Who Will Succeed Pastor E. A. Adeboye?

Obazee became the head of FRC in November 2010 and was reappointed by President Buhari in 2015 to serve till 2018. His public records present him as a decent advocate of accountability in governance who was not averse to controversial headlines. Towards the end of 2016, he designed an enforcement code for corporate boards and non-profit foundations that imposed a 20-year term limit for heads of such organizations. This includes churches and other religious organizations. For Pastor Adeboye, who has led the RCCG since 1981, what this enforcement meant was clear. His time was up. Yet, in the midst of a whirlpool of public outcry, political manoeuvring and whispers that Obazee had a personal vendetta against Pastor Adeboye, it was Obazee who was swept away by this controversy. The attempt by the bureaucracy of the state to regulate the tenure of a spiritual sovereign was totally obliterated. By 9 January 2018, the law was scrapped, and the enforcer was sacked. Obazee, a former RCCG pastor himself, was presented by the church’s public relations department (led by Pastor Segun Adegbiji), as a disgruntled subordinate who had ‘vowed to remove’ his former leader. This helped paint the issue as a personal clash and betrayal rather than a principled national effort towards financial and governance accountability that the council said it was. This narrative neatly insulated Pastor Adeboye from the controversy.

The authority of a man like Pastor Adeboye operates on a plane beyond federal power, no thanks to a blend of divine mandate and formidable political capital in a country that has a reputation of trusting religious leaders more than public institutions. Pastor Adeboye’s own response was strategically ambiguous as he announced at a minister’s conference on 7 January 2017 that he was ‘stepping down’ as Nigeria’s general overseer, only to remain firmly in place as the global general overseer of a church that is, in essence, a Nigerian global empire. It was a bureaucratic sleight of hand that satisfied the letter of the suspended code while utterly boasting that the spirit of the law was irrelevant and that the rules that govern other men do not apply here.

This incident looked like just another bureaucratic skirmish, but at the time, it was arguably the most profound stress test of a different kind of Nigerian power. Pastor Adeboye’s influence is murmured in the corridors of Aso Rock. Presidents defer to him. Politicians, especially those vying for political office, seek his blessing. His empire is built on networks of parishes that can easily provide patrons with a grassroots presence that can be mobilized to legitimize a candidate, to influence an election or to control public opinion. This incident was the glaring proof that Pastor Adeboye has become an institution unto himself. Challenging his authority would be seen as an act of political folly. As Soneye Ayomide Joseph, a lecturer and researcher in church history at Caleb University, who has extensively studied the sustainability of leadership in RCCG, told me,

But how did Pastor Adeboye rise from a mathematics lecturer to the heir of a humble prophet’s vision? How did he systematically build a global religious corporation out of a handful of parishes? This level of power comes with a problem of replaceability and succession. How did the real founder of RCCG, Reverend Josiah Olufemi Akindayomi, solve the most delicate problem of any institution, which is the question of a flawless succession? At 84, how will Pastor Adeboye solve this same problem? Now, as the unchallenged leader of this billion-dollar empire that the state cannot force out, how will he solve this quandary that the constitution of the church is silent about? He has said that the succession plan resides in a divine timetable known only to him. The man who inherited power perfectly has made himself totally irreplaceable, so Nigeria and a global congregation continue to wonder: What happens when Adeboye is gone?