This week is my first time of hearing about Pastor Peace Ibiyeomie, wife of David Ibieyeomie, the Port Harcourt-based theological vandal afflicted with Napoleonic immodesty. Even from the very little I know of her, I feel safe to say she was born solely for the purpose of marrying her husband.
The hubby, who is almost always rigged in white suits like a casino crooner, is a maestro at mangling the gospel, a quality that he has maritally transmitted to the wife. Or vice versa. In one single sermon, a video of which is viral, Mrs Ibiyeomie managed to reduce divorced women to contagious objects from which married women must keep a safe epidemiological distance.
“Don’t follow a divorced woman as your friend, even if she’s your sister. Teach her to either reconcile with her husband or remarry,” she declared. 
What a remarkable burden to place on women already reeling from the collapse of a marriage. Mrs Ibiyeomie’s desire is that the modern divorced should be seen as faintly radioactive.
The cruelty of this statement does not only lie in its breathtaking ignorance, but in its acute compassion deficit. It assumes that every divorce is evidence of failure by the woman. It rules out abuse, infidelity, addiction, violence, abandonment, manipulation and years of silent suffering. In Mrs Ibiyeomie’s bizarre world, the divorced woman must either crawl back into the carnage or hurriedly remarry, even when the Bible expressly forbids remarriage until the former spouse dies. She views a woman without a husband as no better than a malfunctioning appliance awaiting repair.
I wonder whether the same warning was issued to married men about befriending divorced men. She appears to view divorced men as rugged survivors while divorced women are apparently rolling agents of marital contamination.
“Don’t follow a divorced woman as your friend” is an extraordinary stupid thing to say in a society where many women remain trapped in dreary marriages because society and pulpits terrorise them with shame. Society already treats divorced women as though they bear invisible scarlet letters. Landlords judge them, churches whisper about them, families interrogate them and some employers stereotype them. Now, a pastor is directing their friends and family to abandon them, too. Awesome. Perhaps next Sunday’s sermon will advise people not to sit near widows lest bereavement become airborne.
A very disturbing part is the assumption that married women are mentally brittle creatures who can be morally spoiled merely by proximity to divorced friends, a moronic conclusion that sees friendship as hypnosis. It is as if when a woman hears her divorced friend’s custody battles over lunch, she immediately develops an irresistible urge to file for divorce the next working day.
Sturdy marriages are not destroyed by friendships, but by grotesque spouses, unresolved conflict, including with in-laws; irresponsibility, cruelty, neglect and incompatibility. If merely knowing a divorced woman can upend a marriage, then the marriage was already balancing on wobbly.
It will be interesting to know what Mrs Ibiyeomie meant by “teach her to reconcile”. Reconcile with the man who beat her? The one who cheated remorselessly? The one who disappeared for months? The one who impregnated a neighbour, housemaid or even his own daughter? We all know the outcomes of the obsession with preserving marriage at all costs. Osinachi, the singer, was one. She was kept in a lifelong prison dressed up as a godly home until her life was allegedly ended by her husband.
A divorced woman is no failed woman. Many times, she is simply a woman who rejected society’s wish to see her to die in slo-mo. It may come across as ironic, but I do think many divorced women become wiser, kinder, more emotionally intelligent and more self-aware after surviving terrible marriages. They often become the very friends capable of telling married women uncomfortable truths that romantic fantasy and church performance culture conceal. They know some marriages survive only because one party has surrendered dignity to keep up appearances. They know endurance is not always virtue. Sometimes, it is out of fear.
The real discomfort here, perhaps, is that divorced women disrupt the fairy tale, reminding society that marriage is not automatically sacred because a pastor joined the couple, a role the Bible does not even specifically assign to clergy. A church should be the first refuge for wounded people, not a social sorting centre where women are ranked according to marital status like goods in a Booku aisle.
Jesus Christ spent time with the rejected, the shamed and the condemned. He did not instruct people to avoid them for fear of moral infection.
If a married woman abandons her divorced sister or friend because a pastor told her to, then the divorce is not the tragedy in that relationship, but the absence of loyalty.
The biggest shock for me, however, was seeing women cheering when Mrs Ibiyeomie machine-gunned women who “snatch” other women’s husbands with curses. At one point, she thundered that such women and their children would never know peace, that calamity would follow them and that their homes would collapse in misery. The congregation erupted in approval as if vengeance is a spiritual gift.
As I told my friend, Harry Iwuala, who notified me of the garbage the woman uttered, cursing the children of the alleged husband snatchers was a catatonically dim thing to do. Why do they deserve curses? Are they accomplices in adultery? Did toddlers develop the infidelity strategy? Did infants chair the illicit relationship committee and overthrow the woman at home in a coup de’tots? What kind of Christianity casually rains maledictions on children because of the sins of adults?
While adultery is condemnable, reality is often more morally complicated than the shrieking simplicity of pulpits acknowledges. Are there not marriages where husbands are emotionally starved, publicly humiliated, constantly degraded or treated with contempt? Are there not women who turn marriage into a permanent punishment exercise, weaponising sex, affection and respect until the home becomes a psychological refugee camp? None of this excuses infidelity, but adult relationships are often messy terrains, not cartoon morality plays with haloed wives and demonic temptresses.
The women cheering those curses were perhaps the most depressing spectacle of all. Some of them may themselves have married men who were once emotionally entangled elsewhere. Some may have knowingly dated married men in the past. Some may even be nervously shouting “Amen” and, in their minds, saying “back to sender”. I think church congregations in Nigeria produce the loudest amens from the guiltiest consciences. What is frightening is how easily cruelty becomes entertainment once wrapped in religious language. A pastor says something vindictive and people laugh. A woman is publicly diminished and congregants clap. Entire categories of struggling people are demonised and worshippers cheer as though empathy itself has become sinful.
In the world inhabited by Mrs Ibiyeomie, the divorced woman is not somebody who survived something awful, but an airborne pathogen and marital anthrax spore floating through society to infect otherwise stable homes.
ALSO READ: See How Pastor David Ibiyeomie Stopped 50 Cent’s Port Harcourt Concert
THIS IS AN OPINION PIECE THAT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE POSITION OF NBG AFRICA.
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