So this weekend I was watching a documentary on Channel 4 or was it 5? I struggle to remember which now. Anyway it was a documentary about tenants who refuse to pay their rent and instead employ all sorts of dodgy tactics to keep on living rent free whilst leaving the hapless landlord with no other option than to proceed to court for an eviction order.

One of the dodgy tenants in question happened to be black and from her accent, I could tell she was clearly West African. After living for almost 9 months without paying rent, the landlord finally managed to persuade her to leave. The deal he worked out was that she would leave the property by a certain date and he would forget about the rent! The poor guy was so frustrated that he did not mind forgetting about the money he was owed so far as she left his property.

What got me amused and a bit irritated however was the note the tenant in question left in the flat for the landlord after she had left. In this note she talked about how she wanted God to deal with her enemies and she listed the landlord as one of these said enemies! I mean how could any decent person who purports to be a christian label a person whom she owed almost a year's rent an enemy?

Being African myself I would not say I am altogether surprised. A lot of us seem to blame all our misfortunes on enemies either perceived or real. Your child is not doing well in school? Oh it must be your enemies from your Grandmother's Uncle's gate-man's village! Let us conveniently forget that this child hardly attends class and has lost most of his textbooks. A few years back I was in a friend's office and one of her colleagues was lamenting the fact that she did not get promoted despite giving her salary for the past 6 months or so as a "seed" in church. She felt that the giving (giving away for free if you ask me) of her salary to the church automatically entitled her to a promotion despite the fact that as I was told in confidence by my friend that the said lady was crap at her job and was not really liked by her co-workers. Who did she blame? You guessed right! Of course her enemies. Everywhere you go especially among African Christians, enemies seem to be at the heart of every misfortune.

Many African churches help in perpetrating this enemy culture. When I was younger my parents used to attend one of the old generation Yoruba churches and still do. A good many hours of my Sundays growing up were spent in this said church. We usually got to church around 9am and got home around 5pm! As a kid this was very frustrating especially in those pre-DSTV and satellite television days when local tv stations only opened for a few hours and most of the best movies and programmes were shown on Sundays.

My father's ready response whenever we groaned and complained about this church "working hours" was that we spent all our other hours playing and doing other worldly things and that it would not be asking too much of us to spend the whole day in the house of God on Sundays. Anyway I digress. Back to my point on churches helping to perpetrate the enemy culture. Many of the church's prayers usually started like this, loruko Jesu, loruko Jesu, loruko Jesu! (In Jesus name 3 times) followed by either of the following, Ogun o! (war- in this case spiritual) Ogun Orun o! (Host of heaven) or Ino o (fire of heaven) which the congregation would then proceed to direct against their enemies. It was often a scorched earth policy kind of directing. The utter destruction of these so called enemies! Even as a little kid back then I used to often wonder what happened to forgiveness and the Bible's exhortation to forgive one's enemies.

One of my friends told me how he was scarred as a child while attending one of these kinds of churches as a child as the Pastor kept telling the congregation that the enemies were near and that they should intensify their prayers. The poor guy told me he hid under a table thinking all manners of people, witches and wizards were coming into the church to hurt him.

Listen, I know enemies could be real. Some people just won't like you no matter what you do and some won't ever wish you well because of envy or some grudge they hold against you. However let us be honest. Not everything that goes against you is the work of the enemy. Some of them, no most of them are as a result of our own doing. Either not doing enough to get the results we want or doing the wrong thing so that it annoys others and then they seek to put us in our place or in the case of a lack of promotion, leave us in our place.

Opposite my parents' current house is a primary school and I suffered the most for it after we moved into the property during my teenage years as my room was closest to the fence separating our home from the school. Every morning I would be woken up by the Nigerian national anthem and kids singing school songs. I mean this area is meant to be a purely residential area but that is a topic for another day. Lately my mom said they have started leasing the school to a church outside school hours and this church often holds revivals on the grounds and this keeps them up all night. My mum said she was going there to give them a piece of her mind about the noise they were making. I will not be surprised if they include the poor woman among their enemies in their prayer points during their next revival!



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