New Year Prophecies, Are They Real?
POINTBLANCK BY ISAAC ORIEKA
iorieka@yahoo.com
Prophecies and predictions for so many years in Nigeria has been the past time of men of God Clerics, imams, diviners, soothsayers, herbalists, and religious leaders as an annual custom to real out New Year prophecies towards the end of the preceding year or at Crossover Services on December 31st to usher in a new year. It has become one of the rituals of the Christmas and New Year celebrations in the country.
These prophecies are the imagination and permutations of the prophets to see into the future to avert disasters according to their fate of logical predictions, whether correct or false. Many of the Clerics have mega-churches and millions of following and of various denominational extractions who believed the prophets can change their poverty-stricken life conditions.
Besides, most of these Clerics and religious leaders are not measured in their utterances especially on how to communicate prophecies which may cause panic, harm, danger, tension, and death that may clash with the right of others and the public interest. Some of the prophecies and predictions are misleading and fake. Although, some genuine prophecies still exist, which is a guide to the future but not absolutely proven scientifically.
Meanwhile, predictions and prophecies are nothing but the views of the person making the prophecies. Sometimes the practice is necessary, but many of the General Overseas and prophets exploit the gullible following and other superstitious people who patronized them by getting proceeds from their prophecies through deceit from their prophecies. Politicians also fall victims to this scam diviners, prophets, herbalists, and marabouts in order to win elections.
Research has shown that faith is a personal affair, so, no means of restrictions should be imposed on such spiritual practice. However, so far to date, what has been the contributions of these prophecies to the growth of the GDP, alarming unemployment rate, hunger, and poverty, rising insecurity, banditry, kidnapping, failed health sector, fallen educational standard, crawling manufacturing sector, and so on. Yet, we have the highest numbers of churches and mosques in Africa scattered around the country and Nigeria has been tagged “POVERTY CAPlTAL Of THE WORLD” .Why has the miracle prophets, soothsayers, and diviners not transformed the fortunes of the country to a first-class economy?
This could be anchored on the fact we neglected a technological driven move to position the economy based on the manufacturing of goods and services. Rather, we lazily accepted and embraced the spiritual business of negative prophecies, invincible miracles and a blind belief in guesswork and mind-bending tactics to survive the unfriendly harsh global economy occasioned by the recent covid 19.
LESSON
There is nowhere in the world that a false belief in new year prophecies or any prophecy at all would make any nation grow socio-economically .It is good to pray, but the key ingredient remains hard work, else the prophets and imams would keep living off our hard earned cash and in flashy opulence and flamboyance.
