By Oludare Ogunlana
LAST Wednesday, a 41-year-old gospel minister named Olayemi Bayonile Bolaji, known to millions as Toluwanisings, collapsed at his home in Ibadan. The night before, he had led worship at a concert in the same city. His aide says the people around him carried him to seven or eight hospitals. Some, he says, told them the doctors were on strike. Others simply did not admit him. He died before anyone treated him.
I did not know him personally. I grieve with his family, his church, and everyone who sang “A Very Big God” in a hall or a kitchen this year. Nothing I write today is about him. It is about us, and about what we said within hours of his death.
What we said
By Thursday, the familiar words had filled the timelines. Arrow. Ọfà. The enemy. Spiritual attack. The devil has taken another one.
I want to ask a plain question, and I ask it of every one of us, whether you worship on Sunday, on Friday, or at the family shrine: which devil told the Nigerian government, federal, state, and local alike, not to build a functioning emergency referral system? Which arrow was aimed at the budget line for ambulances, in Abuja or in Ibadan? Which spirit sat in the National Assembly and the state houses of assembly and decided that a resident doctor should earn less than a politician’s driver, until the doctors walked out?
The aide who told the story ended it with these words: “God said it was his time.” I understand why a grieving man says that. However, notice what the sentence does. It closes the case. It moves the file from the Ministry of Health to the throne of heaven, where no one can be summoned, no one can be sacked, and no one has to answer for an empty emergency room on a Wednesday morning.
The theology of the closed case
Our three faiths agree on more than we admit. Christianity teaches that God made man in His image and gave him dominion, which means responsibility. Islam teaches that Allah does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. Ìṣẹ̀ṣe teaches that orí, your own head, your own choices, carries you to your destiny, and that the Ifá priest who blames every misfortune on an enemy is a bad priest.
Yet in practice we have built a shared national theology that none of our founders would recognize. It has two articles. First, every death that comes quickly has a spiritual author. Second, every politician who shows up at the funeral is a benefactor.
I call this the theology of the closed case, and it is the most useful religion a bad government ever had. A citizen who believes his neighbor died from an arrow will fast and pray. A citizen who believes his neighbor died because eight hospitals had no doctor on duty will ask who was responsible for the doctors. Only one of those citizens is dangerous to the people in power.
The devil’s headquarters
Listen to how we talk and you would think Satan has relocated his headquarters to Nigeria. He does not seem to shoot arrows in Lagos as accurately as he does in Ibadan, and he barely operates at all in Accra, where a man who collapses is more likely to reach a hospital that treats him. I am not mocking anyone’s faith. I am pointing out that the devil’s accuracy tracks our infrastructure almost perfectly. That should make us suspicious.
Toluwanisings is not the first. In January, a young singer named Ifunanya Nwangene died in Abuja after a snakebite, and the country briefly asked why antivenom and emergency care were not available in the capital. Then we moved on. We will move on again by Friday unless we decide not to.
Where they go when their own heads ache
Here is the part of the story our prophets never preach. When the Adáhunṣe pastor, the Alálùpàyídà in a suit, the senator, or the governor gets a headache, he does not pray it away. He does not anoint it with oil. He flies. To London. To Paris. To Dubai. To Ahmedabad.
Three weeks ago an Indian hospital released a promotional video of former head of state General Abdulsalami Abubakar walking its corridors after a knee replacement, under the banner “Clinical Excellence Beyond Borders.” The Vice President of the Federal Republic flew in to visit him there and signed the visitors’ book to thank the Indian doctors. A knee replacement. Not a rare cancer. Not a transplant. A procedure that Nigerian teaching hospitals perform. A private hospital in Gujarat used a former Nigerian head of state as a billboard, and the government he once led pays for such trips by law.
It is widely told in Ibadan that in the 1950s and 1960s, members of the Saudi royal family came to UCH for treatment. Whether every detail of that story is exact, the direction of travel is not in doubt: the world once came to Ibadan to be healed. Last year, the same UCH spent more than one hundred days disconnected from the national electricity grid over unpaid bills. Toluwanisings collapsed a few kilometers from it.
Now hold the two pictures side by side. The pastor tells you to drink anointing oil when you are sick; his wife delivers in Houston. He gives you a sticker for your car to stop armed robbers; he moves with police and soldiers in his convoy. He tells you that God will provide; his children are in Toronto and Maryland, in countries where the ambulance actually comes. The politician tells you to pray for Nigeria; he keeps a passport for himself and a hospital bed abroad. They have not rejected medicine. They have only rejected it for you.
That is not faith. That is a two-tier system dressed in a cassock, and the people who sing praise songs at its gates are paying for both tiers with one salary.
The singers who used to sing to power
It was not always like this. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the generals ruled, Evangelist Niyi Adedokun, the man they called The Glory Singer, recorded albums with titles that needed no footnote: Esan Ko Gboogun, “vengeance does not know medicine,” and in 1994, the year after June 12 was annulled and Abacha seized power, an album he simply called Pharaoh. His songs mixed revelation with satire, and he aimed the warnings upward, at the men in the villas. Those of us who were there remember the stories that he made sure his cassettes reached the hands of the rulers themselves. He was not alone. Evangelist Funmi Aragbaye has spoken publicly about how her own songs drew the anger of the military. These were gospel ministers who understood that the prophet’s job was to stand outside the palace, not inside it, and to sing the word of God against the king when the king deserved it.
That tradition is nearly gone. Today a gospel minister’s career runs through the same halls as the governor’s. The anointing is dispensed at the same events where the contracts are shared. A singer who has eaten at the table cannot sing about the hunger outside the gate. The prophets have prophesied prosperity to the very men who have made the country a Babylon, and the people have loved it so.
I say this with no pleasure. The men and women who sing are not the ones who emptied the hospitals. However, they hold the only microphone that most Nigerians still trust, and they have chosen to use it for comfort instead of truth.
What a believer should do this week
I am not asking anyone to pray less. I am asking us to stop praying instead of acting, and to stop letting our prayers do the government’s public relations.
If you are a pastor, an imam, or a babaláwo, preach one sermon this month about the duty of rulers, and name the duty: hospitals, roads, ambulances, doctors who are paid. If you sing gospel, write one song that a governor would not want played at his rally. If you are an ordinary citizen, ask one question at the next funeral: not “who shot the arrow,” but “where was the nearest hospital, and why did it not help?”
The young man’s family will bury him. Let the rest of us bury something too: the comfortable lie that the devil runs the Ministry of Health.
