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By Helen Baker

The US’ 2016 Presidential Election was surely one which everyone waited for with bewilderment from the onset. With a particular atypical candidate having taken everyone by surprise, first by deciding to run as a candidate and later clinging to the Republican nomination and later ultimately winning the presidency of the United States. Yes, that’s Donald Trump.

November 8th, 2016 came and went, and the sun rose the next day. On the other hand, many have taken to social media what has been said to be an uncharacteristic turn of events regarding a purported ‘prophecy’ by the Nigerian cleric, T.B. Joshua, who on Sunday, November 6th, 2016 made mention of the 2016 U.S. Election results.

He said that he saw a “narrow” win for a particular candidate, not specifically mentioning what kind of “narrow” win he was referring to. He then went further to say, that the upcoming leader would face difficulty in terms of “passing bills”; a possible “vote of no confidence”; and that the upcoming leader’s “boat would be rocked”. After these statements, he paused and then continued to say that the narrow win he referred to earlier was with regards to a “woman”. He concluded to say that Mr. Trump, despite all the criticism was a “courageous man”.

Now, with all the excerpts from the November 6th statements from the Nigerian cleric, many took to the media (and social media) to inaccurately say he said that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency of the United States. What is surely known about the controversial cleric is, his past international prophecies are always accurate when given time to actually unfold.

However, in this instance no time was given to allow the ‘prophecy’ to come to unfold. Some just hastily waited for the next day to see everything come to pass all at once – if they could, they would have probably wanted everything to happen on that Sunday, that is: the difficulty in passing bills, the narrow win, the rocked boat right there at that moment, but things do not seem to work that way. Nonetheless, so far the observations in light of the ‘prophecy’ are as follows:

1.     Truly, Clinton won the popular vote of the United States “narrowly”. However, given the Electoral College system of the US, she did not win the electoral aggregate. “The woman’s” (Clinton) “narrow” lead in terms of the popular vote is 47.7% versus 47.5% (for Trump). This is a rare occurrence in US history – it only once happened in the 1800s and with Al Gore.

2.     Others may say, Trump – as a Republican – will have it easy to pass laws, because the House of Representatives and the Senate (both of which constitute the US Congress) are majority Republican. This is of course too early to tell – going by the earlier statement that there time needs to be allowed for events to unfold. However, what can be observed from what occurred during the campaign trail is the following: Mr. Trump is not a Republican by ideology, Trump is his own ‘ism’.

For example, many of Trump’s stated fiscal policies are at odds with a typical Republican candidate. Why? Because Mr. Trump’s proposed fiscal policies are those of a spender: “tax cuts”, “building a wall”, increasing the number of officials working at the US’ southern border, deportations etc… Whereas the US Congress has been more conservative as regards fiscal policy and are likely to restrict any proposed laws that require ‘over-spending’ from Mr. Trump. Similarly, it has been made clear that Mr. Trump and his Republican counterparts have often been at odds with one another in the most overt of ways during the campaign trail. Therefore, any proposed “bills” that may be out of hand, the president-elect may face a difficult time in getting them passed in that regard. All this is at this stage speculative, but the ‘prophecy’ does shed some light on what is to come.

3.     There have been wide-spread ‘anti-Trump’ protests all over major cities in the US. Others stating that the 2016 president-elect, is “not their president”. This is the first stage of the president-elect’s “boat being rocked”. This is only 2 days after the 2016 US presidential election and the events keep unfolding.

Those who have been agog with their comments regarding a possible “mistake” having been uttered by the Nigerian cleric, should rather critically observe the events unfold and in so doing read and watch the news (and not superficially read twitter feeds or Facebook timelines) and then want to confirm or discredit what was said.

With that, I close with this: let us be an informed global citizenry that supports those who go into the arena to fight the good fight; if you’re merely a spectator who merely sits on the side-lines and then waits to criticize, then your comment does not count.


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