Today, on my increasingly erratic TV flat screen, I watched a humdinger of a religious broadcast from the Nigerian based Synagogue Church Of All Nations. Lots of swarthy Sunday best clothes on view. Seriously packed pews and lots of attentive faces....

A slim, commanding pastor conducted a series of dramatic eye-popping, bone-splintering exorcisms at the front of the church. The pastor’s main tools for the exorcisms were A) her absolute faith in God B) her commitment to casting out evil spirits from the bodies of her parishioners and (C) a tiny little plastic bottle filled with Morning Water. Morning Water being a special brand of holy water much like Evian, Perrier and San Pelligrini, only produced and bottled in Nigeria. Small groups of well-behaved Good Christian women led a long queue of self-obsessed mothers and adulterous sisters-in-law over to the waiting pastor.  A determined squad of stern-faced church aids closed in around the misbehaving woman. Nothing was going to prevent these wayward souls from meeting their destiny.

The pastor raised her precious bottle (it looked like one of those bottles you use to spray a dirty laptop screen with) and forcefully squirted a good burst of her precious Morning Water over the first Bad Woman who’d been brought before her. Bad Woman No. 1 screwed up her lips in horror and quickly recoiled from the horrible gush of cold water spitting all over her. I’m pretty sure she couldn’t believe an educated sister was actually stupid enough to spray cheap, funny smelling water over her best, expensive Sunday weave.

The Good Christian women, as Good Christians tend to do when performing the Lord’s work, went all gangbuster and held Bad Woman No.1 still. The disturbingly cool pastor continued to spray Morning Water directly into the alarmed and alarmingly spinning eyes of Bad Woman No.1.  Bad Woman No.1 shook so hard you could practically see the panicking demon's forehead banging against Bad Woman No 1's lovingly ironed top as it tried to escape the awful deluge of Morning Water.

Somehow, and who could blame her for this, Bad Woman No.1 found the strength to ask the pastor why she was spraying so much Morning Water over her face. The pastor kept on spraying.  Eventually Bad Woman No. 1 realised the only way she could ever escape this hellish torture was by growling like a rabid animal and loudly confessing to having killed all of her five children in their beds, cut off the heads of her husband’s pet goldfish and planning to run around Lagos urinating on every statute of the risen Christ she came across.

The pastor obviously had no desire to spend the coming Monday washing down the abused statues of Christ, for she quickly speeded up her trigger finger and practically water-boarded Bad Woman No.1 to death.  Eventually Bad Woman No.1 let out a monstrous howl, plunged to the floor and grew deathly still. With the defeated water-logged demon vanished to “Who Knows Where”, Bad Woman No. 1 soon stood up and graciously thanked the pastor for her good work --- And then (and I couldn’t believe her brutal treachery) Bad Woman No. 1 turned to the woman who was standing behind her and told the pastor: “This no-good bitch also deserves some Morning Water.” 

Without even checking her watch the pastor turned to the next bad woman and zapped Bad Woman No. 2 with some more of her unanswerable Morning Water. I swear on my new IOS Update that I have never, ever, seen so much water come out of such a tiny bottle. Forget turning bread into wine, this little plastic bottle was off-the-charts miraculous.

Fifteen minutes later and the pastor had performed another three exorcisms and she wasn’t even breathing hard. This was spiritual cleansing on an industrial level. The pastor was like a fast-moving chocolate box packer on the fastest factory line in Africa. Honestly, I’ve never seen one demon in my whole life. By the looks of things the pastor probably beats up thirty demons every Sunday; that's one hundred and twenty non-dish washing, husband-bashing, go-make-your-own-bed, Satan-loving demons a month. Holy Moly!

When the time was right, perhaps an hour or two later, I forced myself to turn off this awful, awful programme. But some good did come out of this. I believe the Synagogue Church Of All Nations may have provided the increasing anxious voters of South Africa a quick remedy for their President's continued moral and spiritual wobbles: Jacob Z. is too stubborn to be thrown out of any  government office he’s ever disgraced. I’m convinced the ANC must stop trying to rid themselves of Jacob Z. by employing silly outmoded western democratic methods of excommunication. 

The ANC must immediately dump their silly Anglo-Saxon parliamentary motions of No-Confidence and throw away their pointless Gallic “Points of Order”. It's obvious that only tried and tested traditional African methods of dealing with quivering old men who speak in tongues will effectively resolve the present crisis. The remaining stalwarts of Mandela’s dream must immediately buy up all available stock of Morning Water and start spraying Jacob Z. with the best and most effective holy purifier on the planet until he sees the light and leaves the building.