Television preachers are no strangers to Nigerian television viewers.

All the major channels have sold hours of religious proselytizing to them.

They are quite a number, and the competition for audience unrelenting.

There are hours when television preachers are simultaneously on parade in nearly every channel. It has assumed a nuisance dimension. What puts one display apart from the other is the consistent arrogation of some pastors to themselves of the power of miracle healing. This typical approach to evangelism and the ruse called miracles, earn them more disdain and public disapproval than they realizes. This trade in which a well-known televangelist is the best known actor demands modesty and moderation in both of which he is wanting I am always put off by these men of the cloth, who conduct their ecclesiastical functions as if the prime objective is mercenary. Even so, a resort to miracles as a vehicle of persuasion and self-enhancement calls for some measure of subtlety, not brazen browbeating.

The Bible warns of false prophets. Sometimes, I wonder each time a miracle practitioner appears on my TV screen, if I am not stark face to face with one of them.

It is a well-known fact the world over, that there are men and women not endowed with the capacity to face their problems squarely. They can neither reason not analyse correctly. This natural state of helplessness always places them at the mercy and disposal of men and women with the gift of the gab, the business of magic, witchcraft, diabolism, and spell casting all code-named MIRACLES.

Statistics show that women, the elderly, the afflicted, the ignorant and the down and out constitute the bulk of persons susceptible to religious gullibility. A healthy busy active youth in his prime, driven by cynicism and adventure will hardly afford the time for voodoosm or see the wisdom of consulting the sorcerer no matter his level of sophistication.

These televangelists seem to specialise in the knack to give the barren fertility, heal the sick, enrich the poor, and provide a job for the unemployed. Every inadequacy is remedied but only for those who believe.

How wonderful this can be, but nothing can be more audacious and no claim more repugnant to common sense and reason. Coincidences have been quickly claimed as triumphs just as failures are blamed on lack of faith.

I once had an ailing friend who allowed himself to be talked into visiting one of those put-on events. He discarded all his prescribed drugs and plunged himself into a miracle-oriented church. His terminal affliction took its course. Before his demise, he confessed to his mistake in entrusting his life to a miracle church and its proprietors. Of course, the church was in full attendance at his funeral service to remind his mourners that God knew best and that the devil had been at work. It was all part of the ruse.

A miracle is a hoodwink and draws its strength from that portion of the Bible which condemned the unbeliever to eternal hell fire. The credulous becomes scared, cowed, and swallows the blackmail in the wisdom of silence, hook, line, and sinker.

A miracle is defined as a divine intervention in the natural course of events. Or an event so unnatural that it can only be explained by reference to the supernatural. Perhaps that is where my problem lies, for I am a humanist, not a spiritualist and I do not believe that the laws of nature can be breached by man. However, if perhaps these televangelists with their crew will want to be credited with attributes reserved for the supernatural, I can only wish them good luck.

A pastor who claims to have the power and the will to perform clemency miracles should be seen closer to hospitals and health centers rather than television houses. He will, that way, save Nigeria the huge annual budgets on healthcare delivery.

Not long ago, a man of God rented a sporting facility where he offered his congregation the usual reliefs designated with a special label. The facility was jam-packed with the same category of gullible and credulous men and women identified earlier. At the end of the crusade, many were disillusioned: most went home poorer than they came. But not the men of God who enjoyed a vast fiscal harvest. The facility suffered untold infrastructural devastation inflicted by frenzy crowds stampeding for attention.

It surprised me that government should hire out a major sporting facility to open-air howlers who want to use this sports facilitity to market their ware. If a million naria was paid as fee for obtaining this permit, I bet it would have cost much more to restore it to its standard condition. The inconvenience imposed on neighbourhood dwellers by human and vehicular traffic on that occasion was unbearable.

Television sermonizing is escalating; apparently, it is a paying vocation.

I compare its growth to the advent and spread of the Okada transport business. It is believed to have been started by a few unemployed young men who needed to survive. Their immediate success attracted more operators from one state to another and finally spread to every part of Nigeria.

Okada transport system is unquestionably beneficial to millions of Nigerians. It is nonetheless not an ideal system of transportation. Nigeria can do without it as soon as the national transportation programme is installed. Similarly, TV evangelism may be beneficial to millions but let it be known also that Nigeria can do without it. The level of crime and spiritual depravity in the society does not suggest that they are succeeding where others are failing.

May that time not come when religious programmes will not so completely take over our television channels that there is nothing else left to view and listen to.