In a latest video message the Enugu-based priest revealed there are plans being devised to murder President Muhammadu Buhari.
Idowu Akinlotan in this piece for Today.ng says that it is not clear where God’s word stopped, and where that of Fr. Mbaka began. He calls on the prominent cleric to reveal the names of those who are perfecting their plans to kill the president.
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| Father Ejike Mbaka |
Mbaka’s latest outburst
Catholic priest and founder of the Enugu-based Adoration Ministry, Ejike Mbaka, has remained undaunted in his fiery engagements with people of power despite the dreadful unease he causes the Catholic Church. His latest outburst suggesting that plans were being hatched by some shadowy persons to assassinate President Muhammadu Buhari is certain to bring grief to his superiors in the church. A few days ago while ministering, Fr. Mbaka had declared that opponents of President Muhammadu Buhari’s anti-corruption war were determined to bring the campaign to a halt by getting rid of the president. He gave no substantiation other than to say heaven revealed the plot to him.
It is not clear where God’s word stopped, and where that of Fr. Mbaka began. But the priest’s fulsome support for President Buhari predates last year’s presidential election. Happily for the priest, his love for Buhari has been amply requited. Last December, many months after assuming office, President Buhari hosted the priest in Aso Villa and eulogised his courage and faithfulness in ministry. The priest beamed. But an evidently distressed and alarmed Catholic Church thereafter transferred him to Emene, a suburb of Enugu, having stayed more than a decade at Christ the King Parish, GRA, Enugu. His new place of posting, Our Lady Parish, is much smaller. Fr. Ejike immediately concluded that his transfer was punitive because he spoke the truth to power and denied former president Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, support. He added very colourfully and even poetically that given the smallness of the Emene parish, it was apparent he was destined to suffer, without a place to lay his head or place the assets of the Adoration Ministry which he founded and nurtured to host thousands of Catholic faithful regularly.
Fr. Mbaka has sustained his love for President Buhari
Since he repudiated Dr Jonathan in January 2015 by calling on the electorate to reject the then president and instead embrace Gen Buhari, Fr. Mbaka has sustained his love, admiration and support for President Buhari, a support that has intensified and become amplified since the presidential election of 2015. Indeed, the priest argues passionately that President Buhari is the answer to the people’s and Catholic Church’s prayers concerning the election of a leader who would fight corruption. It was not surprising that this kind of unalloyed support would elicit equal adulation from the president who last July congratulated the priest on his 21 years in ministry and 10 years of the Adoration Ministry.
However, increasingly, many Christians are becoming a little wary of both Fr. Mbaka’s fulsome praise of President Buhari and his fulminations against the president’s enemies and everyone who shows any reservations about his style. In fact, the Catholic Church appears greatly saddened by what they see as Fr. Mbaka’s politicisation of religion. His transfer to Our Lady Parish, they suggested last February through their spokesman, Rev. Fr. Ralph Madu, was routine, overdue and definitely not punitive. Priests, the spokesman continues, are meant to serve anywhere without grumbling and with humility, while posting of church functionaries has always remained the exclusive preserve of the bishop. Fr. Mbaka, he adds, had indeed overstayed at Christ the King Parish. His new posting, the spokesman concludes, should even give him time for his Adoration Ministry which is a private, not church, ministry.
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Fr. Mbaka haughtily transcends the divide between religion and politics
While his supervisors eye him warily and squirm as he jauntily darts crosses the boundaries between prophetic ministry and political ministry, they will be even more at a loss what to do with him. To keep him is becoming to them an almost sheer impossibility; but to dispense with him entirely, assuming church rules make it expedient and easy, is even more challenging. Should they hope he would make an ass of himself one day with a spectacularly misplaced prophecy, they would still worry that the collateral damage to the church could be unbearable. When mega churches such as the Catholic Church deal with an unorthodox and possibly obstreperous priest, they find themselves caught between the rock and a hard place. They will of course recall with anguish the famous case of Martin Luther, the German-born Christian reformer. They will also not be unmindful of the fact that Fr. Mbaka seems to retain a lot of respect in and out of the Catholic Church.
That respect may, however, begin to fade soon as Fr. Mbaka haughtily transcends the divide between religion and politics. He has belaboured Igbo irredentists in terms that are unexampled and unflattering, even describing them as evil and illogical. The various irredentist groups in the Southeast have responded in kind, advising him to drop his cassock and play full-time politics if he has the courage and the conviction. The more he abandons federal politics, which he fulminated against so popularly and effectively under Dr Jonathan, for local politics, a strange and unfamiliar ground to him, he could get ensnared. Even heavyweight Igbo politicians have been careful not to directly and irreverently oppose either the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) or the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB). Fr. Mbaka has shown no such sensitivity or even discipline.
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| President Muhammadu Buhari and Mbaka
More, the priest could soon get into trouble with the wider public as he starts to allude to factors and sentiments that are either illusory or indefensible. Fr. Mbaka got away with murder, so to speak, when he assailed a deeply unpopular Dr Jonathan in the run-up to the last general elections. It is not clear that his fawning sentiments about President Buhari will continue to resonate as clearly and richly as he hopes and presumes. Will he recant sometime soon when that epiphany hits him? In March last year when he alleged that the Goodluck Jonathan family was after his life, the former president and his wife simply hissed and moved on. The First Family recalled that he had fawned over them in their early days in office, almost as if he was after certain patronage, according to their surmise. So when he began to rail against them, they first tried to blackmail him by releasing video recordings of how he praised the First Family. When that failed to unnerve the faithful who thronged his ministry grounds, the president and his wife simply ignored him.
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Mbaka’s panegyrics should ask him who is planning to assassinate the president
Fr. Mbaka will be sensible an sensitive enough to know he cannot play ducks and drakes with the affections of the mercurial President Buhari. The president has a reputation for not taking prisoners; but in addition, he has enough agencies and aides who do not balk at using state power in seemingly transparent manner to disembowel any upstart or critic, no matter how highly placed, or of whatever colour or religion. Fr. Mbaka is sucking up to the Buhari presidency now. He had better stand pat, for if the Nigerian cultural standard is anything to go by, he may be incapable of living or ministering above suspicion to escape the arm-twisting the Buhari government is becoming famous for.
But above all, the Catholic Church cannot because of the fear of consequences continue to indulge Fr. Mbaka’s crass politicking. They should rein in their priest as they know how best to do in line with experience garnered from centuries of interaction with difficult political situations and upheavals. Priests have a voice in any social and political environment, especially as the Catholic Church knows in terms of the so-called liberation theology. And they can express those opinions brilliantly and within the context of the scriptures. But open and unadulterated partisanship is another thing entirely. If Fr. Mbaka will not caution himself, and the state is too intoxicated by his panegyrics to ask him who is planning to assassinate the president, the church should step in and do what is necessary to restore normality and decency.
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