Pastor Jerry Eze (What God Cannot Do Does Not Exist) actually led a 3-day fasting and prayer session with the Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN) to seek divine intervention over the recent spate of deaths in Nollywood.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this exercise. If you undermine this exercise or say something negative, you become antichrist, yet, this exercise may be a distraction from major issues the actors guild needed to pay attention to.

If this exercise was a combination of spiritual warfare/deliverance AND practical teaching/seminar on healthy living, then, it deserves commendation.

But where the Nollywood people have been made to see their problem as spiritual, then there is a big problem.

First, I still insist that Nollywood do not record more deaths or calamities than other industries. People believe they do because every single Nollywood practitioner that dies, or battles one ailment is known.

Practitioners in other industries don’t have such leisure nor such coverage.

The other day, I passed through the NBA House in Port Harcourt, I read virtually all the obituary posters on display. So many, and you will wonder….

Yet, Nigerians don’t know that these people are dead. Only their friends, church people, meeting people, colleagues, neighbors and families know. Never so with Nollywood people.

Go to teaching hospitals, you will see posters announcing the dead of doctors and nurses.
Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) may lose more members in a year, but their losses don’t make it to the media.

Take a roll call of the NUT, NURTW, NLC, PENGASSON, etc.

So, I insist that we talk about Nollywood because anything that happens there makes news.

Leaving this, let’s look at the losses that Nollywood has recorded in recent times….

While some came at the “appointed time”, some came as a result of recklessness or lack of proper care.

I hope that after the latest spiritual warfare and deliverance that Pastor Jerry Eze equally took time to teach them how to take care of their health by ensuring they live healthy.

I hope he equally taught them about the need for regular checkups.

I hope he taught them too about the need to save for the rainy days while they are still at their peak, and not resort to beseeching Nigerians for crowd funding when they have health issues that N2m or N3m can take care of.

I hope he also taught them of trust fund from which they as a group can draw to assist members in need.

I hope he equally taught them about funds management and investing in relatives and friends who will have them covered when they have need.

If they overlooked all these and focused solely on the spiritual, then, ihe na-ebe ka na ebekwa.

— Charles Kaye Okoye