The death and the alleged resurrection of an Ahoada politician, one time caretaker chairman of the Ahoada-East council and two-time secretary of same council, Sunny Edema, has continued to create unanswered questions even beyond his immediate council area or his state, Rivers. It is being discussed on some social media. In this piece, BOLAJI OGUNDELE attempts to solve some of the mysteries surrounding the story.

Note: Names of sources have been deliberately withheld to protect their identities and to ensure their safety.

LAST weekend brought sleepy Ahoada town alive for a moment and into the news too. It was in Ahoada that the news of something people claimed was in the likeness of ‘the miracle of this age’ occurred in a flash and disappeared like it never happened. The story of the alleged resurrection of a man, described so far in various adjectives, including miracle, fraud, gimmick and misrepresentation travelled farther than Ahoada. While the ‘multitude’ of the town-folk who thronged Igbuduya Street with an expectation of seeing a man returning from the dead, believing every word coming from the ‘inner chambers of the house’, where ‘a man of God’ was praying for the return of Sunny, few ‘sceptics’, who won’t give the ‘charade’ credibility by their presence among the crowd, waved the whole drama as the gimmick of a man who seeks to be worshipped by those who will believe anything.

So-called eyewitness accounts had claimed that former caretaker chairman of Ahoada East local government area, who was until his death the secretary of the council, Sunny Edema, died at about 11pm on Thursday January 26 this year, remained dead for about 24 hours, certified clinically dead, but was miraculously resurrected by a man of God, stayed alive for few more hours and died again. A lot of confusing details were alleged around this incredulous story, including branding the name of a popular church, which had since come out to deny knowledge of any such event.

“I learnt that before he died he was complaining of pains in his heart and was restless. He died on Thursday night at about 11pm and two doctors checked his body and confirmed that he was dead already. But his brother who is living in Lagos, attending T.B. Joshua’s church sent a message home that they should not bury the man. I learned he said his brother was not dead and that T.B Joshua would come to wake him up.

“If you had been in Ahoada last night you might not have been able to move around, especially around the man’s street because it was like the whole town came to see what was about to happen. To cut a long story short, they resurrected him at about 11pm last night. But there are other rumours that he was actually resurrected by members of his secret cult society and that it was not any church of God’s power that woke him”, an eyewitness who called her name Mary said.

When the subsequent news of his death broke, Mary once again provided information, saying “It looks like the man is dead now because I learned that they have taken his body to a mortuary and that it has started swelling. According to what I heard, they said he died again around 3am the day after he was resurrected. People are spreading a lot of rumour about his death and resurrection that first time; while some doubt the claim that he was resurrected because they claimed they did not see him, others said he was a member of a secret society and that it was his members who came to bring him back from the dead and not T.B. Joshua”.

It, however, later became clear that the story of the death and the attempt resurrecting or actual resurrection of the late politician had nothing to do with the Synagogue nor its founder, Prophet Joshua. According to reliable reports gotten from reliable sources around Edema, the links they know the late politician had with the Synagogue was a testimony he once gave at the Synagogue to the effect that the man of God prayed for him and gave him water and that after his encounter with the church and the founder he climbed further in his political career by being made a caretaker council chairman.

The fact that the church indeed neither played a role, nor had knowledge of the death and resurrection episode was further affirmed by the spokesman of the church, Reverend Ojo, who told the Sunday Tribune that there was no time when the church got involved or informed of whatever was happening in Ahoada, saying “there’s no way anything will be happening in the name of the church that the man of God would not be informed, but in this case everything that linked us to the story is false. You should have even asked for the names of the ‘wise-men’ they claimed the Prophet sent over. The story of our involvement is false and should be disregarded”.

The story got more interesting when the elder brother of Sunny allegedly went to Pentecostal church on Thursday for an evening service and testified to the congregation how his younger brother resurrected from the dead and wilfully returned to the dead after a brief complaint. A member of the church, who informed the Sunday Tribune of the latest development said the elder brother, who took a long time of the service to relay how his brother was actually resurrected and later asked for permission to go back to death said the church was held spellbound.

“The elder brother of the man came for our evening service and told the church that his brother was resurrected indeed, but that he said he did not want to stay back in this world that the troubles around were too much and how many people did not want his peace. He said it was after this brief conversation that his brother died again”, the source confided.

The whole story, however, got clearer and it turned out that some people just deliberately decided to misinform the people who had gone there to see the ‘miracle’ happen. Though accessing the family of the deceased was advised against as they were still in grief when Sunday Tribune visited Ahoada, a close associate of the deceased, who pleaded anonymity explained that the story is very different from what the people had been sold. According to him, Sunny died since Thursday and never woke up at any point in time.

According to him, while it was true that the family refused to take him to the morgue after realising he was dead on Thursday because his elder brother who is resident in Lagos instructed them to keep the corpse as he would be coming with a spiritualist to revive the deceased from the dead, the source said the story had nothing to do with the Synagogue as peddled among the crowd that kept vigil on the street. He specifically explained that it was all a conjecture, helped by deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

“I know Sunny very well and I was surprised too when all these stories started flying all around and my first impression was that someone must have been misinformed. First of all, we have to state the truth about the health status of the man we are talking about. He was a hypertensive person and in the past he had suffered seizures that took him into coma, but from which he eventually recovered. I am talking of an experience that happened about three times before this last one and which started say about 2 years ago. So one can understand why some people, like his elder brother I gathered instructed them to keep him in the house after the doctor had told them that he was dead.

“I learned that before he died he started complaining about his heart which made the boys around him to take him to the hospital, along the way, I guess when they were coming back he vomited twice on the road. When they got back home, following a complaint one of the boys made him a salt water solution, which aggravated his case and eventually threw him into coma or even ceased his life. I learned after he was given the salt water solution, he started foaming in the mouth and in the nose. Remember he had a high blood pressure issue and salt is never good for this case.