At 67, Rev Cannon Simon Ibrahim, a former secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), has already ingested an overdose of the bitter ingredient of life. For 23 years, he has remained a faithful missionary, though on his sickbed!
It is perhaps apt to brand him a cat with nine lives. Reason: He has waltzed through the shadows of death, where even angels would not dare tread, but not without paying heart-rending prices – till date.
“Rev Ibrahim has remained a most loyal follower of Christ’s teachings. He made sacrifices in the course of his missionary activities to most countries of the world,” Ladi Thompson, activist Senior Pastor, Living Waters Unlimited, a prominent Lagos-based church, told this reporter last Thursday.
Panting dangerously when the reporter had a snappy encounter with him in Lagos last Friday, emaciated Ibrahim cut a pitiable soul. Even with his crutches, his gait would unsettle the stone-hearted of the deepest dye.
“Whatever Pastor Ladi told you about me is true. I have traversed the world in the process of propagating His word. But it is funny the way things suddenly turned for me in 1991,” Ibrahim said, as he painfully shifted his sorry figure on his bed.
“But what happened that year (1991)?” For him, answering the poser from the reporter was herculean.
Eventually, He managed to recall how in the year, a religious upheaval seized the commercial city of Kano by the jugular. Convulsion engulfed the city, forcing Ibrahim, already a marked man, to run for cover in his office.
Born and bred a Muslim in Kano, Ibrahim was a renowned Islamic scholar before he embraced Christianity. Unknown to him, however, he had twisted the lion’s tail.
To members of his family, he became a “leper.” His former Muslim colleagues and friends would not stand sighting him – even for a split second! Then he had to willy-nilly write his will as fatwa (death sentence) was hanged on his head.
So, in the fateful year, he plunged headlong into a consuming religious war that eventually changed his story.
Some religious bigots were on Ibrahim’s trail as the religious crisis held the city by the throat. Like a bolt from the blues, some armed men took rage to his office. They held him by his collar, dragged him out and pounded him blue and black.
His attackers did not end the assault there. They callously cut off his testicles with a sharp dagger and plucked out his right eye. Jubilantly, the sons from hell went away with the severed body parts, leaving him in a pool of his blood.
Ibrahim’s mien bore stark self-pity as he cut in, painfully: “More than 500 people were killed that day. I spent six months unconscious before I realised what befell me. I hate remembering that day, more so that I can hardly talk for 20 minutes now.”
Some unknown good Samaritans, the Anglican pastor said, took him to an infirmary after the ordeal. He was discharged after writhing in agony for months in the hospital.
Since it became suicidal for him to remain in the country, the embattled cleric was ferried out of Kano – and later, out of the country. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) hatched the life-saving deal.
For a long time, he was in Mali as a refugee until about 2010 when he was in Lagos witnessing the handing over of an apartment and a car to Mrs Veronica George Orji, wife of another devout pastor, who was wasted by Boko Haram insurgents in Maiduguri, Borno State, earlier in the year.
The ceremony was modest in Gbagada. It drew the presence of the then President, Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN), now of CAN, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor. Ibrahim bubbled in inspiring defiance.
He was profound in praises for Thompson, whose non-governmental organisation, Macedonia Initiative, spearheaded Mrs Orji’s rescue bid.
The Kano tragedy was not Ibrahim’s baptism of horror. He got his maiden blow in 1987 at a riot that literally tore Kafanchan, Kaduna State into shreds. He got the beating of his life after which he got stabbed in the belly.
Still seething with rage, the ex-CAN secretary said the fact that he lost many loved ones in the attack had remained a pain in the neck for him. “I hate remembering the horror; each time I do, I cry like a baby,” he bemoaned.
Languishing in his condition for 23 years must have been damn traumatic, the reporter surmised aloud. Then he cut in, struggling with his breath: “Yes, as a human creature, I am supposed to feel it, but I have remained in Christ. My prime concern has been how I could be more useful in God’s kingdom.”
Asked about other members of his family, the cleric said he lost his wife at the inception of his ordeal, but he later remarried in 2007 when he was sojourning in Togo. “What about your children?” The reporter asked. His response: “They are there.”
When pressed further, he recounted how he was “practically dead” at a South African hospital when he went alone for medical attention.
“I was told that for some hours on life machine, I was taken for dead. To the medical experts, the next thing was for me to be taken to the mortuary pending when my body would later be evacuated for burial. They called in an Anglican priest who conducted the necessary rite on me. I was about to be wheeled out to the morgue when, according to them, I surprisingly raised my right hand to the astonishment of everyone around. That was how I got another chance to live till date,” Ibrahim said.
One would easily imagine what his thoughts on his 23-year ordeal would be. He opened up tersely: “I believe God is in the know of everything and I give Him the glory. I don’t think about what life is because I am not in the world. I don’t think about all the vain things of the world that people waste their time on. I am totally in Christ and I eternally remain a missionary.”
Heaping praises on the like of Pastor Thompson, who was on his heels that day with his aides, trying to perfect his movement back to South Africa, Ibrahim said: “If I need anything, I can call Ladi any time. I can call somebody else. What is of concern to me now is the heart problem that compounded things early this year. It has kept me on drugs. But whatever it is, I have triumphed over evil.”
Thompson, whose church and organisations – the Omoluabi Network and Macedonian Initiative – have hundreds of Ibrahim’s cases under their care, described Ibrahim’s case as pathetic, saying that he needed improved attention.
He, however, expressed shock that rather than abate, the wave of insurgency in the country with its attendant casualties had remained on the frightening rise.
