Those who do not have shades of pink or white in their stock of dresses still have the whole of today (Friday, July 25th, 2025) to pick one and be set for the D- Day. Pastor Mrs Berakah Yoroms will be 60 July 27th, 2025. And as she will never be 60 again, she is marking it in a big way, including unveiling her pet NGO: Widophan International. So, it is going to be a big outing, not in the vulgar sense of big but thoughtfully.
Aside from the defining features of such events, men and women of ideas will dominate the show. That’s another way of saying that as a (female) pastor in her own right, Mrs Berakah is sure to attract a whole lot of the men and women who make things happen in that domain to her great day. It is debatable if one can think of a community of ideas people or interpreters than pastors.
But beyond pastors, there will be academics because the husband is a professor of Political Science as well as a pastor. This won’t just be academics but persons high up in academia, particularly the professoriate. This birthday should, therefore, be the event to be part of in the light of the scarcity of idea pools nowadays.
Who may know if this is not where this interesting development in contemporary Nigeria involving the reality of otherwise ranked professors (especially of Political Science) becoming pastors may not attract a debate. Pastor Mrs Berakah is not in academia but her 60th birthday is surely bringing together an audience with a good share of professor-pastors, fellow travellers of her pastor and professor-husband, Professor Gani Yoroms.
A ranked Nigerian Professor of Sociology once asked at a CODESRIA methodology workshop in Ibadan in 2005 whether an established Professor of Political Science could be a pastor without something having gone wrong. He was posing the age old question whether science and religion can be in a happy marriage.
It is a question which hasn’t gone away as the professor-pastor phenomenon is gaining traction. Radical activists of the 1980s can be added to the category as many of them, some of them SAN who either run churches or are very active in one. If we must cite examples in the case of academics, Prof Eghosa Osaghae will readily come to mind. He has established his ranking order in scholarship in Nigeria even if by flawlessly delivering an Inaugural Lecture without reading from any text. Everyone, including his seniors rate him to be very scholarly. Far away from Osaghae in UI is Prof Major Adeyi at the University of Jos, very humane in his sensitivity to other people’s problems. When once Intervention took him up on whether a scholar with some Marxist bent could be ‘a man of God’, he hit back by arguing that there’s no contradiction between being a scientist/socialist and religion. Here is the link to his interview then Even Prof Jonah Isawa Elaigwu had moved into religious consciousness in his last years on earth. And his is interesting, he being in the elders caucus of the discipline. He was never a pastor but in no telephone conversation with him since 2011 or so would he not insist on the primacy of God in whatever one did. So, there is, indeed, the professor-pastor conundrum in Nigeria
It will be difficult for modernists to see any happy marriage there. Modernists whose intellectual forefathers ran away from religion (or was it the misuse of religion?) could not be expected to be anything but hostile to religion or the prospects of a happy union between children of religion and science.
But we are not all modernists which its critics now associate with worse crimes against humanity than religion was ever used to perpetuate. Without overdrawing this, modern enslavement, imperialism, colonialism, racism neocolonialism and neoliberalism have all been dumped at the feet of modernist ideas of science, reason, progress and universalism.
So, one way of answering the memorable question by the guru Sociologist at Ibadan is to say that today’s Professor-pastors are repaying or protesting science for its atrocities relative to religion. And professor-pastors could stretch the argument further by insisting that their pastoral detour even as professors is the sharpest evidence to show that science is only a narrative and there’s nothing that says that the classical notion of science sold in Enlightenment view of the world cannot be re-narrativised, expanded or even thrown away. Thank you, professor-pastors.
But the Ibadan question is still not fully dealt with. It isn’t because professor-pastors are, consciously or otherwise, involved in highly performative processes. The texts, arguments, codes, practices and protocols observed in religious worship are capable of reproducing the reality they invoke. These practices can have very powerful stupefying effects, with multiplicity of outcomes that not even the most established of scientists or professors can monitor, control or discipline. In a highly chaotic social order such as Nigeria where pastors have large audience of worshippers mostly desperate for a banner of hope from any quarter, how might a professor-pastor ascertain that s/he is not complicit in misleading unsuspecting people, creating problems whose manifestations will take decades away? Can professor-pastors kick this question away by saying that such unintended evil outcomes are counterbalanced by the good outcomes, whatever it is that we consider to be evil or good?
Pastor Mrs Berakah may not herself fit in the professor-pastor category but if her 60th birthday provides an occasion for thinking through this, that could be a lifetime achievement!
Intervention says happy birthday to Mrs.
