4th January, 2024
By Nehru Odeh
Professor Ebenezer Obadare, distinguished scholar, author and Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington D.C., United States has said that General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye and other men of God are direct descendants of former Nigerian military Head of State General Yakubu Gowon.
Obadare made this statement recently while delivering the keynote address at a two-day conference organized by former students of Dr. Segun Osoba, foremost historian, Marxist scholar and rights activist, held in his honour with the support of six other institutions within and outside Africa.
The conference attended by scholars from across the globe, was held at Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu Ode on 18 and 19 December 2023. Obadare entitled his keynote “Rekindling the Scientific Spirit: Historical Criticism in the Age of Sacred Authority”.
Obadare, who has done extensive work on Pentecostalism in Nigeria, said Pastor Adeboye and other men of God in Nigeria were Gowon’s direct descendants based on the way the latter preceded and influenced the former in their insidious attempt to stymie rational thinking, relegate intellectualism to the background and enthrone mass supernaturalism.
According to Obadare, the Church in Nigeria not only cashed in on the dearth of objective thinking occasioned by the military assault on the universities but also started from where the military stopped, as it made sure that reason and the scientific ethos were thrown to the winds.
Succinctly put, the Pentecostal movement, which is antithetical to rational thinking, stepped into the ravaging shoes of the military. That explains why Obadare said in his keynote that Pastor Adeboye and other men of God in Nigeria were the direct descendants of General Yakubu Gowon.
Obadare said the military’s attempt to stymie intellectualism as it ravaged the academia created a gaping epistemic vacuum which the Pentecostal movement readily stepped into. That is, the pastor, seeing the vacuum the military assault on universities created, replaced the professor as a beacon of knowledge.
“At any rate, not only was the military’s gambit of humiliating the professoriate with the ultimate goal of subduing civil society effective, the ensuing decline in the prestige of academia and the effective collapse of the Nigerian university as an institution vested with the mandate of “sense-making” created an epistemic vacuum.
“In retrospect, it is this vacuum that the Pentecostal movement, iconic of the anti-intellectual reaction, stepped into and currently occupies, and it is the primary reason, as I have argued elsewhere, why the Pastor has replaced the professor in the imagination, if not the affection, of a cross-section of Nigerians.
“Therefore, in the longue durée of Nigerian history- and the point is worth emphasizing if only because the genealogy tends to be forgotten- the age of sacred authority, championed and Generally Overseen by sundry contemporary vendors of the divine, is a product of the delegitimizing of the university, itself an effect of the military’s calculated assault on any semblance of independent intellectual life. By implication, Pastor Adeboye and the rest of the contemporary theocratic elite directly descended from General Yakubu Gowon,” Obadare maintained.
According to him, the way the military under Gowon assaulted the academia so much so that it weakened its capacity to foster scientific inquiry and objective thinking and therefore devitalize civil society is a precursor to the way the clergy over the years has replaced objective thinking and rationality with a “common belief in the ubiquity and efficacy of supernatural power”.
This indeed has resulted in the cultural valorization of agents such as Pastor Adeboye who claim unique access to the source and methods of its mobilization.
“One key takeaway from this copious literature is the realization that the assault by the military on the academy was far from adventitious, but as a matter of fact central to its ultimate goal of devitalizing civil society more broadly. The tactics involved are perhaps too familiar to recount, and include the systematic pauperization of the universities through a targeted denial of resources, the recruitment/appropriation of leading scholars into the political establishment via appointment into sinecures, and the delegitimizing of universities as centres of knowledge production.
“A faculty whose take-home pay could not take it home, same as the one whose boss was a comedian because the wages he paid were a joke, was presently caught betwixt and between, undecided whether to moonlight in a string of undignified and undignifying jobs, as many in fact did or to pack it in and seek opportunities outside the country, as many have continued to do.
“For those left with no choice but to ‘consult’ for the numerous NGOs that mushroomed in the wake of the spike in civil society funding in the 1990s, the paradox of providing intellectual service to entities many of which were established as institutional parallels to the universities cannot be overlooked.
“The theme of my keynote was largely inspired by, and is a way of paying homage to, this attitude of skepticism, for no observant person, certainly no one of Dr. Osoba’s cast of mind, can fail to notice the prevailing mental atmosphere in contemporary Nigeria, especially as it relates to the ubiquity of religiosity that, as I have shown in my work, has spread its logic-averse tentacles to every facet of public life and institution in Nigeria, including the bureaucracy, the armed forces, media, and crucially, our universities.
“This phenomenon is what the “age of sacred authority” in the title of my address is meant to evoke, and what I propose to do in the rest of my address is to cast a quick glance over the phenomenon, focusing on why, at least in my judgment, its ascendance is a problem for historical inquiry specifically and humanities and social science research and writing more broadly, and why what I am calling a rekindling of the scientific spirit is imperative.
“Accordingly, when I refer to the scientific spirit, I am guided by the understanding that, as the eminent science journal Nature declared back in March 1883, “science has no peculiar sphere… every field of human research is capable of scientific treatment.
“For the nineteenth-century American poet and critic James Russell Lowell, “the noblest definition of science is that breadth and impartiality of view which liberates the mind from specialties and enables it to organize whatever we learn so that it becomes real knowledge by being brought into true and helpful relation with the rest.
“Thus conceived, the scientific ethos is antithetical to ‘sacred authority,’ whereby belief in both the sacred and leaders whose authority is grounded in the supernatural is primary, widespread, and determinative.
“While Pentecostalism, of which I have had a few things to say in my work over the past few years, is iconic of this spirit of surrender and is inarguably its main propeller, it by no means exhausts it,” Obadare declared.