I had thought that last week’s article on the Last of Bible issues would end my writing on Scriptural matters as I had promised. But it was not to be as a result of Chief Segun Odegbami’s comments in his “The Mathematical” column on Page 36 of the Saturday Vanguard of September 11.
Titled: “The Pawn and the Prize – Mr. Sports Ambassador!” he disclosed that in a dream he saw a passage in a book where it was written: Jeremiah 1:4. So, when he woke up he took his Bible to see what was in Jeremiah 1:4. And what he found there was this statement of the Lord: “I chose you before I gave you life and before you were born, I selected you to be a prophet to the nations.”
When Odegbami wrote on this pronouncement of the Lord in Jeremiah 1:4 earlier in the year I felt like reacting to it, but eventually I did not but with him returning to the topic last Saturday, I decided to write on the issue. Especially as the impression he gave in his article was that he was one of the people the Lord’s statement in Jeremiah 1:4 applied to.
Those the Heavenly Father said He chose before He gave them life were the people whose coming into the world was predicted before their birth. These are such Biblical personalities as Isaac (Genesis 18:1 – 15), Esau and Jacob (Genesis 25:19 – 26), John the Baptist (Luke 1:1 – 25) and Jesus Christ (Isaiah 7:10 – 16, 9:6 – 7 and Luke 1:26 – 38).
They were individuals God created to carry out a mission in their lives. If Segun Odegbami’s coming into the world was not foretold by a prophet or prophetess to his parents, then he does not belong among those the Supreme Being said He chose before He gave them life.
Those the Most High God said He selected to be a prophet to the nations are the servants He sends to deliver His messages to people. Or whom He also endowed with the power to perform miracles and cure diseases or told to write a book as He instructed Moses to do in Exodus 24:4 – 9, Samuel in I Samuel 10:25 – 27, Isaiah in Isaiah 30:8 – 18 and Jeremiah in Jeremiah 30:1 – 3 and I in 2001. The book was published in September 2004 with the title: Nigeria Set Aside by God for Greatness and the untold story of June 12 annulment. If the Lord does not use Odegbami in any of these ways, then he is not one of those He selected to be a prophet to the nations.
But if it is true that the Ancient of Days brought Jeremiah 1:4 to his notice in a dream and he went to read the passage, then the Lord was letting him know that he would be a man of achievements and one whose name would be heard internationally. Odegbami achieved this when he played for the country’s senior soccer team, the Super Eagles in the 1970s through early 80s.
It is true that the Heavenly Father speaks to people in a dream as He did with King Solomon in 1 Kings 3:1 – 13 when He told him to ask for anything he wanted Him to give or do for him. But the Lord does not call people to be His servant in a dream. He does so by speaking and discussing with them as was the case with Moses in Exodus 3:1 – 22 and Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1: 1 – 10.
The statement Jeremiah made that he was too young and not fluent in speech to be given an assignment to be a prophet reminds me of my own experience in a similar situation. This was in April 1999 when the Lord said he was sending me to General Abdulsalami Abubakar who was then the country’s military Head of State. I had written about this twice or thrice in the last ten years, so I am not just coming up with it because of Odegbami’s article of last week.
I was surprised that day when the Most High said the country had been polluted by evil forces and He was sending me to Abubakar on what to do to avert the tragedies that would be occurring a few months after he had left office. I pleaded with the Lord to send the Chief Imam of the Abuja Central Mosque to him because that was the kind of person he would take seriously.
The reply of the Ancient of Days who normally is soft – spoken was a high – pitched frightening voice in which He asked who was I to tell him who to send Abdulsalami Abubakar. Before He finished saying this soldier ants (called ijalo in Yoruba) appeared from nowhere and started biting my legs where I knelt.
It was then that the Most High made the statement that He chose me before He gave me life and selected me as a prophet to the people. He then ordered me to get His message across to General Abubakar within a week. I did this in a letter I wrote and passed on to him through his Chief Press Secretary, Haruna Mohammed, who was the Editor of the New Nigerian when I was the Editor of the Sunday Concord (1984 – 85).
The message of the Lord I conveyed to General Abubakar was that he should get the Chief Imams in Abuja and the capitals of the 36 states in the country to each raise 41 Muslim clerics under them to fast and pray for seven days for the well – being of the country and the citizens. Abubakar was to reward them with an appreciable thanksgiving offering of his choice after the spiritual exercise.
But the Lord warned that if His message was ignored that calamities that would last decades would start occurring in different parts of the country a few months after he had left office. Abubakar discountenanced the message and this is the reason why the nation had been bedeviled by unending disasters in all parts of the country since the return to civil rule on May 29, 1999.
I wrote on the message of the Sovereign Lord I conveyed to General Abubakar about four times in this column in the last 11 years and he never refuted my story that I made it known to him that disasters would be happening in different parts of the country for decades. Neither did Haruna Mohammed, his Chief Press Secretary through whom I passed the message to him challenged or contradicted my statement.
10 topmost immigrant Lagosians – Dr. James Vaughan, of Egba ancestry
With the full names of James Churchill Omosanya Vaughan he was the son of Mr. James Wilson Vaughan, a prosperous merchant in Lagos and a grandson of Mr. Scipio Vaughan whose biography featured in this column last week. Omosanya who was born in Lagos on Monday, May 30, 1893 was a medical doctor and a prominent political activist and one of the students in the first set at King’s College, Lagos when it was established in 1909.
He and Isaac Ladipo Oluwole who were the first Nigerian students to study medicine at the University of Glasgow in Scotland entered the institution in 1913 and graduated in 1918. On returning to Nigeria in the early 1920s, Vaughan set up a private clinic in Lagos where apart from attending to his fee – paying patients he also provided free medical service to the destitute.
One of the most outspoken critics of the British Colonial Administration he along with other leading activists like Lawyer Hezekiah Oladipo Davies, Dr. Kofo Abayomi, Mr. Sissei Ikoli and Prince Samuel Akinsanya, who later became His Royal Highness the Odemo of Ishara established the Lagos Youth Movement.
Vaughan was the first President of the Movement which had the improvement of higher education and having a curriculum for medical teaching at Yaba Higher College as its priority. Within four years the Lagos Youth Movement became the most popular and influential nationalist organization in Nigeria, leading to changing the name to Nigerian Youth Movement in 1936 to emphasize its pan – Nigerian objectives. Dr. Omosanya Vaughan died in Lagos in 1937 at the age of 44.
When his father Mr. James Churchill and his younger brother Burrell Vaughan returned to Nigeria in 1855 after the demise of their dad they did not lose touch with the seven sisters they left behind in the United States. They travelled to America a number of times to visit them.