News Editor
Alaafin queried in anger:
“By whose name?”
“God’s name or by the name of your idol,” the lawyer told him.
“I myself am god!” the oba replied.
By calling himself god or God, the Alaafin of 1925 had not said what no one had ever said. About 300 years earlier, King James I of England uttered something weighty about the king occupying a throne almost as powerful as God’s.
King James told the English parliament on Wednesday, 21 March, 1609 that “kings sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.” A king, he said, could make anyone “beggars or rich at his pleasure; restrain, or banish out of his presence…” And he used that power, and faced resistance – from the Catholic Church and from other churches. He fought and won.
He enjoyed exercising that divine right, quashing opposition, bringing people up, casting people down. But his son, Charles I, who succeeded him didn’t have the grace he had.
History says Charles was fought, defeated, arrested, tried by a parliamentary court and found guilty of charges which included devising “a wicked design to erect and uphold in himself an unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people”.
At his execution at about 2pm on Tuesday, 30 January, 1649, Charles insisted that he did no wrong, that the people were his subjects who should really have no “share in the government.” He stressed that “a subject and a sovereign are clean different things.”
May God give Nigerians the sense to continue to have a share in their government.
