I dreamt of danger about returning to Nigeria during #EndSARS – Sam Adeyemi

“When COVID-19 started, all our children were in the US, so everyone stayed with their families. We stayed with our children. The week services resumed was when EndSARS started, so we were preparing to return to Nigeria. When the EndSARS protests ended in violence, we stayed back a bit. When we were ready to return to Nigeria, a different experience altogether happened,” Adeyemi explained.

The EndSARS protests against police brutality began in October 2020 and led to violent confrontations between demonstrators and the police. Adeyemi, alongside other prominent Nigerian figures, had publicly condemned the police’s actions during the protests.

In November 2020, an activist Kenechukwu Okeke filed a criminal complaint against Adeyemi and 50 other prominent individuals, including musicians Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, and Davido, for their alleged roles in promoting the protests.

Okeke accused them of inciting actions that led to the destruction of his property. The charges were later ordered to be halted by a High Court in the Federal Capital Territory in January 2021.

During this time, Adeyemi stated that he and his wife had a series of disturbing dreams, which he interpreted as divine warnings not to return to Nigeria.

“My wife had a dream in which she travelled to Nigeria and returned to the US, which was a bad dream. I told her I wouldn’t say I liked this dream. Three days later, I had a dream,” Adeyemi said.

“We both travelled to Nigeria in my dream, and I was in a big fight. I was being attacked violently and had to ask the Holy Spirit in my heart what to do. He said I should call the name of Jesus Christ. I shouted ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’ in the dream and didn’t realise I shouted out loud in real life.”

He also recounted how he shouted from the dream and woke up his wife, Pastor Nike, stating, “My wife woke me up at 2:00 am. by hitting me and asking what was going on. We decided to take it seriously, especially considering a dream we had three days earlier.

“We prayed fervently, sensing danger. Three hours later, I fell back asleep and had another dream. We were in Nigeria this time, and I was in a fight.”

Adeyemi also disclosed that whenever he and his wife set dates and booked flights to return to Nigeria, he would have a bad dream about something terrible happening to him in Nigeria, noting that he had never experienced two dreams about the same event in one night.

These dreams, coupled with concerns from family members in Nigeria, he noted, prompted him to take the warnings seriously.

“A few days later, we called family members in Nigeria, and one person said, ‘I’m feeling very uncomfortable about you travelling to Nigeria.’ We called another family member who said, ‘I feel uncomfortable about you coming. What is going on?’ We just turned and looked at each other, pondering the situation. Then I said, ‘You know what? I’ve been a Christian for 40 years.

“At this point, if God is speaking to me, I should have an idea that it is God speaking. Something is going on. I don’t know what it is, but I want to pray more. And at that point, we called a meeting of all the leaders in Daystar Christian Centre—the top 120 leaders on Zoom.”

He noted that he informed the elders of Daystar about the situation, and they agreed to keep the church running until he received “clearance” from the Holy Spirit to return back to Nigeria years later.

“I’m passionate about building systems so the church does not collapse. It is fantastic, and we call it an organisational miracle. It was almost three years before we had the Holy Spirit’s clearance to return to Nigeria.

“But what eventually the Holy Spirit would tell me was that he wanted me to shift my focus from just being the pastor of a local church to that global walk that I had known that I would do. So right now, the focus shift is to do that global walk while we keep Daystar running, leveraging technology.”