O Lord of Yam, Cassava, and Millet, Hear Our Cry!
Dear fellow sufferers under the Nigerian sky.
Let us gather, not with our hoes and cutlasses, but with rosaries, prayer beads, and fasting stomachs. The Federal Government of Nigeria, in its boundless wisdom and infinite incompetence, has finally stumbled upon the solution to food insecurity: A Three-Day National Prayer for Food Sufficiency.
You heard that right. Let’s get a Thunderous Hallelujah!
Let’s forget irrigation systems. Ignore post-harvest storage technologies. Laugh off land reform, mechanization, and banish agricultural science. What Nigeria needs, brethren, is not strategy or sweat, but supplication to our sky daddy.
Fellow believers, yes, you heard me right. According to a memo floating around like a divine dove from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural (Under)development, signed by the HR Director (because when you’re out of ideas or your depth, HR becomes Holy Redemption), employees are to gather in solemn prayer, asking Jehovah Jireh, the Lord our Provider, to do what the Minister of Agriculture and his well-fed army of Permanent Secretaries and Special Assistants have failed to do since the days of Lord Lugard.
And why shouldn’t our officials gather in prayer?
After all, these officials have tried everything else – from sitting in their air-conditioned offices in Abuja to attending billion-naira “agriculture summits” in Dubai. They’ve sent delegations to Brazil to learn how to grow cassava (because the Yoruba saying that “you don’t go to another man’s farm to learn how to use your cutlass” was written by an unpatriotic saboteur). They’ve printed glossy brochures showing lush maize fields lifted from Google Images. What else can they do after all these exertions?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And when you’ve exhausted the dictionary of laziness, prayer becomes the last vocabulary word in the national lexicon.
One cannot help but marvel at our planners’ strategic genius. Faced with food shortages, hyperinflation, and farmers driven off their land by terrorists posing as herdsmen, they have come to the inspired conclusion that kneeling in prayer is more effective than weeding, that psalms are better than ploughs, and miracles should be included in the national budget. It has been revealed to our inspired officials that prayers should be substituted for policy, and fasting should replace fertilizer.
Meanwhile, when they’re not dodging bullets from emboldened “Herdsmen”, farmers in our food basket states of Plateau and Benue are forced to produce food with equipment last used in biblical times.
But fear not! As the HR memo declared, our divine intercessors in the Ministry will soon storm the gates of heaven and demand divine rain, angelic fertilizer, and maybe a heavenly tractor or two. Nigeria shall be blessed with abundant foodstuffs.
Amen! Our Lord is good and merciful.
After all, when you have civil servants who don’t know the difference between a yam and a cocoyam, prayer becomes the only logical fallback. Do we not all know that officials do not attain their positions because of competence, but because of their connections with godfathers?
But permit me, dear compatriots, to commit a blasphemy by comparing notes with some infidels.
Let us travel, in our minds, to a tiny pagan nation called the Netherlands. That is a land whose gods do not hear loud supplications. A cold, flat piece of real estate on the edge of Europe, smaller than Lagos State, with a population barely reaching 18 million. The country is so small that you will struggle to locate it on a map even with your binoculars. The Netherlands has no prophets. No “Daddy G.O.” No all-night crusades promising bountiful harvests in exchange for seed offerings. Dutch people will demand to know where any minister who tells them that he is talking with god on their behalf is getting his igbo, Nigerian parlance for marijuana.
Yet, that has not stopped the Netherlands from being the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products.
Yes, you heard me. The postage stamp-sized country exports more agricultural products than Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya combined. Its tomatoes don’t rot in trailers, its onions don’t mysteriously vanish from warehouses, and its cows don’t require 24-hour surveillance from bandits.
And here’s the scandalous part: they do it without a single day of national prayer.
Their agriculture ministry employs serious scientists, not sermonizers. Their research institutions, led by the Agriculture University in Wageningen, test soil, not faith. They don’t call for fasting; they invest in education. Dutch officials are paid modest salaries, travel economy class, and retire without sending their children to Yale on stolen subsidy funds. Only the Dutch Monarch rides in a motorcade. You see fewer SUVs on the Dutch superb roads than on the rough and ready roads in Ajegunle.
Meanwhile, a federal permanent secretary earns nearly ₦900,000 monthly in Nigeria, excluding allowances that can fatten a village. Ministers cruise in convoys of 10 SUVs, drink imported bottled water and exotic beverages with price tags like telephone numbers, and cannot identify a single local grain.
So we must ask, in this great hall of national comedy: If our officials know their jobs cannot be done by logic or effort and only by the supernatural, why did they apply in the first place? Did they think they were auditioning for clerical roles at Winners Chapel?
Or perhaps the job description for Federal Minister of Agriculture now reads:
“Seeking anointed vessel to intercede with the Almighty for rain, yield increase, and locust control. Prior experience in fasting and binding demons preferred.”
We have now reached the nadir of national indignity. A government elected to solve human problems is now outsourcing them to the divine. What next? Shall we pray for sufficient electricity? (Oh wait, we already do that.) Perhaps we’ll soon have a National Crusade for Road Repairs, with altar calls for pothole healing.
Oh, Nigeria, every time officials fail at governance, they retreat into the supernatural, like a child who insists that his “village people” are to blame after failing his math test.
It’s the same old theatre of the absurd: the same wobbly script and cast of incurable incompetents. They loot the funds meant for fertilizer, then kneel in church pews for “supernatural soil rejuvenation.” They squander the irrigation budget on SUVs, then fast for divine dew.
As repeatedly stated on this blog, we have normalized the abnormality in Nigeria and Africa!
Meanwhile, overcompensated and overpampered officials mock those who sweat in the sun to coax a few crops from over-abused earth.
Perhaps we should dissolve the Ministries altogether. Let us, once and for all, declare that governance in Nigeria has gone Pentecostal, that competence is for unbelievers, and that prayers are not complementary to policy but policy itself.
Let’s ordain our ministers formally and transform the Cabinet into a Clerical Conclave. Let’s call the Minister of Agriculture “Apostle of the Granary.” The Minister of Power can be the “High Priest of Light.” The Minister of Finance shall henceforth be addressed as “Reverend Revenue.” And, of course, the Minister of Information shall now be known as “The Prophet of Propaganda.”
Let us have Friday Jumu’ah for Food Sufficiency, Saturday Sabbath for Stable Electricity, and Sunday Service for Subsidy Restoration.
Who needs policy when you can quote Jeremiah 29:11?
As I have written ad nauseam, Africa’s real tragedy is the rulers’ folly and the ruled’s gullibility.
Like mindless little children, we citizens of this battered contraption called Africa clap like trained seals when officials summon us to prayer. Rather than question the sanity of those who campaigned for our votes but stare our gaze to the heavens regarding service delivery, we share their prayer posters on WhatsApp. We say “Amen” to every lazy pronouncement from presidents and their ministers. We tithe to churches while we neglect our farms. We teach our children to wait for miracles instead of tools. We bathe in olive oil and speak in tongues while neglecting our official duties. We see nothing wrong with the head of HR using her official time and resources to write memos begging for divine intervention.
Like children listening to bedtime stories, we believe manna will fall from the sky because the Bible says so. We believe that angels will plant the seeds, harvest the crops, and deliver them to Mile 12 market.
The Dutch did not pray their way to global agricultural success. They studied, planned, built, and worked. And their leaders took responsibility, not refuge behind pulpits and pews.
We must develop our minds to know that prayer is not the problem. Hypocrisy is. A country that thinks prayer is a substitute for coherent policy is set to fail.
Let every man pray, yes, after he has done the work. Let every woman fast, if she chooses – but only after planting her seed. When people who were elected to solve earthly problems now hide behind the veil of piety to excuse their failures, it is not religion – they are simply cowards dressed in cassocks. Worse than that, they are criminal scammers.
This is the same Nigeria where a governor builds an “intercessory chapel” inside the Government House instead of a rural health center. It is the same country where the agriculture minister once said God told him “the harvest would be bountiful,” but forgot to mention that the seeds were never distributed.
This is the time for straight talk. For how long are we in Africa going to keep dancing in circles around our vomit?
I know this is heresy to many, but no Almighty is moved by our loud hallelujahs when your irrigation budget has already been looted. He or She is not fooled by our 21-day fast when officials spent agriculture funds to buy SUVs.
If your job now requires only prayer, then resign. We do not need dead wood in our government telling us to wait for divine intervention for jobs they are paid to do. It is an insult to our intelligence.
Vacate the office, hand over the keys to your parastatal, go to the nearest seminary, become a priest, don a white cassock, and minister to your incompetence. But don’t stay in government, receive salaries and other appurtenances of office, only to shove your god down our throats.
Madam HR, do not collect a salary from a nation you refuse to serve. Do not fly business class to climate summits while you ask poor citizens to pray for rainfall. Do not spend ₦5 billion on “agricultural empowerment” workshops that end with “praise and worship.”
We did not vote for god – we voted (foolishly, it seems) for humans who claimed to have ideas.
To the African youth still clinging to hope and divine intervention: drop the prayer posters. Pick up a hoe. Pick up a book. Learn a trade. Acquire a vocation. Build something. Invent. Innovate. Irrigate. Store. Export.
Stop waiting for Elijah to drop from heaven and show you how to plant egusi seed.
To the so-called technocrats in Abuja: if you cannot solve problems with reason, research, and resolve, kindly return to your villages and become Chief Prayer Warriors. Stop wasting national airtime with empty declarations. Stop behaving like children who still believe in bedtime fairy tales.
The time has come for us in Africa to grow up, develop our faculties for critical thinking, apply logic, and THINK.
Our officials should stop pretending that divine intervention is a national development plan.
Until we do that, Nigeria and Africa will remain a prayerful but perpetually hungry nation, always fasting and never full.
Selah.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, Social Commentator.)
My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!
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