Without any ado, I think Big Brother Naija is a programme carved out from God’s agenda for Earth. And for those who do not believe in God, it is the authentic man-made mechanism to prepare us for a future where existential transparency is the order of the day in a unitary global government. Presently, we live in a world where satellite surveillance is a reality, and everybody’s innermost secrets are already known by forces yet unseen. They watch our every move like the boy on the beach watches ants play inside his sand castle. Yes, Big Brother is here already.
But before going further, one may ask, what exactly is satanic? The dictionary specifies three different meanings: “of or characteristic of Satan”; “connected with Satanism”; and “extremely evil or wicked”. The first and second denotations seem irrelevant here, because the programme is neither affiliated to Satanism nor evocative of the image of Satan – minus the Illuminati symbol of the all-seeing eye, which is based on conspiracy theory anyway. So, this leaves us with the third definition. From the standpoint of morality, the show is arguably “very wicked”. But we already live in a wicked world.
Recently, a former BBN housemate, Gifty Powers, called for the termination of the reality TV show which she tagged as “satanic”. The lady, who was a housemate in the second season of the show in 2017, said that the BBN is keeping youths in unhealthy competition with one another. She was quoted as saying: “Big Brother Naija needs to be shut down entirely. I wish I knew what I know now. BBN has kept lives in competition. BBN is satanic… Number 1 thing the devil does is to manipulate the weak.”
Miss Powers’ elucidation on the meaning of “satanic” is instructive. It is dog-eat-dog rivalry. The creators of the show set a huge amount of money as trophy, and this makes the participants go all out to scheme against one another, in order to survive to the very end. This reminds me of THE movie “13 Sins”. In the flick, an individual is approached by unknown interests, and given instructions on tasks to perform in order to gain incremental monetary rewards, running into millions of US dollars. The tasks are very sinful and distasteful, and in some cases, criminal. But because of the cash reward, none hesitated to sin. This is the true picture of the world we live in. People are tempted to do all sorts of unprintable things to survive. Nobody really cares; it is all about greed, violence and lust. This is the Big Brother signature.
Now, let us understand the anatomy of the BBN show. Big Brother Naija, formerly known as Big Brother Nigeria, is a Nigerian reality competition television series, based on the Big Brother television franchise, in which, contestants, called “housemates” or “HouseGuests” live in a specially constructed isolated house and compete for a large cash prize and other material prizes at the end of the show, by avoiding being evicted from the house by viewers who vote for their favourite housemates to remain in the house. The first season of the show aired in 2006, the episode that brought the present host of the 2021 edition, Ebuka Obi-Uchendu, to limelight.
But the Big Brother concept is not an indigenous one. It began in the Netherlands in 1999 as a Dutch reality competition television franchise created by John de Mol Jr., and later syndicated internationally. The name is inspired by Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the housemates are continuously monitored during their stay in the house by live television cameras as well as personal audio microphones. As of 15 August 2021, there had been 504 seasons of Big Brother in over 62 franchise countries and regions. The title of many Spanish-language editions of the programme is translated as Gran Hermano.
In my mind, the global reach of the reality show is enough to tell us that there is an agenda behind it. But while some people would beat their chest and vow that it is all about mainstreaming immorality in the wider global society; I believe there is an existential, if not divine, dynamic behind this controversial show. Going from the origin of the concept in the book by Orwell, the theme is about creating a microcosmic global village where people grab all and bare all, under one almighty overseer.
There is nothing hidden. From your inner thoughts to your external actions, everything is profiled, analysed and rewarded. It is a setting already depicted in religion’s Holy Books. Those who wish to serve God must serve in truth and in spirit, being ready to bare all intentions and deeds, no matter how sinful. The only difference between Big Brother Earth and Big Brother Heaven is that the audience are humans not angels, and the reward is temporal and not eternal.
That brings us to the conspiracy side of the game. If there is a Bible-friendly meaning depicting a gathering of God’s children under one heavenly government, there is a probability for an alternative narrative – a gathering of Devil’s children under one earthly government. Therefore, embedded in Big Brother could be an actual agenda to prepare earth citizens for the envisioned one world government of the so-called anti-Christ. More so, when one crunches these variables against the backdrop of another Orwell-like futuristic author, H.G. Wells (author of War of the Worlds).
War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel published 1898 in London. It is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extra-terrestrial race. The opening paragraph is shockingly suggestive of an unseen Big Brother-like group of beings watching all of us on earth.
“No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”
It is because of this universal appeal and supernatural underbelly of the Big Brother concept, that I wish to comment on the news that some Christians, apparently concerned about the immoral tone of the BBN show, have come up with an alternative show of their own: The Father’s House Reality TV Show.
According to their publicity material, it plans to assemble in one big space carefully selected thirteen young professing Christians drawn from different denominations across Nigeria to live and work together for forty days and forty nights. It does not promise a N90 million grand prize like BBNaija, but the overall winner “will win the Grand and priceless Prize of the ‘Fathers Blessing’ alongside other cash and gift prizes”.
While it seems they are saying “what the sinners can do, the righteous can also do”, they must be more creative if they want to have a fighting chance in the people’s imagination. The world is tired of hypocrisy. They must incorporate the same ingredients that make life on earth interesting – love, hate, pandemonium, treachery, sin and redemption. We live in a world of sin, and deep in the consciousness of all of us, we want people to live our fantasies, even when we cannot live it ourselves. We can pay for the vicarious pleasure of “sins we cannot commit” that is why Hollywood is a very successful industry; and that is what makes BBN tick.
