Reuben Abati
The spiritual side of Aso Villa
People tend to be alarmed when the Nigerian Presidency takes
certain decisions. They don’t think the decision makes sense. Sometimes,
they wonder if something has not gone wrong with the thinking process
at that highest level of the country. I have heard people insist that
there is some form of witchcraft at work in the country’s seat of
government. I am ordinarily not a superstitious person, but working in
the Villa, I eventually became convinced that there must be something
supernatural about power and closeness to it. I’ll start with a personal
testimony. I was given an apartment to live in inside the Villa. It was
furnished and equipped. But when my son, Michael arrived, one of my
brothers came with a pastor who was supposed to stay in the apartment.
But the man refused claiming that the Villa was full of evil spirits and
that there would soon be a fire accident in the apartment. He
complained about too much human sacrifice around the Villa and advised
that my family must never sleep overnight inside the Villa.
I thought the man was talking nonsense and he wanted the luxury of a
hotel accommodation. But he turned out to be right. The day I hosted
family friends in that apartment and they slept overnight, there was
indeed a fire accident. The guests escaped and they were so thankful.
Not long after, the President’s physician living two compounds away had a
fire accident in his home. He and his children could have died. He
escaped with bruises. Around the Villa while I was there, someone always
died or their relations died. I can confirm that every principal
officer suffered one tragedy or the other; it was as if you needed to
sacrifice something to remain on duty inside that environment. Even some
of the women became merchants of dildo because they had suffered a
special kind of death in their homes (I am sorry to reveal this) and
many of the men complained about something that had died below their
waists too. The ones who did not have such misfortune had one ailment or
the other that they had to nurse. From cancer to brain and prostate
surgery and whatever, the Villa was a hospital full of agonizing
patients.
I recall the example of one particular man, an asset to the
Jonathan Presidency who practically ran away from the Villa. He said he
needed to save his life. He was quite certain that if he continued to
hang around, he would die. I can’t talk about colleagues who lost
daughters and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and fathers, and the
many obituaries that we issued. Even the President was multiply
bereaved. His wife, Mama Peace was in and out of hospital at a point,
undergoing many surgeries. You may have forgotten but after her husband
lost the election and he conceded victory, all her ailments vanished,
all scheduled surgeries were found to be no longer necessary and since
then she has been hale and hearty. By the same token, all those our
colleagues who used to come to work to complain about a certain death
beneath their waists and who relied on videos and other instruments to
entertain wives (take it easy boys, I don’t mean nay harm, I am
writing!), have all experienced a re-awakening.
Everyone who went under the blade has received miraculous healing,
and we are happy to be out of that place. But others were not so lucky.
They died. There were days when convoys ran into ditches and lives were
lost. In Norway, our helicopter almost crashed into a mountain. That was
the first time I saw the President panicking. The weather was all so
hazy and he just kept saying it would not be nice for the President of a
country to die in a helicopter crash due to pilot miscalculations. The
President went into a prayer mode. We survived. In Kenya once, we had a
bird strike. The plane had to be recalled and we were already airborne
with the plane acting like it would crash. During the 2015 election
campaigns, our aircraft refused to start on more than one occasion. The
aircraft just went dead. On some other occasions, we were stoned and
directly targeted for evil. I really don’t envy the people who work in
Aso Villa, the seat of Nigeria’s Presidency. For about six months, I
couldn’t even breathe properly. For another two months, I was on
crutches. But I considered myself far luckier than the others who were
either nursing a terminal disease or who could not get it up.
When Presidents make mistakes, they are probably victims of a force
higher than what we can imagine. Every student of Aso Villa politics
would readily admit that when people get in there, they actually become
something else. They act like they are under a spell. When you issue a
well- crafted statement, the public accepts it wrongly. When the
President makes a speech and he truly means well, the speech is
interpreted wrongly by the public. When a policy is introduced, somehow,
something just goes wrong. In our days, a lot of people used to
complain that the APC people were fighting us spiritually and that there
was a witchcraft dimension to the governance process in Nigeria. But
the APC folks now in power are dealing with the same demons. Since
Buhari government assumed office, it has been one mistake after another.
Those mistakes don’t look normal, the same way they didn’t look normal
under President Jonathan. I am therefore convinced that there is an evil
spell enveloping this country. We need to rescue Nigeria from the
forces of darkness. Aso Villa should be converted into a spiritual
museum, and abandoned.
Should I become President of Nigeria tomorrow, I will build a new
Presidential Villa: a Villa that will be dedicated to the all-conquering
Almighty, and where powers and principalities cannot hold sway. But it
is not about buildings and space, not so? It is about the people who go
to the highest levels in Nigeria. I really don’t quite believe in
superstitions, but I am tempted to suggest that this is indeed a country
in need of prayers. We should pray before people pack their things into
Aso Villa. We should ask God to guide us before we appoint ministers.
We should, to put it in technocratic language, advise that the people
should be very vigilant. We have all failed so far, that crucial test of
vigilance. We should have a Presidential Villa where a President can
afford to be human and free. In the White House, in the United States,
Presidents live like normal human beings. In Aso Villa, that is
impossible. They’d have to surround themselves with cooks from their
villages, bodyguards from their mother’s clans and friends they can
trust. It should be possible to be President of Nigeria without having
to look behind one’s shoulders. But we are not yet there. So, how do we
run a Presidency where the man in the saddle can only drink water served
by his kinsman? No. How can we possibly run a Presidency where every
President proclaims faith in Nigeria but they are better off in the
company of relatives and kinsmen. No. We need as Presidents men and
women who are willing to be Nigerians. No Nigerian President should be
in spiritual bondage because he belongs to all of us and to nobody.
Now let me go back to the spiritual dimension. A colleague once
told me that I was the most naïve person around the place. I thought I
was a bright, smart, professional doing my bit and enjoying the
President’s confidence. I spelled it out. But what I got in response was
that I was coming to the villa using Lux soap, but that most people
around the place always bathed in the morning with blood. Goat blood.
Ram blood. Whatever animal blood. I argued. He said there were persons
in the Villa walking upside down, head to the ground. I screamed.
Everybody looked normal to me. But I soon began to suspect that I was in
a strange environment indeed. Every position change was an opportunity
for warfare. Civil servants are very nice people; they obey orders, but
they are not very nice when they fight over personal interests.
The President is most affected by the atmosphere around him. He can
make wrong decisions based on the cloud of evil around him. Even when
he means well and he has taken time to address all possible outcomes, he
could get on the wrong side of the public. A colleague called me one
day and told me a story about how a decision had been taken in the
spiritual realm about the Nigerian government. He talked about the
spirit of error, and how every step taken by the administration would
appear to the public like an error. He didn’t resign on that basis but
his words proved prophetic. I see the same story being re-enacted. Aso
Villa is in urgent need of redemption. I never slept in the apartment
they gave me in that Villa for an hour.
About the Author:
Reuben Abati is a columnist in The Guardian and former Special
Adviser on Media and Publicity to former President Goodluck Jonathan.
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