Jonathan, Mbaka and the e-Hounds

I have two issues with Rev. Fr. Camillus Ejikeme Mbaka’s approach to
social and political matters, and I will state them right away.

One
is his tendency to declare with finality what will happen to the world
or to people of the world that have gone astray. We Christians live in
New Testament times which teach about the elastic patience of God and
the opportunity it provides for sinners to do a turnaround and make
heaven – even at the very last minute. Prophetic anointing is also a
task that assists the Almighty to accomplish this goal for the human person. In addition, the New
Testament prefigures the Old in many ways; there are far too many
instances of where the Almighty changed His mind about punishing
individuals, groups and nations that tested his will with serial acts of
wickedness against humanity.

The other is that the reverend
gentleman appears too quick to take decisive, sometimes emotional stands
against politicians, doing it in such a way that he placed
himself as a one-man opposition party to elected public officials. Being
emotional means that he sometimes ended up putting his spiritual
anointing to God’s test. The outcome may not always be edifying.

In
spite of these two misgivings that I habour on his approach to
socio-political matters, I still have reasons to thank God for the man.
Climbing from the deep valley of poverty to the zenith of priesthood, he
has managed to amass spiritual and material influence in the faith,
which he deploys as support for the youths, the poor, the
orphans, the widows, and the disadvantaged in general. His approach to
evangelism is therefore a fine example of what the bible describes as
“faith with good works.”

I will give two examples of what Fr.
Mbaka does, in the areas of education and youth empowerment. Rather than
build private secondary schools or universities (as is the fashion
nowadays) and use them to further milk the faithful, Fr. Mbaka provides
thousands of poor students with scholarships instead. Rather than
continue to bemoan the inability of government to provide employment to
teeming school graduates, he went on to establish industries not only to
provide employment but also, and more importantly, to reinvest the
profit where it mattered the most – giving seed capital in the form of
grants to youths and widows with bright ideas to launch into business.

Beyond
the miracles that are said to happen in his weekly adoration events (I
never attended any and so cannot personally vouch for them), these are
the real reasons why the man is held in awe and has amassed a large
fellowship of Christian converts that I daresay any politician hunting
for votes should be interested in.

Politics is a different kettle
of fish, however, and I am the least surprised that Rev. Fr. Mbaka is in
hot water as a result of his readiness to jump into political
skirmishes as the spirit moves him. As weapons and arsenal are being
amassed to fight to win the February 2015 elections, Rev. Fr Mbaka will,
for the first time, meet face-to-face with national propaganda far
beyond the level of anything he experienced during his local run-in with
ex-Gov. Chimaroke Nnamani – if the Candidate does not reign in the
e-hounds.

The good reverend’s misstep has so far created two kinds
of what I classify as vengeance seekers and e-hounds. The first appear
to be those who apparently have been waiting in the wings for an
opportunity to viciously lash out, in retaliation for earlier positions
Mbaka took on political, ecclesiastical or social issues. The second are
the army of political e-recruits working for the two dominant political
parties (APC/PDP) whose sole task appears to be to viciously attack
influential persons who take public positions that they perceive as not
in the electoral best interest of their paymasters.

One of the
ways that the second group operates is to twist words and provide false
interpretations that question the integrity and good faith of those who
dare to take the road to dissent. I was going to suggest that this was a
preserve of the APC until Fr. Mbaka appeared on the scene with his
Jonathan bashing. For instance, Mbaka had explained that he had to go
public with the not-so-salutary message about our Commander-in-chief
because the President’s wife did not give him the opportunity to deliver
the message to her privately. He did not say that he decided to rubbish
them for not taking his calls. But this has not deterred some social
media commentators from concluding that he gave his public message to
vent his anger and frustration at the first lady and her husband for
daring to shun him. In giving this interpretation, they conveniently
forgot that it was the first lady who needed (and probably still needs) the priest and had to travel all the way to Enugu to meet with him for support and blessings.

It
is instructive that all of the concerned principal actors – the
President, the first lady, Sen. Ike Ekweremadu (who led the first lady
on her spiritual mission to Enugu), the PDP and the Jonathan Campaign
Organization – have kept a studied silence on the matter. Yet, it does
appear that there are vicarious interests egging on the e-hounds to
continue to create a deep rupture between the President and a rump of
the Christian faithful who believes in Fr. Mbaka. Question is: do these
strategists think that President Jonathan, in the long run, will win the
votes of those who have otherwise been sympathetic, by surreptitiously
using e-monsters to seek to destroy the integrity of a hardworking and
well-meaning priest?

Here is a free advice: the best way to
destroy Fr. Mbaka – if that is indeed the strategy – is to seek out and
find every one of the thousands that he has helped or is helping through
school, the hundreds that he assisted to get jobs in his company, get jobs in other companies, or those he granted seed capital to start a business,
the hundreds of thousands of youths in the various communities where he
performed spiritual cleansing, and every one of those who have
benefited from his material benevolence – and persuade them to allow
government displace Mbaka in order to provide for them those material
and spiritual services, now or after the elections. 

It is also possible
that there are those who may want to believe that social media nattering
can accomplish this feat in the 36 days left before 14 February 2015. Why not?

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