where we can raise our membership to 10 million people in the next ten years and get $10 for every member. My daddy wants to put a church “within five minutes walking distance in developing cities and five minutes driving distance in developed cities.” I want anyone, anywhere, who looks out of a window to see the shining light of a Redeemed Christian Church of God. For every African member of our church, I want two non-African members, preferably from countries with hard currencies. Never again will we depend on Nigerians who are abroad as our main source of cash flow. Now, that will be a church that I will be proud to say deserves my ingenuity.

Therefore, I, Leke, having studied the Christian movement from the medieval age to this modern age, having watched our beloved Daddy G.O. travel around the world like a colossus, having been the power behind some of the most consequential decisions our Daddy’s church has made in recent time, I can tell you that nobody is more prepared than I am to ascend the throne.

I may be younger than most of the pretenders to the throne, but I have the Wisdom of Solomon. I have been in the thick of things, and I am not carried away by sentiments; neither do things of the world wow me. I have seen it all. I have the maturity to knock knucklehead pastors in line. Years of service by these errant pastors do not move me. I will do what is best for the bottom line of our church. This has become necessary, as we face this stiff challenge from Winner’s Chapel and their one-man operation led by Bishop David Oyedepo and sons. We must not let them outshine us. It is a real danger that we will face in the next ten years, as the new generation of leaders takes over across the Pentecostal churches in Nigeria. As long as I am alive, I will not let Daddy’s lifelong investment go the way of Bishop Benson Idahosa’s. Iro! I am the only one very well equipped not only to give them a run for their money but to maintain our RCCG as the premiere church out of Africa for the next 100 years.

During my reign, I want my daddy’s church to top the list of churches with the highest weekly attendance in the world. I want our church to beat South Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church and India’s Calvary Temple, with 480,000 and 350,000 weekly attendances, respectively. I know we can do it. I have studied what those churches are doing, and I assure you that I will replicate it at our Prayer City right here at our Lagos-Ibadan Expressway headquarters. I have noticed that the ragtag Deeper Life Church is ranked higher than us in weekly attendance. That is an absolute insult.

Unlike some of the pretenders to daddy’s throne, I have spent long hours 30,000 feet up in the air, in my daddy’s private jet thinking about stuff like this. If we fail to move in and dominate our domain and even beyond, some of the edifices that we are building today will be desolate in the next 50 years, left for rats to occupy or be converted into nightclubs. I bet you, some of the people angling to take over from my daddy, will not be around in 50 years. How do you expect such goats to think about where to position our church in 50 years’ time? I will be around, and I have a vivid dream of where our church will be then.

For those of you who do not know, I have a masters’ degree in Aerospace Technology and Engineering from the University of Hertfordshire, England. I could have been a very successful engineer anywhere in the world. But I humbled myself and subjected myself to an eight-hour interview to be a personal assistant to Daddy G.O. In that interview, I wore a suit and tie when I went in and came out eight hours later wearing only a singlet and boxers. It was torture. Only Jesus, who suffered on the cross, can fathom what I went through in that interview. All for what? All for the lowest paying job in my daddy’s ministry. Am I humble or what?

While Daddy G.O. loves to fish and watch James Bond films, I am more like Buhari’s son, Yusuf. I have a flair for hot bikes. That means that I will bring speed and excitement as your General Overseer. You don’t have to worry about how I will sustain myself. My hot wife is the CEO of OASIS Suya Eatery and Shawarma and Mimi’s confectionary. I may be the last son, but I am the first in line in terms of astuteness and preparation.

For those who cannot wrap their minds around my logic, I will use a canal example to illustrate what I mean. Daddy G.O. is like the beloved Queen of England, Elizabeth 11. Everybody agrees that what would be great for the United Kingdom is to have the crown skip Prince Charles and go straight to Prince William. Our beloved Redeemed Christian Church of God is facing a similar dilemma. The good news is that, unlike the British Crown, where the Imperial Majesty must follow the signed and documented ancient ascension plan, ours has no such encumbrance. It is my daddy’s and my daddy’s alone. And like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, I do not have to wait around to assume power. I do not have to go to any parliament or in front of a committee or a team of kingmakers to transform myself from the presumptive leader to the substantive leader. So, let this letter serve as an introduction of my humble self to all our brethren and as a warning to all those who may want to be on my way.

Even though I have the three cutesiest children in the world with my hot wife, I know some of you traditionalists may have difficulty calling me Daddy G.O. at this young age. I do understand. To accommodate you all, I am willing to answer Baby G.O. until such a time when I am older than the median age of our church members.

Let me stop here. I have to catch a flight. My daddy’s private jet has been waiting for me for the last two hours on the tarmac. Please file this under your top-secret files. Don’t let those leeches on social media get their hands on it. It is just a draft that shows a man ready to accept and ascend the leadership of our great church at a minute’s notice.

May God bless you all.

Yours truly,

Leke Adeboye

Baby G.O.

Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches Post-Colonial African History at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is also the host of Dr. Damages Show. His books include This American Life Sef, Children of a Retired God, among others.

Since the inauguration of Mr Hakainde Hichilema as Zambia’s president on August 12, 2021, he has refused to receive a salary. The president, who has gone on a ‘salary strike’, has been leading the country for eight months without a salary. This was revealed by the country’s Ministry of Finance on April 3. He has also rejected different titles and would rather prefer to be known as “Mr President”, and not to be addressed as “His Excellency”. For him, titles breed dictatorship and represent worship, and do not add any value to the urgent task of fixing Zambia, and its people. While one might want to attribute his attitude to his status as one of Zambia’s richest men, with business interests in several sectors such as finance, healthcare, ranching, property, and tourism, Africa has hosted many wealthier leaders who had drained their national treasuries.

“Mr President” (Hichilema) is not the only leader in the business of donating his salary to his nation. In 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa, and members of his cabinet promised a 33 per cent pay cut for three months, in support of South Africa’s quest to combat the destructive COVID-19 pandemic. While this is commendable, the recent proposal to increase the salary of the executive members at this critical period may be seen as a concern.

This article is not aimed at praising or categorising Hichilema as the best-performing leader on the continent. It is also not directed at rolling out the drums for celebrating his lofty achievements, but this is in recognition of his understanding of the rudiments of leadership and the enormous task of restoring Zambia to the path of glory. It is about the uncommon idiosyncrasy that he has brought into the maximum office in Lusaka. When responding to the salary question, he noted, “Let’s focus on working for the people of Zambia. It is service to the people and not self-service.” Not many African leaders would see leadership as service to the people. Not many would refuse to use the states’ resources to further their affluent lifestyles and excessive allowances.

The desperation displayed by many African politicians to occupy the top position on their countries’ political ladder, and their quests for tenure elongations, may be attributed to the financial attractions associated with the office of a president. As reported by Business Insider Africa in November 2021, Cameroonian President Paul Biya ranked first on the list of Africa’s highest-paid leaders, with an annual salary of $620,976, followed by Morocco’s King Mohammed with $488,604, while the third position was occupied by South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, with an annual salary of $223,500.

Do we actually remember Mr Hichilema? He is the mere Zambian “cattle boy” who defeated the incumbent, President Edgar Lungu (after three attempts), by more than a million votes, in the bitterly contested presidential election in August 2021. Indeed, it was Mr Hichilemas’s sixth shot at the Zambian presidency. Upon losing the 2016 election to Edgar Lungu, he was accused of treason for reportedly failing to “vacate the road” for the smooth passage of the presidential motorcade. He was remanded in jail till the charges were dismissed. The man from the United Party for National Development (UPND) garnered support from the youth, who jettisoned their political apathy and became participants, as they mobilised and voted for Hichilema in their quest for a change. Indeed, 71 per cent of registered voters turned up for the voting exercise. In the past decades, the Zambian economy, which had been very prosperous and boasted of very large reserves of copper and cobalt before things took a turn, became characterised by socio-economic inequalities and indebtedness (US$18 billion in 2021), a rise in the cost of living as food inflation became 30 per cent (the highest since 2001), corruption, a weak currency, unemployment (11.4 per cent), and crisis in the mining sector. Has Zambia fared better under his leadership? Perhaps, it is too early to assess overall performances.

In Africa, a change in leadership does not necessarily translate to a shift in policy direction or in the fortune of the electorates, as seen in Nigeria and Zimbabwe. However, in the case of Zambia and under the #WeAreFixing#Zambia, the government has tried to localise the award of government contracts to people living in the area where the contracts would be executed. This contrasts with many African leaders, with a penchant for awarding contracts to foreign companies, many of which have performed poorly in comparison to local industries. He has also increased the social spending of his government, provided free education in government-owned schools, supported the farming sector, and the growth of small businesses.

However, many of his critics are uncomfortable with his “romance” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the possible reliance on the institution to augment the rise in social spending and reduction of taxable income. Indeed, President Hichilema declared that “IMF has changed” and did not also hide his love for the global financial body during Zambia’s quest for a $1.4 billion (R22 billion) bailout loan from IMF in January. The president further acknowledged the conditions embedded in IMF’s financial facility and believed that issues such as good governance, rule of law, accountability, and transparency, are what every responsive government should aspire to deliver. While this is true, I hope “Mr President” is right about the transformation of the IMF. Time will tell.

Adeoye O. Akinola is a Head of Research and Teaching at the University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, South Africa.

Now that pretty much everyone and his cat has declared to run for president in 2023, I think it is time for those of us who would be the ones casting votes to take a realistic view of the lie of the land, and ask ourselves uncomfortable but necessary questions.

I think the first one I want to knock out of the deck is the issue of whether a party outside of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) can win the Presidency.

Let’s get it out of the way; they can’t.

Not in 2023 at least.

There have been opportunities since 2019 for them to work their way into genuine contention, but all of those opportunities were literally thrown away. The largest third-force vote in 2019 went to the late Obadiah Mailafia of the African Democratic Congress. He had just shy of 98,000 votes in an election where there were more than 27 million votes cast. Just think about it. The biggest third-forcer did not have up to half a per cent of all the votes cast. In fact, all the third-force parties combined had just over 3 per cent of the total valid votes. That ought to be a healthy reality check with respect to parties outside the big two, and, in reality, that is par for the course of the American style democracy we have so unfaithfully copied. There will be two big parties, and the rest will be there picking the scraps. Left to me, I’d adapt the French model that lets all participants run in a first-round, then take part in a lot of horse-trading before the top two duke it out for the actual presidency. Something to take from this is that if you vote for one of the third-force guys, you would be depriving your definition of the “less bad” of the bad two of your vote, and giving it to the “more bad”.

Think about that.

There are other factors that work against third-force candidates, not least the fact that there are 176,846 polling units in the country. On the day of the presidential election, a party that is interested in winning will need to have its agents in each of these polling units and will need to pay them enough to ensure that they do not become fifth columnists on that day. I have seen party agents from smaller parties collect money on election day and begin to work for another party on the spot.

Do the smaller parties have mechanisms to check this?

Can the smaller parties raise the up to the ₦8,842,300,000 that may be the minimum required (₦50,000 per agent per polling unit) just for party agents alone for a day’s work? These are realities. ₦8 billion is needed for one small segment of election day alone…

On to the next, and we are talking about the big two, APC and PDP. As third-force advocates never tire of telling us, both parties are the same. This argument has a lot of merits, especially when you consider the spate of defections and counter-defections between both parties. The Achilles heel of the argument, however, is this: If by some miracle a third-force party wins the presidency next year, there is not much in our system that prevents the same politicians from all suddenly seeing the light and defecting en masse to such a party. Would we then change our argument to “APC is the same as PDP, and is the same as KOWA”?

Herein lies one of the big challenges we face. Our system encourages coalescing around individuals, rather than what acronym they are flying. While the general public and the legal system agree that votes are given to parties, the political operators know that as configured, Nigeria’s political system is built for individuals and interest groups. This is crucial, and understanding this will enable people make the assessment of the candidates they are presented with. So much is made about the error of 2015, but not enough is asked about what we had in front of us back then. Ultimately, voters had no choice between the APC and PDP candidates because that is what the parties presented to us, and that is one of the main issues. The character of the party in Nigeria is built on the individual at the head of the party. There is too much power concentrated in the person of the party leader in our system, and our culture of obeisance and eye service makes it worse.

This is the reason why the APC’s seven years in power have been disastrous: The party took the character of its leader, Muhammadu Buhari. The PDP, in the first eight years especially, took the character of its first leader, Segun Obasanjo. Was Uncle Sege perfect? Not at all, but in the light of all that has happened since, it is almost impossible to deny that his era was in every sense of the expression, “the good old days”, and this is where we need to be careful.

I am not a member of either party, so I cannot be involved in the selection of their aspirants. I suspect that most people reading this would not be party members either. But there is a need to find a way to make the parties know that we are aware that whoever is at the top of the ticket is what the party would become over the next four to eight years, and this brings me back to the Obasanjo comparison. For all his faults, and there were many, one thing that Obasanjo cannot be accused of not having is capacity. Uncle Sege’s capacity was vital for the situation that Nigeria was in when he took over back in 1999.

Consider this: When Obasanjo took over, Nigeria’s debt service to revenue ratio was hitting the 60 per cent mark, our foreign reserves were just under $1 billion, and at a point under Abacha, inflation actually hit 72.8 per cent! Do such figures sound familiar?

But would we get such a person if he fails to emerge from the primaries of both parties?

That is the question. In both parties, as of today, we have wide fields of declared candidates, ranging from the good to the bad to the ugly. That is the nature of big-tent parties, which is what both the APC and the PDP are. If both parties end up presenting us with Yahaya Bello and Peter Obi to vote for, the choice would be obvious.

But what if both parties present us with Nyesom Wike and Rotimi Amaechi?

Neither is palatable in my opinion, but we’d have to choose one and then be faced with their bitter rivalry and gangster-style politics playing out on the national stage. Thus we, as a voting public, need to find a way to make the parties understand that they have to present us with decent options. That, for me, is the way forward.

Cheta Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence.

Last week, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), a government agency under the Ministry of Communications, currently led by Minister Isa Pantami, took the decision and made this public that any user of a GSM phone who is yet to link his or her National Identification Number (NIN) to a Subscriber Identification Module, that is SIM cards, would be barred from making any further calls on the country’s telecommunication network. The telecommunication operators were ordered to effect the directive and so by April 4, over 48 million phones had been barred from making any calls. The idea of having mobile telephone lines in Nigeria linked to NIN was first mooted in 2020. Ten times so far, the Ministry of Communications and its subsidiary agency, have extended the deadline for compliance. In December 2020, over 72 million lines were barred from making calls. Following appeals to government, the deadline was again extended the tenth time.

The original reason given for the registration of SIM cards was national security. Too many persons, the government observed, commit crime through mobile telephony, from the use of the lines to kidnap persons, collect ransom, lure persons into ritual killings, rape, murder, extortion, advance fee fraud and all kinds of criminal activities. In a country of over 200 million people, it made sense to use mobile telephony penetration to track the people and gather data. The linkage between the Nigerian Communications Commission and the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in this regard made sense. Data is the biggest problem in Nigeria. Nigeria plans without data. Nigerians do no respect data. They are more likely to operate on the basis of faith and superstition. Nigerians don’t even know how many they are. With the increasing penetration of mobile telephony, a veritable tool of inclusion and democratisation  there is no doubting the quality of data that can be mined from such a strategic and accessible public and open resource for development planning and national security reasons. This makes me think that the NCC/NIMC intervention was useful and advisable, absolutely in principle. Indeed at a point, the Nigerian regulator fined MTN, the biggest telecommunications company in the country, $3.9 billion for failing to disconnect unregistered SIM cards.

But where are we at this moment and why? In the last week, many Nigerians whose phones are not yet linked to the NIN, are busy agonising. They cannot make direct calls. They can only receive calls through their WhatsApp applications. Over 48 million Nigerians have been shut down. I can no longer count on my finger tips or the strands of hair on my head, the number of Nigerians who are literally weeping and gnashing their teeth that living without their mobile phones is like a trip to purgatory. Businesses have been affected. Love lives and relationships as well. This reminds me of an essay I once wrote wondering how we used to live before the advent of mobile telephony. I recall those days when every Femi, Chuka and Musa used to go to NITEL offices to make phone calls, only to get lucky or unlucky after many hours on the queue. Few persons had phones at home at the time, and for those who were privileged, what kind of phones did they have? Early 20th Century grandfather phones that left your fingers bruised after every call and after a usually annoying encounter with the disrespectful staff at the telephone exchange, who could be heard often times eavesdropping on your conversation and giggling at your expense.

The revolution in the telecommunication industry in Africa put an end to all that. It brought the people more than anything else, freedom. It shattered one aspect of the illusion of elite privilege and superiority.  Telephone exchange staff became irrelevant – nobody needed them any longer and the gossip that they enjoyed ended. For a while there was something called Thuraya Satellite phones!  All those women who got carried away by men who wielded those bulky phones, just before the democratisation of telephony, must now be wondering why they got carried away so easily by something that became nothing within such a short space of technological advancement and innovation. Today, Femi, Musa and Chuka can hold a phone, and call anywhere in the world without anyone’s assistance.

The only problem I see here are those Nigerians, the annoying ones who don’t load credit on their own phones, that is the “Oga, Oga, I don’t have credit, please call me back” crowd. When you call back, the same person who has no credit on his or her phone wants to beg for money from you, but he or she would never think of borrowing credit to even borrow from you. This is why my favourite feature on mobile telephony is True Caller. Once you can memorise the list of time wasters and the greedy crowd, it is easy to just ignore their calls, except they are willing, of course, to make the call, before that usual line: “Brother mi, please I need your help oh.” The danger is that every request is a matter of life and death, and the response is expected immediately. Nobody cares about your own circumstances. When you tell them you don’t do this thing they call bank transfer, they would even offer to travel down to set it up for you, so that any time they need a handout from you, there will be no delay – Nigerians and their terrible sense of entitlements and the discontents of mobile telephony!

If people suffer this much in the hands of extended family stalkers, extortionists and abusers, I have no problem with the state qua state saying that it needs to have a record of everyone who makes a call, or owns a phone. A mobile phone looks good. It is a tool of communication. It is also a status symbol. Indeed, when some Nigerians step out of their homes in the morning, they do not hold one phone, they carry about three, and in terms of cost, those three phones are more than enough to buy a plot of land and start the foundation of a building. Some people are so vain, despite the poverty in the land, that when you move beyond the value of their many phones and assess the cost of their jewelry, and apparel, the total combo would be enough to build a house! With such display of insensitivity and the crime level in the country, the Nigerian government is right to seek to know what people do with their phones. And who owns which phone? These small gadgets that people hold in their hands and call mobile phones can be used for good and ill. It is the same instrument that is used to announce good news, that terrorists use to deliver messages of evil. Freedom is a good concept in human societies, but it is not an absolute proposition.

But why would Nigerians refuse to obtain the NIN and link their phones to it after ten postponements by the National Communications Commission (NCC), over a period of two years? The first thing is that the people do not trust their governments. We have reached a sad point in this country, whereby the people consider government their Number One Enemy. They doubt anything that is related to government. Whatever government proposes, the people are likely to think that the primary interest is not theirs but the selfish interests of government officials. Without any deep reflection, they reject any government initiative almost instinctively: The fact that religion, ethnicity and ego are often thrown into the mix makes everything worse.  Nigerians are also the most superstitious human beings in the world. They read meanings into everything. When this whole drama about the NIN/SIM started, Nigerians were naturally suspicious. Nobody allayed their fears and so the conspiracy theories grew wings. Do they want to monitor our phone calls? What do they need NIN for? Do they want to use this as an excuse to bring in people from Niger and Chad to manipulate 2023 general elections?  Even if we take the numbers, who will protect privacy and guarantee integrity?

As is typically Nigerian, nobody could offer any clarification. The approach adopted by government was to bully the people and issue threats. That worked. People trooped to the registration centres. The centres were chaotic. Long queues; abusive staff. There were reports of extortion to get just a number. NCC addressed that by getting the telecommunication companies involved and setting up new centres at some point. It was at that point that I got involved. I had to get to the service centre at 6 a.m., alongside Ms Ijeoma Nwogwugwu and Mr Adibua Okwesa. Still, we met a queue. It is so strange that in Nigeria, you cannot get certain things, including visas to foreign countries, or a National Identification Number (NIN), except you go through a night vigil or its equivalent. The Federal Government of Nigeria may insist on its policy choices in this context, but the point is that it was a terribly managed process. The repeated extensions were also in part due to failures on the part of government and its agents. The NCC and the Federal Ministry of Communications jumped into the process without any clear thinking, completely without preparation and without enough public enlightenment.

The second thing is that the people don’t really care. Why should the NIN/SIM card alignment be a priority when Nigerian borders are so porous and there is so much poverty in the land?

I want to appeal to the Federal Ministry of Communications and the National Communications Commission to take a second look at the latest deadline. When the queues built up and the people complained, the government was helpless. I commend the agencies, however, for the decision to extend the deadline further until now.

I also admit that the Federal Government had given so many earlier warnings. But that is Nigeria for you. The people do not obey directives by government until they are convinced that it is something deserving of their concern. But by now, it must be clear to Nigerians that government means business with the registration of NIN and SIM cards. Their reluctance to comply is more of a comment on people-government relations than the people themselves, or perhaps both, to be fair.

I recommend a more cautious approach. Even those who had their NIN cannot link up. The NCC must look at their back-end operations. It is either the operating system is overwhelmed or there is a need to look at whatever is happening at that back-end. Phone users have been told to go quickly and sort out their NIN/SIM registration and many are out there in compliance but the confusion is enormous. It would be wrong to project the typical Nigerian attitude that the people deserve to be punished. No. Many are actually innocent offenders. It seems to me that the alignment of the NIN and SIM cards should be a permanent, on-going process. There must be more creative ways of making sure that the people comply. What are those other options? Candidly, I have no technical ideas, beyond common sense, but I think mounting additional pressure on a population that is already under the weather as a result of existential uncertainties is most unkind: a national currency that is heavily devalued, the cost of diesel going up so badly even the rich now ration electricity supply, no jobs, no water, no electricity and yet in the midst of it all, some people are beginning to show up talking about 2023 general elections and promises that they do not intend to keep.

The barred GSM lines should be opened up for another reason: the cost to the economy and the effect on the mental health of the people. I suggest that the government should meet the people half-way, encourage them, and show a little more empathy. The people should also meet the government half-way by simply obeying the directive that every barred SIM card should be registered and thereby get unbarred.