Mr. H.K Leventis, a trustee of the AG Leventis Foundation and a director of the Nigerian Bottling Company, in this interview with Festus Akanbi says in spite of the poor state of infrastructure in the country, Nigeria remains one of the best markets in the world. He also speaks on the family business and other issues
How will you rate the investments of Leventis family in Nigeria's economy?
It is very important because investing in Nigeria and Ghana has created the Leventis fortune. The business we had here led to everything else. If we hadn't been in Nigeria, I don't know where we would be, somewhere else probably. Nigeria especially is very important for the Leventis family and everything that followed on. From the time when AG Leventis, the founder of the business died, we have expanded into bottling operations abroad, manufacturing of glass bottles and all that after he died because I think Coca Cola trusted us to be able to manage larger businesses. And then we expanded into Eastern Europe when the Soviet Empire collapsed and became a franchise bottler that has now reached 28 countries. I think in volume, we are the second largest bottler in the world.
In the early 70s and 80s, we had the Leventis Stores and the Technical Division, what led to the closure of these businesses?
I think businesses have to change depending on their situations and the Nigerian economy went through a very difficult path during that time and we decided that a number of our businesses that were not profitable should be closed down. Leventis Stores and Leventis Technical were some of them. Basically, we reduced the trading businesses that were not making profit and went into new businesses like making and selling generators and AG Leventis is now doing very well. We have gone into different types of businesses just to survive; we could not just continue to do business as usual. We used to sell three or four hundred vehicles every month and more sometimes, now we sell the same number in a year. That drop meant we had to go into other lines to survive and we had to create new businesses.
What lessons should other entrepreneurs learn from the Leventis family?
I think because we have been here as a family from the early twenties and it's nearly been a hundred years in Nigeria, I think you just have to persevere and you have to be very flexible in what you do. You have to be able to decide on what you are best at and if it doesn't work, you try something else. Things were probably easier at that time because there weren't that many possibilities but now there are so many other possibilities and we have to survive by deciding on what we are going to go into and if it doesn't work, we go into something else.
How do you think the government can assist manufacturers?
I think the area of infrastructure is the most important thing. When you are deciding where to go to, or want to manufacture something, you want to find somewhere which provides you with electricity, water, and other infrastructure, which generally don't exist in Nigeria. However, because we have always been in Nigeria, this is the place we want to do business. So we have to survive by generating our own electricity, providing our own roads and water. The idea is that roads should be provided by the states for businesses to grow and to expand. It is relatively high doing business in Nigeria when you generate your own electricity and have to use diesel. Diesel is very expensive, so basically the cost of doing business in Nigeria is very high. So that really has got to be improved. I can see the government is trying to improve it and I hope it succeeds because that's the only way Nigeria can move forward.
Do you think Leventis' investments in Nigeria have been worth it?
It's a large population and educated to a large extent and I think the future of Nigeria is very good as long as it can sort out the problem of infrastructure. And I think there will be more investments if everything is done well. If you can be certain you are going to be treated the same way as everybody else, then you could be more secure in investing. If I was coming here for the first time and I came on my own and saw the infrastructure and heard about the problems of corruption and all that, I will be very skeptical about moving here. But we are not because we know the country. However, I think it is necessary for Nigeria to really do something to provide anybody who wants to invest here with the certainty that they will be treated properly and they will be treated the same way as everybody else will be treated which is the most important thing.
What led AG Leventis to seek the Coca Cola franchise?
He first wanted to set up a big business empire basically. So he started the small way and very quickly it expanded. AG and my father very much understood the system because they came from an island also under the British colonial rule; they were very much in tune with the indigenous people, wherever they went including Nigeria and Ghana. AG was very close to the natives of Ghana and my father was very close to many of the original fighters for freedom in Nigeria and from all parts of the country: north, east, west and mid-west, everywhere. He knew everybody who later on became the first batch of politicians in Nigeria. Basically, they wanted to set up a large business which included eventually motor vehicle distribution, manufacturing and of course the soft drinks business which came about ten years after the initial business was set up. The philosophy was to do things for the good of the local people, grow a successful business which would expand, employ the local people, and be good for the country where they were set up.
Tell us what led to the introduction of Coca Cola franchise?
I think AG decided that because there were no soft drinks apart from two small producers, he wanted to see it happen in a big way and he went and got the franchise. I think he was given the option of either Coke or Pepsi, either one would have supported him, but he decided that Coke was the best one to begin with. He got the franchise for both Ghana and Nigeria beginning in the 1950s. We set up the first bottling plant where the main first plant is now and it was the first bottling plant we set up in Nigeria.
What were the steps taken to expand the company?
The expansion took place from the profits that we made. We borrowed funds as well from banks but at that time the business was booming, so we could build one or two new bottling plants every year for a number of years during the seventies. And in some places, we had more than one bottling plants; if the one we had was too small we then built another one. Now, we have rationalised the number of plants because the competition in the soft drinks market and the economy hasn't been so good recently.
How did the company deal with the reluctance by banks to finance manufacturers?
The banks have different guidelines. I think they still believe in reliable companies which have been here for a long time and which they trust to repay. We normally don't fund the financing of these new plants alone; we receive funds from our sister companies that are in other parts of the world in the group. Nigeria is one of 28 companies in the group that was set up by the Leventis family. Leventis is a very big family and the brothers themselves are shareholders in the group which is based in Greece and they help a lot in providing financing for our expansion. Nigeria is a very important part of that group. We now have a situation where we are able to build at the expense of 28 countries and to get help whenever we need help.
What has Coca Cola benefited from NBC?
I think it is very important that Coke has the concentrate. I mean in the past, they would supply the concentrate and help us with the marketing but they weren't involved with the rapid expansion of the company and of the bottling group of which Nigeria is a major part. They were able to ask Coke to become shareholders in the global group, which means that we are in a better position to achieve the answers that we both want which is the expansion of the business.
What are the factors that work against family businesses?
When my generation came in - we were the second generation and we were actually running all the various companies as directors. So when we relinquished direct control, we installed professional management in all our companies. As such, we are not directly involved in the day to day management but we maintain oversight over the companies. None of us or our children is involved in the day to day running of our businesses and so the next generation is maintaining oversight over the company. However, we visit all the time, we go round and we talk to the managers and to some Nigerians because they are part of our businesses. So we advise and we try to make sure they do the right thing. But the day to day running of the business is done by other people.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Bill to abolish construction of bore holes underway
ON DECEMBER 3, 2011 • IN NEWS
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/12/bill-to-abolish-construction-of-bore-holes-underway/
Awka – A bill, which will abolish the construction of bore holes Anambra State is under way in the state House of Assembly.
The Deputy Chief Whip, Mr Tony Ezekwelu, who represent Idemili South Constituency, made the disclosure at a media forum in Awka on Saturday.
Ezekwelu, the initiator of the bill, argued that most of the bore holes dug in the state had become sources of “sicknesses“ to the people.
When passed into law, he said, the building of bore holes would be a thing of the past as that would pave the way for the resuscitation of water schemes and reticulation across the state.
He also announced that another bill entitled “Infrastructural Local Content Bill“ was in the making in the House.
According to him, the bill when passed and assented to, will ensure that every contractor that comes to do contract in the state employs 85 per cent of its workforce from the state.
“This is to stop capital flight and as way of empowering our jobless youths,“ Ezekwelu said.
Ezekwelu, who is a member of the House Committee on Health, said that from the first quarter of 2012, all pregnant women in the Anambra would enjoy free ante-natal treatment in government hospitals.
“We will continue to partner with international donor agencies to ensure that our people access health facilities for a healthy life style,“ he said.
The legislator explained that his foray into politics was purely for service to the people, especially the youth.
He promised that within the next four years in the legislature, he would give priority to the training and empowerment of youths in his area.
“I intend to reduce unemployment to the barest minimum among the youth in my area through skills acquisition and empowerment,“ Ezekwelu stressed.
He said that if resources were properly utilised, unemployment and poverty would be wiped out from the society.(NAN)
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2011/12/bill-to-abolish-construction-of-bore-holes-underway/
Awka – A bill, which will abolish the construction of bore holes Anambra State is under way in the state House of Assembly.
The Deputy Chief Whip, Mr Tony Ezekwelu, who represent Idemili South Constituency, made the disclosure at a media forum in Awka on Saturday.
Ezekwelu, the initiator of the bill, argued that most of the bore holes dug in the state had become sources of “sicknesses“ to the people.
When passed into law, he said, the building of bore holes would be a thing of the past as that would pave the way for the resuscitation of water schemes and reticulation across the state.
He also announced that another bill entitled “Infrastructural Local Content Bill“ was in the making in the House.
According to him, the bill when passed and assented to, will ensure that every contractor that comes to do contract in the state employs 85 per cent of its workforce from the state.
“This is to stop capital flight and as way of empowering our jobless youths,“ Ezekwelu said.
Ezekwelu, who is a member of the House Committee on Health, said that from the first quarter of 2012, all pregnant women in the Anambra would enjoy free ante-natal treatment in government hospitals.
“We will continue to partner with international donor agencies to ensure that our people access health facilities for a healthy life style,“ he said.
The legislator explained that his foray into politics was purely for service to the people, especially the youth.
He promised that within the next four years in the legislature, he would give priority to the training and empowerment of youths in his area.
“I intend to reduce unemployment to the barest minimum among the youth in my area through skills acquisition and empowerment,“ Ezekwelu stressed.
He said that if resources were properly utilised, unemployment and poverty would be wiped out from the society.(NAN)
Ayo Oritsejafor _ My drug story: How Christ arrested me while buying Indian hemp
Sunday, January 01, 2012
“I want to hear amen like thunder!” His voice, resonating between lower tenor and upper baritone, tears through the giant speakers and reverberates through the expansive church auditorium with the force of a tornado. Totally enveloped in the spirit, as his parishioners are wont say, words fly out of his mouth with the force of thunder. Sometimes, he would take measured steps forward, stop and gaze at his enraptured congregation, before he begins to speak with a surge of energy that belies his age.
But, never ask Pastor Ayodele Joseph Oritsejafor, founder and senior pastor of Word of Life Bible Church, in oil-rich Warri, Delta State. He will never tell you. “What has age got to do with this?” He would retort as many times as you pose the question.
Of a truth, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor is not your run-of-the- mill preacher. He is a zealot for the word, if you permit. But if you knew where he came from, if you knew how deep he sank in the world of illicit drugs and cultism, you would hardly be surprised at his zeal for the gospel.
As they say in Christendom, the fiery preacher “fell” under the anointing of the late Archbishop of the Church of God Mission, Benin City, Prof. Benson Idahosa. It was in 1972, at the peak of Oritsejafor’s notoriety as a cultist and drug addict. And his life never remained the same after that encounter. He began to preach almost immediately. “Most people have a choice in the selection of their careers,” says Oritsejafor, the incumbent CAN president. “In my case, I didn’t have a choice other than to be a minister of God.”
Reason? He says his mother had made a covenant with God, long before he was conceived, that should she bear a son, he would be dedicated to God. He would serve God. And that came to pass.
Pastor Oritsejafor, immediate past president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) who made history, last year, when he was elected president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, the first Pentecostal pastor to hold the position, has been accused of pulling weird stunts while preaching. He often does not deny this. “It is not my doing,” he says. “I cannot explain myself. When the Holy Ghost controls you, there is no way you can control it. You just allow the Holy Ghost to do whatever He wants to do with you.”
A prolific author, “Papa”, as the teeming following of the flamboyant cleric call him, has taken the gospel to every continent of the world, having organised crusades and power conferences around the globe.
In 1980, Oritsejafor made a debut as a powerful tele-evangelist with his power-packed television programme, Hour of Deliverance, which is aired on many local and international television channels, as well as some satellite stations. Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor Ministries was the first to launch a Miracle Crusade, the Lagos Miracle Crusade, straight from the heart of Africa to audiences across the world, via satellite, in 1987, with Evangelist Joe Martin.
Blunt and fearless as ever, Oritsejafor, in this encounter, speaks about everything under the sun. Except his age.
Here are the excerpts:
I just witnessed a programme at which you gave out six cars, 10 tricycles, 500 bags of rice and so on. I learnt this is the sixth consecutive year you have held this empowerment programme in your church. Why do you do this? Is it because it is religious injunction or what?
I think most of it would probably be because of where I came from. Any normal person coming from my kind of background that would not take care of poor people must be crazy. And I am not crazy. Every time I touch the lives of the poor, it reminds me of days when I had no food to eat. Things were so bad that sometimes, I would stay in the street for days, in search of something to eat. I lived like that. So, whenever I see poor people, they remind me of where I am coming from and the life I lived as a child.
I wonder why, sometimes, Africans who had been poor and suddenly become rich become arrogant. I don’t know why. It puzzles me because, to me, it should remind you of where you are coming from. Every time I see poor, hungry and struggling people, they remind me of the days I had no food to eat. When I say no food, I mean no food.
Some of those people who won the items are not even members of your church…
We don’t look at all that. I don’t care whether or not you are a member of my church or even a Christian; because, for me, a human being is a human being made by God. God is not going to ask me about the man’s religion. He’s going to ask me: “Did you see that man? Did you see that woman?” I may not like the things you do, but that doesn’t change you from being a human being. We can change this country. All it would take is just a few more people to have a good heart and to want to reach out to help so as to redeem Nigeria. I thank God for the privilege I have to do it. I have had a fulfilled Christmas.
About a month ago, we gave out N20, 000 each to 141 persons. What’s N20, 000 that I can spend just at the snap of my fingers? But as some of them got that, I could see their faces light up with joy. What are we doing to ourselves in this country? I still can’t understand. There are people in this country that have so much money, who don’t know how much they have. These are the people who can literally change and transform a city. But ask some of them to take you to their towns. I won’t mention names; but just ask them: can we go to your town? The place you call home? You would be shocked that some of them don’t even own a house there. Is this not madness?
Can we discuss your early childhood? What was it like?
I didn’t really come from a poor family as such. That’s my father (pointing to a framed photo on the wall in his office). I think he was trying how to tie a wrapper (laughter). My father used to wear suits. I grew up to know my grandfather too. He too used to wear double-breasted suits with pocket-handkerchief. So, that’s the kind of family I come from. I didn’t really come from a poor family as such, but some things went wrong for me.
One aspect of what went wrong was that my father died when I was just four years old. Then, that finished everything. You are an African, so I am sure you would understand what happened. So, my mother had to remarry. And naturally, most men don’t like to carry excess luggage. I don’t blame my mother; she was so young. She had to go on with her life. So, they had to move me to uncles. My mother went to the United Kingdom. I started moving from one uncle to another. It got to a point that my whole luggage in life was contained in one black nylon bag.
In a nylon bag?
In fact, I didn’t even know what I had. I think I had something like a bag. But it wasn’t a real bag.
How many were you?
There were only two of us. I have an elder sister. She’s a chief. Funny enough, they left her with my grandmother. She basically stayed there. Probably because I was a boy, I don’t know, but they just kept moving me from one place to another. In fact, I never could tell how long I would stay in a place. In some places, I stayed for three days; and they would just say, “pack!” And I would pack my things, get into the car or whatever. We would arrive somewhere and they would say: ‘“this is your home. So and so is your uncle. So and so is your aunty.” I would sit in a corner. If they liked, they would show me a corner to sleep. It could be on the floor. It could be in the parlour or anywhere. Just one corner.
I went through that for years. And that hardened me. It got to a point I almost had no feelings. Life meant nothing. I was hooked on drugs. We used to have a lot of tablets; different kinds of tablets. You take some to take you up, and some to take you down. I just wandered away. I lost hope in everything and anything. Things got so bad that one day, I was walking along the Marina, near where PHCN office is now, and I started crying like a baby.
I was really high (on drugs). But I was crying like a child. I asked myself whether there was God. I was tired of life. That was how bad it was. That’s the kind of background I came from. You can’t go lower than that. My mother came back. But at that point, my life was really messed up.
So, at what age did you give your life to Christ?
I don’t talk about my age. If I give you that now, you would figure out my age. And I don’t like people knowing my age.
What’s is it about your age that you guide it so jealously?
Well, I don’t just talk about it.
Ok, what year did you receive Christ?
In 1972. Actually, November 2, 1972 was when I had an encounter with Christ. Then, I started meeting good people. God had started helping me. I had begun to go to school. New things had started happening in my life. Then, I found myself in a privileged position.
Where was this?
It was in Sapele here. In fact, between February 14 and18 (2012), some friends from the United States and I would be doing a crusade at the very place where I gave my life to Christ 40 years ago.
What happened when or after you cried at Marina?
Three months after that, I came to Sapele from Lagos. I went out one night to buy Indian hemp. Where I was buying it, somebody gave me a handbill inviting me to a crusade. I said to him, “you must be sick. How do you give people like me invitation to a crusade?” Anyhow, I took it. Somehow, I didn’t forget about it. It was just there in my mind. Finally, on that day, I took a friend and we went to the crusade. I was half-drunk.
We got there; I heard the gospel preached very clearly, for the first time. That was how I came out during the altar call and gave my life to Christ. My friend didn’t want me to come out but I did anyway. It was dramatic. The word had changed my life. It was so drastic that people who knew me couldn’t believe. Just imagine: one day, I was an addict, addicted to all kinds of illicit substances; the next day, I had become a preacher, preaching from house to house.
It was very dramatic. I was already preaching. I bought a Bible the next day after I gave my life to Christ, and I was going from house to house, preaching. The people actually thought I had lost my mind, because it was hard to believe. People, who knew me yesterday as a drug addict, and now, today, suddenly see me with a bible, going around and saying: “Jesus loves you,” thought it was too dramatic to be true. In fact, some people ran to my mother’s house to tell her that “your son has gone mad!” Yes, everybody thought I was crazy.
A few weeks after that, I actually bought a tambourine, went to the market. I was playing it and dancing. People would gather and then I would preach to them. So, they said, “finally, he’s gone. He has gone into the market.” You know, when craze don go market, dem no dey fit cure that one again. That’s the belief of our people. They actually believed that I was gone. To go into the market was the extreme a mad person could go. So, people actually gathered to sympathise with me, but I ended up preaching to them to give their lives to Christ.
Before your encounter in 1972, did you ever imagine that you would become a preacher?
Most people had a choice in the selection of their careers. In my case, I didn’t have a choice other than to be a minister of God. So, I knew I would end up being this based on the covenant my mother had with God.
What covenant?
My mother, in search of a male child, had told God that she was going to dedicate the child to God, if it eventually comes. But after my birth, she forgot her own part of the deal. She forgot her own part of the agreement. It was in 1979 when I was making my first trip to the US that she suddenly remembered the promise she made to God and she broke down in tears. I told her she should be happy instead of crying. She told me: “Sit down, let me tell you something. I never told you this because I forgot.” My mother said to me that my father, at a point, got another wife. My mother was desperate to have a male child. She was a Baptist. She went to the church and told God that if He gave her a male child, she would give him back to God. She said that aspect of the prayer, she had forgotten to tell me.
My mother told me she had just come to understand that when I was born, for the first five years, I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk for five years. She said after my fifth birthday, I started talking. So, I now understood why the pull to do something for God was so strong. God was just claiming what belongs to Him. So, there was no way I could have become anything else other than preacher of the word. I was one of those few people who had a call even before they were born.
Who was that friend you were with the day you were born again, and where is he now?
Unfortunately, he died six months after I gave my life to Christ. My friend called me a fool when I gave my life, and he died six months after that conversation. If being a fool is being alive, I better remain a fool. He was wise and died. I was a fool and I lived, and I’m still living. I thank God that I was a fool and I think I prefer to remain a fool. If this is what He does to fools, I better remain one. Honestly, I don’t think I would have lasted up till now if not for His intervention. I was one of the very few people, until that time, who hated anything that had to do with Christendom. It never interested me. I never saw anything interesting and good in Christianity.
So, how did he die?
As unbelievers, we got into cults. One of them was connected to a snake. We were involved in all kinds of crimes, but I never slept in a police cell one day. I really thought I had all the powers. The life I lived was crazy. But I denounced all that stuff that night I gave my life to Christ. Six months later, a physical snake crawled into his house, bit him and he died.
What do you think you would have been now if you didn’t give your life to Christ the day you did?
I would have been dead. Let me just tell you that straightaway. I know. I don’t need a prophet to tell me that, because the way my life was going, it was obvious. I said I started crying at a point. I didn’t see any ray of hope. There was no meaning to this life. We were smoking Indian hemp on empty stomach. There were days I lived in a joint where they sold hemp. I lived there. I slept there. There was free hemp, but no food. So, if they paid you, you could kill. You could do anything for money.
There are so many desperate young men like that today. Any time I go to Moloney area (of Lagos), where my church is, where I grew up, the moment the boys who know my history, even among the present-day boys, get to hear that I am around, they would come in droves. I still give them something.
You said you went to the US…
Yes.
What was it for?
I went to the bible school. I was already preaching, but I just wanted to help myself a little more.
By the time you were being moved around, how did that affect your education?
It messed things up completely. It messed me up big time. It got to a point when I hated to go to school. I hated to go to school. You see, I don’t pray for my enemy to have some of those experiences that I had. Sometimes, you wonder what your own flesh and blood can do to you. You wonder if these people were really your flesh and blood.
You do all sorts of things when you preach, like taking off your shoes, hopping here and there, and so on. Why?
I do some crazy things at times on the pulpit that I cannot really explain myself. It is not my doing. I cannot explain myself. When the Holy Ghost controls you, there is no way you can control it. You just allow the Holy Ghost to do whatever He wants to do with you. Or can you control the Holy Ghost?
Would you describe the death of your wife in 1996 as one of the low points in your life?
She was a very interesting personality. Her death touched me just like the death of my father who died when I was very young. She was somebody, until her death I could not do without. It was, indeed, a very sad day for me. Her death was strange to me because she was actually recovering. She just collapsed. She spent 20 years of her life with me. I discovered at that point that God does not commit greatness to untested soldiers. He commits greatness to people who have been tested and are being tested.
When you lost your first wife, you had to remarry. How did you meet her?
Well, that is a long story now. I met her a year after the death of my first wife. God gave her to me so she could wipe away my sorrows and tears. That was exactly what she did. She was a member of the church. She used to own an engineering company. She actually studied Mass Communication but she owned a company here in Lagos. She knows a lot about building. So, by the time we got married, she helped me a lot in the finishing of the building. Till tomorrow, she helps me because I am not very good at many things. I am very grateful to God for giving her to me because she is a rare gem.
You’re a very trendy preacher. Do you set out to make a fashion statement?
When you look at me, don’t look at what I wear? I like to look nice. Most of the things I wear are cheap materials, but because of my personality, people think they are expensive. I naturally know how to combine colours. Most people do not understand that when you look at Ayo, you need to ask and find out who he really is. Where am I coming from?
Most people don’t really know how I got to where I am today. A lot of people talk of success without sweat. It sounds good. But I can tell you that if you find success without sweat, you are going to sweat to keep that success. From Genesis to Revelation, God will not commit greatness to an untested soldier.
Can you let us into the money, time and energy that were put into building this church?
That will be difficult to do. I cannot really say how much we spent on the church. To be frank with you, I don’t know. This is because most of the work was done by the members, mostly by direct labour. They are the ones, in most cases, who finished the church. If not for the members, I do not think we would come this far. Some people do ask why I decided to have such a gigantic church. My answer is that in l987, I was going through a transition in my life and ministry. I made up my mind that I was going to leave Warri to come to Lagos because when I gave my life to Christ, the Lord told me that He was returning me to my root and I thought it was Lagos because that was where I was born. But in the process of the thought, two things happened: God gave me a vision where he showed me thousands of souls and a building, a very huge building that would seat over 30,000 people.
There was nothing like it anywhere in this country when I started building the church. It was there He told me that from this place (Warri), you would take my word to the world. I just described what I saw in the vision to the architects; the rest, as they say, is history. If God is not with you, there is no way you can build such a place and build it in Warri. The church is in the middle of where the crisis is. I have realised why He allowed me to build it. It is because of the crisis. Everybody is a member of the church, irrespective of your dialect. The church is a rallying point. The Bible does not discriminate and the Scripture has taught us not to discriminate. Discrimination is not in the Bible.
You said you were once a bad boy. What do you think led you into doing those horrible things?
I think when God wants to use you, He picks you from somewhere. He does not pick those who do not have a past. I think, I got involved in those vices through peer groups. It started through simple smoking before I graduated into hard drugs. It became a normal thing for me to smoke. I was no more interested in ordinary cigarettes. I preferred to be in company with those smoking marijuana and I thought it was fun doing it at that time. All the money I had, I preferred to smoke with it than eat or buy clothes. That was how bad I was.
When eventually Mama came back, how easy was it for you to forgive her?
It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. Don’t go too far. I am a pastor, so I should tell the truth. I don’t know if I really completely forgave her. I don’t know. I am being very honest with you. I don’t know if I totally, completely forgave her.
What would make you cry for Nigeria?
I cry for this nation quite often. I cried even this morning. The bombing in Madalla, near Abuja, broke my heart. Sometimes, I feel powerless. You think you could help, but you don’t have the chance. You don’t have the opportunity or anything to be able to help. Sometimes, I also feel bad because sometimes, I feel so close to being able to help but can’t really do so. It’s so bad.
How did you receive the news of the Christmas Day bombing in Madalla?
I had come to the office after the first service. I checked my phone, and then saw the text somebody sent. That just finished me. I went into the second service confused. I had to pretend to be normal because I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s joy. Let me be honest with you, it’s not easy being a Christian now in Nigeria. It’s not easy. It’s even harder being a leader of Christians, because you watch things that otherwise shouldn’t been happening to your own people. And sometimes, you just wonder. It’s not good.
What is the greatest Christmas gift you ever received?
I think the greatest gifts I have received are my three children. If you know my story, you would know where I am coming from. So, for me, those are my greatest gifts.
What are the three things you fear most?
The thing I fear most would happen to me, in my different capacities as a Nigerian, as a pastor and as a Christian leader, is the thought that Christianity could actually be wiped out of this nation. It frightens me to see the way things are going. I pray a day would not come when you hear something like Islamic Republic of Nigeria. And in my own brand of Christianity, I say, God forbid!
Are you suggesting there’s a grand plot to Islamise this country?
I am of very strong opinion that there’s a grand plot to Islamise Nigeria. If there was any time that grand design was true, it’s now. Look at it. Open your eyes and see it. It’s there. It’s on ground. It’s happening before our very eyes.
But we are not going to keep quiet. We are going to be having some meetings to discuss and decide on the way forward for Nigeria and what next for Christianity in Nigeria. Because, if we do not talk to ourselves, and decide on what to do, they would wipe us out. It’s a gradual process. When it happens today, we console ourselves. We say to ourselves, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s not going to stop. Who is benefiting from all these things? Go to Maiduguri. Go to Yobe State. Christians are been slaughtered like animals. And many are running away. Who’s benefiting? Who’s taking over everything? Who? Answer it for yourself.
What implication does this have for our unity?
There’s no unity in Nigeria. We’re pretenders. We’re hypocrites. There’s no unity in Nigeria. There’s none.
Some people have called for a forum such as a sovereign national conference to discuss Nigeria …
I support it. Call it anything. Some don’t like the word, “sovereign.” Some like the word “national.” Some don’t like the word “national,” they don’t like “sovereign.” Call it anything you want, but I think it’s important for all the nationalities in this country to sit down and discuss the project, Nigeria. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk honestly. Let’s face fact. Let’s agree or disagree.
Let’s agree to stay together or disagree and go apart, peacefully. We don’t have to kill each other. Must we be together? I love for us to be together. Honestly, I believe that Nigeria has more to gain by being together, because part of the greatness of a nation is its diversity. I believe that. I believe we can negotiate ourselves into a very good union. But we’re not there yet. We must do that because we see this thing coming. A group of people cannot gradually take over a place.
You see, when some of us talk, they label us. But let’s face the fact; Tunisia was totally Christian at one time. Don’t you know that? Go and read your history. Turkey that we’re talking about now was completely Christian. There are lots of cities in the New Testament (Bible) that are still there in Turkey. Go through the whole of North Africa; Libya that you’re looking at today was all Christian. This was how it started. Gradually. Gradually, they swept Christianity out.
The ones they couldn’t conquer by force, they conquered by economics. Nigerians should open their eyes wide, because there’s not only a violent jihad going on, there is also an economic, religious and political jihad. All these are happening in this country. I think it’s time for us to start speaking. And that’s why I am talking now, because what happened yesterday (Christmas Day bombing of a church in Niger State) is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.
“I want to hear amen like thunder!” His voice, resonating between lower tenor and upper baritone, tears through the giant speakers and reverberates through the expansive church auditorium with the force of a tornado. Totally enveloped in the spirit, as his parishioners are wont say, words fly out of his mouth with the force of thunder. Sometimes, he would take measured steps forward, stop and gaze at his enraptured congregation, before he begins to speak with a surge of energy that belies his age.
But, never ask Pastor Ayodele Joseph Oritsejafor, founder and senior pastor of Word of Life Bible Church, in oil-rich Warri, Delta State. He will never tell you. “What has age got to do with this?” He would retort as many times as you pose the question.
Of a truth, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor is not your run-of-the- mill preacher. He is a zealot for the word, if you permit. But if you knew where he came from, if you knew how deep he sank in the world of illicit drugs and cultism, you would hardly be surprised at his zeal for the gospel.
As they say in Christendom, the fiery preacher “fell” under the anointing of the late Archbishop of the Church of God Mission, Benin City, Prof. Benson Idahosa. It was in 1972, at the peak of Oritsejafor’s notoriety as a cultist and drug addict. And his life never remained the same after that encounter. He began to preach almost immediately. “Most people have a choice in the selection of their careers,” says Oritsejafor, the incumbent CAN president. “In my case, I didn’t have a choice other than to be a minister of God.”
Reason? He says his mother had made a covenant with God, long before he was conceived, that should she bear a son, he would be dedicated to God. He would serve God. And that came to pass.
Pastor Oritsejafor, immediate past president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) who made history, last year, when he was elected president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, the first Pentecostal pastor to hold the position, has been accused of pulling weird stunts while preaching. He often does not deny this. “It is not my doing,” he says. “I cannot explain myself. When the Holy Ghost controls you, there is no way you can control it. You just allow the Holy Ghost to do whatever He wants to do with you.”
A prolific author, “Papa”, as the teeming following of the flamboyant cleric call him, has taken the gospel to every continent of the world, having organised crusades and power conferences around the globe.
In 1980, Oritsejafor made a debut as a powerful tele-evangelist with his power-packed television programme, Hour of Deliverance, which is aired on many local and international television channels, as well as some satellite stations. Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor Ministries was the first to launch a Miracle Crusade, the Lagos Miracle Crusade, straight from the heart of Africa to audiences across the world, via satellite, in 1987, with Evangelist Joe Martin.
Blunt and fearless as ever, Oritsejafor, in this encounter, speaks about everything under the sun. Except his age.
Here are the excerpts:
I just witnessed a programme at which you gave out six cars, 10 tricycles, 500 bags of rice and so on. I learnt this is the sixth consecutive year you have held this empowerment programme in your church. Why do you do this? Is it because it is religious injunction or what?
I think most of it would probably be because of where I came from. Any normal person coming from my kind of background that would not take care of poor people must be crazy. And I am not crazy. Every time I touch the lives of the poor, it reminds me of days when I had no food to eat. Things were so bad that sometimes, I would stay in the street for days, in search of something to eat. I lived like that. So, whenever I see poor people, they remind me of where I am coming from and the life I lived as a child.
I wonder why, sometimes, Africans who had been poor and suddenly become rich become arrogant. I don’t know why. It puzzles me because, to me, it should remind you of where you are coming from. Every time I see poor, hungry and struggling people, they remind me of the days I had no food to eat. When I say no food, I mean no food.
Some of those people who won the items are not even members of your church…
We don’t look at all that. I don’t care whether or not you are a member of my church or even a Christian; because, for me, a human being is a human being made by God. God is not going to ask me about the man’s religion. He’s going to ask me: “Did you see that man? Did you see that woman?” I may not like the things you do, but that doesn’t change you from being a human being. We can change this country. All it would take is just a few more people to have a good heart and to want to reach out to help so as to redeem Nigeria. I thank God for the privilege I have to do it. I have had a fulfilled Christmas.
About a month ago, we gave out N20, 000 each to 141 persons. What’s N20, 000 that I can spend just at the snap of my fingers? But as some of them got that, I could see their faces light up with joy. What are we doing to ourselves in this country? I still can’t understand. There are people in this country that have so much money, who don’t know how much they have. These are the people who can literally change and transform a city. But ask some of them to take you to their towns. I won’t mention names; but just ask them: can we go to your town? The place you call home? You would be shocked that some of them don’t even own a house there. Is this not madness?
Can we discuss your early childhood? What was it like?
I didn’t really come from a poor family as such. That’s my father (pointing to a framed photo on the wall in his office). I think he was trying how to tie a wrapper (laughter). My father used to wear suits. I grew up to know my grandfather too. He too used to wear double-breasted suits with pocket-handkerchief. So, that’s the kind of family I come from. I didn’t really come from a poor family as such, but some things went wrong for me.
One aspect of what went wrong was that my father died when I was just four years old. Then, that finished everything. You are an African, so I am sure you would understand what happened. So, my mother had to remarry. And naturally, most men don’t like to carry excess luggage. I don’t blame my mother; she was so young. She had to go on with her life. So, they had to move me to uncles. My mother went to the United Kingdom. I started moving from one uncle to another. It got to a point that my whole luggage in life was contained in one black nylon bag.
In a nylon bag?
In fact, I didn’t even know what I had. I think I had something like a bag. But it wasn’t a real bag.
How many were you?
There were only two of us. I have an elder sister. She’s a chief. Funny enough, they left her with my grandmother. She basically stayed there. Probably because I was a boy, I don’t know, but they just kept moving me from one place to another. In fact, I never could tell how long I would stay in a place. In some places, I stayed for three days; and they would just say, “pack!” And I would pack my things, get into the car or whatever. We would arrive somewhere and they would say: ‘“this is your home. So and so is your uncle. So and so is your aunty.” I would sit in a corner. If they liked, they would show me a corner to sleep. It could be on the floor. It could be in the parlour or anywhere. Just one corner.
I went through that for years. And that hardened me. It got to a point I almost had no feelings. Life meant nothing. I was hooked on drugs. We used to have a lot of tablets; different kinds of tablets. You take some to take you up, and some to take you down. I just wandered away. I lost hope in everything and anything. Things got so bad that one day, I was walking along the Marina, near where PHCN office is now, and I started crying like a baby.
I was really high (on drugs). But I was crying like a child. I asked myself whether there was God. I was tired of life. That was how bad it was. That’s the kind of background I came from. You can’t go lower than that. My mother came back. But at that point, my life was really messed up.
So, at what age did you give your life to Christ?
I don’t talk about my age. If I give you that now, you would figure out my age. And I don’t like people knowing my age.
What’s is it about your age that you guide it so jealously?
Well, I don’t just talk about it.
Ok, what year did you receive Christ?
In 1972. Actually, November 2, 1972 was when I had an encounter with Christ. Then, I started meeting good people. God had started helping me. I had begun to go to school. New things had started happening in my life. Then, I found myself in a privileged position.
Where was this?
It was in Sapele here. In fact, between February 14 and18 (2012), some friends from the United States and I would be doing a crusade at the very place where I gave my life to Christ 40 years ago.
What happened when or after you cried at Marina?
Three months after that, I came to Sapele from Lagos. I went out one night to buy Indian hemp. Where I was buying it, somebody gave me a handbill inviting me to a crusade. I said to him, “you must be sick. How do you give people like me invitation to a crusade?” Anyhow, I took it. Somehow, I didn’t forget about it. It was just there in my mind. Finally, on that day, I took a friend and we went to the crusade. I was half-drunk.
We got there; I heard the gospel preached very clearly, for the first time. That was how I came out during the altar call and gave my life to Christ. My friend didn’t want me to come out but I did anyway. It was dramatic. The word had changed my life. It was so drastic that people who knew me couldn’t believe. Just imagine: one day, I was an addict, addicted to all kinds of illicit substances; the next day, I had become a preacher, preaching from house to house.
It was very dramatic. I was already preaching. I bought a Bible the next day after I gave my life to Christ, and I was going from house to house, preaching. The people actually thought I had lost my mind, because it was hard to believe. People, who knew me yesterday as a drug addict, and now, today, suddenly see me with a bible, going around and saying: “Jesus loves you,” thought it was too dramatic to be true. In fact, some people ran to my mother’s house to tell her that “your son has gone mad!” Yes, everybody thought I was crazy.
A few weeks after that, I actually bought a tambourine, went to the market. I was playing it and dancing. People would gather and then I would preach to them. So, they said, “finally, he’s gone. He has gone into the market.” You know, when craze don go market, dem no dey fit cure that one again. That’s the belief of our people. They actually believed that I was gone. To go into the market was the extreme a mad person could go. So, people actually gathered to sympathise with me, but I ended up preaching to them to give their lives to Christ.
Before your encounter in 1972, did you ever imagine that you would become a preacher?
Most people had a choice in the selection of their careers. In my case, I didn’t have a choice other than to be a minister of God. So, I knew I would end up being this based on the covenant my mother had with God.
What covenant?
My mother, in search of a male child, had told God that she was going to dedicate the child to God, if it eventually comes. But after my birth, she forgot her own part of the deal. She forgot her own part of the agreement. It was in 1979 when I was making my first trip to the US that she suddenly remembered the promise she made to God and she broke down in tears. I told her she should be happy instead of crying. She told me: “Sit down, let me tell you something. I never told you this because I forgot.” My mother said to me that my father, at a point, got another wife. My mother was desperate to have a male child. She was a Baptist. She went to the church and told God that if He gave her a male child, she would give him back to God. She said that aspect of the prayer, she had forgotten to tell me.
My mother told me she had just come to understand that when I was born, for the first five years, I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t talk for five years. She said after my fifth birthday, I started talking. So, I now understood why the pull to do something for God was so strong. God was just claiming what belongs to Him. So, there was no way I could have become anything else other than preacher of the word. I was one of those few people who had a call even before they were born.
Who was that friend you were with the day you were born again, and where is he now?
Unfortunately, he died six months after I gave my life to Christ. My friend called me a fool when I gave my life, and he died six months after that conversation. If being a fool is being alive, I better remain a fool. He was wise and died. I was a fool and I lived, and I’m still living. I thank God that I was a fool and I think I prefer to remain a fool. If this is what He does to fools, I better remain one. Honestly, I don’t think I would have lasted up till now if not for His intervention. I was one of the very few people, until that time, who hated anything that had to do with Christendom. It never interested me. I never saw anything interesting and good in Christianity.
So, how did he die?
As unbelievers, we got into cults. One of them was connected to a snake. We were involved in all kinds of crimes, but I never slept in a police cell one day. I really thought I had all the powers. The life I lived was crazy. But I denounced all that stuff that night I gave my life to Christ. Six months later, a physical snake crawled into his house, bit him and he died.
What do you think you would have been now if you didn’t give your life to Christ the day you did?
I would have been dead. Let me just tell you that straightaway. I know. I don’t need a prophet to tell me that, because the way my life was going, it was obvious. I said I started crying at a point. I didn’t see any ray of hope. There was no meaning to this life. We were smoking Indian hemp on empty stomach. There were days I lived in a joint where they sold hemp. I lived there. I slept there. There was free hemp, but no food. So, if they paid you, you could kill. You could do anything for money.
There are so many desperate young men like that today. Any time I go to Moloney area (of Lagos), where my church is, where I grew up, the moment the boys who know my history, even among the present-day boys, get to hear that I am around, they would come in droves. I still give them something.
You said you went to the US…
Yes.
What was it for?
I went to the bible school. I was already preaching, but I just wanted to help myself a little more.
By the time you were being moved around, how did that affect your education?
It messed things up completely. It messed me up big time. It got to a point when I hated to go to school. I hated to go to school. You see, I don’t pray for my enemy to have some of those experiences that I had. Sometimes, you wonder what your own flesh and blood can do to you. You wonder if these people were really your flesh and blood.
You do all sorts of things when you preach, like taking off your shoes, hopping here and there, and so on. Why?
I do some crazy things at times on the pulpit that I cannot really explain myself. It is not my doing. I cannot explain myself. When the Holy Ghost controls you, there is no way you can control it. You just allow the Holy Ghost to do whatever He wants to do with you. Or can you control the Holy Ghost?
Would you describe the death of your wife in 1996 as one of the low points in your life?
She was a very interesting personality. Her death touched me just like the death of my father who died when I was very young. She was somebody, until her death I could not do without. It was, indeed, a very sad day for me. Her death was strange to me because she was actually recovering. She just collapsed. She spent 20 years of her life with me. I discovered at that point that God does not commit greatness to untested soldiers. He commits greatness to people who have been tested and are being tested.
When you lost your first wife, you had to remarry. How did you meet her?
Well, that is a long story now. I met her a year after the death of my first wife. God gave her to me so she could wipe away my sorrows and tears. That was exactly what she did. She was a member of the church. She used to own an engineering company. She actually studied Mass Communication but she owned a company here in Lagos. She knows a lot about building. So, by the time we got married, she helped me a lot in the finishing of the building. Till tomorrow, she helps me because I am not very good at many things. I am very grateful to God for giving her to me because she is a rare gem.
You’re a very trendy preacher. Do you set out to make a fashion statement?
When you look at me, don’t look at what I wear? I like to look nice. Most of the things I wear are cheap materials, but because of my personality, people think they are expensive. I naturally know how to combine colours. Most people do not understand that when you look at Ayo, you need to ask and find out who he really is. Where am I coming from?
Most people don’t really know how I got to where I am today. A lot of people talk of success without sweat. It sounds good. But I can tell you that if you find success without sweat, you are going to sweat to keep that success. From Genesis to Revelation, God will not commit greatness to an untested soldier.
Can you let us into the money, time and energy that were put into building this church?
That will be difficult to do. I cannot really say how much we spent on the church. To be frank with you, I don’t know. This is because most of the work was done by the members, mostly by direct labour. They are the ones, in most cases, who finished the church. If not for the members, I do not think we would come this far. Some people do ask why I decided to have such a gigantic church. My answer is that in l987, I was going through a transition in my life and ministry. I made up my mind that I was going to leave Warri to come to Lagos because when I gave my life to Christ, the Lord told me that He was returning me to my root and I thought it was Lagos because that was where I was born. But in the process of the thought, two things happened: God gave me a vision where he showed me thousands of souls and a building, a very huge building that would seat over 30,000 people.
There was nothing like it anywhere in this country when I started building the church. It was there He told me that from this place (Warri), you would take my word to the world. I just described what I saw in the vision to the architects; the rest, as they say, is history. If God is not with you, there is no way you can build such a place and build it in Warri. The church is in the middle of where the crisis is. I have realised why He allowed me to build it. It is because of the crisis. Everybody is a member of the church, irrespective of your dialect. The church is a rallying point. The Bible does not discriminate and the Scripture has taught us not to discriminate. Discrimination is not in the Bible.
You said you were once a bad boy. What do you think led you into doing those horrible things?
I think when God wants to use you, He picks you from somewhere. He does not pick those who do not have a past. I think, I got involved in those vices through peer groups. It started through simple smoking before I graduated into hard drugs. It became a normal thing for me to smoke. I was no more interested in ordinary cigarettes. I preferred to be in company with those smoking marijuana and I thought it was fun doing it at that time. All the money I had, I preferred to smoke with it than eat or buy clothes. That was how bad I was.
When eventually Mama came back, how easy was it for you to forgive her?
It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. Don’t go too far. I am a pastor, so I should tell the truth. I don’t know if I really completely forgave her. I don’t know. I am being very honest with you. I don’t know if I totally, completely forgave her.
What would make you cry for Nigeria?
I cry for this nation quite often. I cried even this morning. The bombing in Madalla, near Abuja, broke my heart. Sometimes, I feel powerless. You think you could help, but you don’t have the chance. You don’t have the opportunity or anything to be able to help. Sometimes, I also feel bad because sometimes, I feel so close to being able to help but can’t really do so. It’s so bad.
How did you receive the news of the Christmas Day bombing in Madalla?
I had come to the office after the first service. I checked my phone, and then saw the text somebody sent. That just finished me. I went into the second service confused. I had to pretend to be normal because I didn’t want to ruin everybody’s joy. Let me be honest with you, it’s not easy being a Christian now in Nigeria. It’s not easy. It’s even harder being a leader of Christians, because you watch things that otherwise shouldn’t been happening to your own people. And sometimes, you just wonder. It’s not good.
What is the greatest Christmas gift you ever received?
I think the greatest gifts I have received are my three children. If you know my story, you would know where I am coming from. So, for me, those are my greatest gifts.
What are the three things you fear most?
The thing I fear most would happen to me, in my different capacities as a Nigerian, as a pastor and as a Christian leader, is the thought that Christianity could actually be wiped out of this nation. It frightens me to see the way things are going. I pray a day would not come when you hear something like Islamic Republic of Nigeria. And in my own brand of Christianity, I say, God forbid!
Are you suggesting there’s a grand plot to Islamise this country?
I am of very strong opinion that there’s a grand plot to Islamise Nigeria. If there was any time that grand design was true, it’s now. Look at it. Open your eyes and see it. It’s there. It’s on ground. It’s happening before our very eyes.
But we are not going to keep quiet. We are going to be having some meetings to discuss and decide on the way forward for Nigeria and what next for Christianity in Nigeria. Because, if we do not talk to ourselves, and decide on what to do, they would wipe us out. It’s a gradual process. When it happens today, we console ourselves. We say to ourselves, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. It’s not going to stop. Who is benefiting from all these things? Go to Maiduguri. Go to Yobe State. Christians are been slaughtered like animals. And many are running away. Who’s benefiting? Who’s taking over everything? Who? Answer it for yourself.
What implication does this have for our unity?
There’s no unity in Nigeria. We’re pretenders. We’re hypocrites. There’s no unity in Nigeria. There’s none.
Some people have called for a forum such as a sovereign national conference to discuss Nigeria …
I support it. Call it anything. Some don’t like the word, “sovereign.” Some like the word “national.” Some don’t like the word “national,” they don’t like “sovereign.” Call it anything you want, but I think it’s important for all the nationalities in this country to sit down and discuss the project, Nigeria. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk honestly. Let’s face fact. Let’s agree or disagree.
Let’s agree to stay together or disagree and go apart, peacefully. We don’t have to kill each other. Must we be together? I love for us to be together. Honestly, I believe that Nigeria has more to gain by being together, because part of the greatness of a nation is its diversity. I believe that. I believe we can negotiate ourselves into a very good union. But we’re not there yet. We must do that because we see this thing coming. A group of people cannot gradually take over a place.
You see, when some of us talk, they label us. But let’s face the fact; Tunisia was totally Christian at one time. Don’t you know that? Go and read your history. Turkey that we’re talking about now was completely Christian. There are lots of cities in the New Testament (Bible) that are still there in Turkey. Go through the whole of North Africa; Libya that you’re looking at today was all Christian. This was how it started. Gradually. Gradually, they swept Christianity out.
The ones they couldn’t conquer by force, they conquered by economics. Nigerians should open their eyes wide, because there’s not only a violent jihad going on, there is also an economic, religious and political jihad. All these are happening in this country. I think it’s time for us to start speaking. And that’s why I am talking now, because what happened yesterday (Christmas Day bombing of a church in Niger State) is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable.
OSUNDARE We Don’t Have Leaders Who Think And Feel...
SUNDAY, 01 JANUARY 2012 00:00 ANOTE AJELUOROU SUNDAY MAGAZINE - KALEIDOSCOPE
http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=72380:osundare-we-dont-have-leaders-who-think-and-feel&catid=175:kaleidoscope&Itemid=702
As the argument rages whether to remove fuel subsidy or not, eminent poet and public intellectual, Prof. Niyi Osundare, has called on President Jonathan not to further compound the hardship Nigerians currently undergo. In an interview with ANOTE AJELUOROU in Ibadan, last week, the award-winning poet, essayist and scholar took on many issues that stand at the cross-road of Nigeria’s quest for development. Excerpts:
In our earlier encounter, you said you finally came to the realisation that for a country to progress economically, there is need to ‘Seek ye the political kingdom first, and then all things shall be added unto you!’‘Seek ye the political kingdom first, and then all things shall be added unto you!’ How close is Nigeria’s political kingdom under President Jonathan’s watch?
Grasp ye the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto thee! Nigeria has not got it right politically. This is why all other things appear to have been falling out of sync in the eight months of Dr. Jonathan’s full presidency. Do we need anyone to tell us our country is in a state of depressive stupor, thrashing around like a half-beheaded snake. President Jonathan needs to ‘man up’ (to borrow an American phrase); he needs to convince us that he knows what time of day it is. He doesn’t look like a leader yet: a decisive, deliberate, insightful figure whose wisdom goes beyond mere political savvy and the nervous quest for self-preservation. In the past many months, the President has behaved very much like somebody who is being pushed in all kinds of directions, and who doesn’t know how to make up his mind. When people in this country look at him, he doesn’t look like the kind of leader who is in charge: confident and resourceful; one who radiates the kind of dynamism which a country like this needs so badly so urgently.
Meek-looking, yes. Soft-looking, yes. Pious-looking, yes (he once knelt head-bowed before a famous Pentecostal cleric, and regaled the nation with a front-page picture of this posture in several Nigerian newspapers!) But this President sorely needs more insight to his thinking, more energy to his action, more bones to his flesh. He needs to think beyond sorry clichés and hackneyed humdrums. He needs to convince us that he has the kind of ideas needed by a desperate country like Nigeria. Nigeria wants to see a President that can think on his feet. A president who has the vital ideas, and can surround himself with those who also have them, who can proffer them selflessly, while being sure that their words will count. Sad to say, but in so many respects, right now, the people of Nigeria seem to be far ahead of their President. He needs to catch up.
He has confessed to not being a Goliath or an army general…
You don’t have to be a general to have some strength in you! Goliath was an evil kind of power; a life-negating leviathan. He was too strong, too domineering, and that was why the God of the Old Testament made him face his waterloo through a pebble from the sling shot of a mere stripling. Jonathan is not a Goliath; nobody wants him to be a Goliath. Nigeria has had too many Goliaths in power and very few Davids. We’re not saying he should tower above us. No. We’re saying he should be man enough to also do the job he is elected to do: To think and act boldly.People who knows him say he is a good man. I have no right to doubt them, but I would like President Jonathan to be a good man and also an efficient leader, a leader who inspires. He’s not an army general; we know. We have seen too many army generals in this country to be comfortable with having more of them. Our prayer is that this country will never again be ruled by army generals! Soldiers are trained to kill and destroy; they become a disastrous aberration when they are brought to construct, to reconstruct, and manage a country.. The ‘Goliath-General’ metaphor is not a terribly well-chosen one, really.
Yeah, Dr. Jonathan, you may not be a Goliath or a general; we don’t want you to be any of those. We want you to be a president; a president who stands up and the people know he’s there for them; who thinks about our problems all the time, and also wakes up solving them. A president, who surrounds himself not with mediocre and political jobbers, but with men and women of ideas; and there are many of them in this country that can really contribute to the solution of our many problems.President Jonathan’s cabinet is too mediocre, and there are people there that Nigerians know that are corrupt, manifestly corrupt. I remember a minister in one of Nigeria’s most lucrative ministries whose reappointment was strongly petitioned a couple of months ago, but the President went ahead all the same with the reappointment. In Nigeria corruption and other forms of abuse of office still remain the main qualification for high office. Eight months after, this country has not made any progress. I think we have even retrogressed considerably. If in doubt, consider the on-going downward slide of the national currency
Consider Boko Haram. The biggest problem we have in this country is security. What is he going to do with Boko Haram? Does he apply the military solution? At times, he talks tough. Other times, he talks soft, and says oh yes, there is going to be reconciliation. Does our President really understand the dynamics of Boko Haram? Who are those beating the drums for the water dragons that are dancing on the water surface? Who are the Boko Haram? Faceless people, most of the time although they say they have caught their leaders. When the security agencies boast that they have Boko Haram right now in our palm, the group surprises them by bombing a neighbouring town the next day? So Boko Haram remains an understudied, underestimated group conveniently dismissed as ‘terrorists’. Have we tried to understand what Boko Haram really is?
Boko Haram is not a totally religious movement, from my understanding of it. There are social sides to Boko Haram, social underpinnings which we have to understand. This looks very much like the movement of the under-privileged, of the dispossessed, the alienated. It looks to me like the movement of people who have nothing to lose in society. I think it was Malcolm X, the African-American leader that said that ‘a society that creates people who have nothing to lose is digging its own grave’. There is a lot of work Dr. Jonathan should be doing that he is not doing at the moment. This country is in a very perilous state. When I arrived in last week, I think for a day or two, no bank in Ibadan was open owing to an armed robbery scare. When I complained to my friend in another state, he said ‘for five days our own banks have been closed; robbers just jump in, operate any time of the day, anywhere; they don’t care a hoot!’ Nigeria is a jungle, a thick medieval jungle, lawless and predictably precarious.
Dr Jonathan hasn’t done much, and that is why the country is like this. Nobody sleeps in this country with both eyes closed, not even the governors with their panoply of security detail, because I have read in the papers of some gubernatorial motorcades being ambushed by armed robbers. Perhaps the men of the underworld are trying to tell our governors that our rulers don’t have a monopoly of impunity! This is a dangerous country today, extremely dangerous. We have to tell the truth to ourselves. Money is coming in; the oil in the Niger Delta is still pumping, but there is no honest management, no proper husbandry, no organisation, no transparency, and no accountability. That’s why we are where we are today.
So our politics is that awry. What do we say about our economy? Nigeria doesn’t produce anything. I say this all the time, and I think it’s obvious to everybody. Anytime I’m on the road or standing by the roadside, and I see cars and other vehicles passing, I keep telling myself, ‘oh yes, that one is made in Sweden; that one is made in Germany; that one is made in Japan, that one is made in the U.K. Now, there is Kia, Hyundai from Korea; Tata from India. And I say to myself, how can a country afford to live like this? All the things we consume are made somewhere else. What are we doing with all these universities, with all the intellectuals we have around? How can a country create wealth when it cannot manufacture, when it cannot produce? Even the oil we depend so vitally on is not being refined by Nigeria, and Nigeria doesn’t know how many barrels of oil are really leaving her shores on a daily basis. Nigeria has no control over her own affairs even in year 2011, with all these universities, for goodness sake. How can a country feel so satisfied with producing nothing and consuming everything?
Coming back to Dr. Jonathan, how can he lead the country to confront our pathological dependency? To be able to do this, he himself will need to stop being a pliable blaze-trailer; we need a trail-blazer! He will need to show us he is capable of generating fresh ideas and following them through That is the kind of leader Nigeria needs at the moment.
‘President Jonathan Needs To Justify the PhD After His Name’
Jonathan is the first truly educated Nigerian to occupy that seat, with a doctorate degree, and an academic. Why is it so difficult for him to navigate himself through whatever obstacles that is on his way?
The university does not necessarily an educated person make (pardon my archaic inversion!). A truly educated person is one who thinks beyond the walls of any institution. He’s one who has that amplitude of mind and vision, whose knowledge is broad, who is able to relate the past with the present, and therefore, anticipate the future.
Yes, a truly educated person is one with a refined sensibility, a humanist, a person who is capable of going from mere fellow-feeling to compassion; who is able to say, ‘oh my God, when my people are hungry, I, too, am hungry’. So, the word ‘educated’ is loaded. Our problem in Nigeria and Africa really, is that we have so many ill-literates. Panoply of diplomas may not total up to insight and resourcefulness. Truly educated people wouldn’t rule us the way our rulers are ruling us today. Remember I haven’t said ‘leaders’. A truly educated person is the one that can become a leader. The half educated, merely literate people we have at the moment can only stop at the threshold of amateurish ruler-ship
Jonathan has a PhD after his name, and I think this country is telling him to justify that title. It doesn’t matter if it’s from Zoology or Microbiology or Astra-physics or Religious Studies. No; there is a discipline that goes with the acquisition of these degrees, a certain development of the mind; a certain toughness of thinking, and a roaming capacity for making decisions and following them through. These are the things we expect from a leader. So, it’s not a matter of how many degrees. A truly educated person is also a conscientious person, a person who will think twice before stealing public funds. The illiterate ones will think about the millions they have and how to increase their loot. They hardly ever think about the future; that future is buried in their stomachs. This is the category of rulers we have in this country today, and that is why our situation is as it is. Does it matter whether they went to university or not?
In the budget Jonathan recently presented, security took the lion share. Do you think that is what it will take to curb the security monster?
I don’t always like to comment on Nigeria’s budgets. As a writer, I eschew clichés and hackneyed expressions. Every budget that has been read in this country has come with some hackneyed sobriquet or another. “Budget of Hope”; “Budget of Reconciliation”; “Budget of Consolidation”; budget of this, budget of that. Hasn’t President Jonathan’s own been tagged “Budget of Transformation”? Insufferable mantras and irritating nonsense, so galling in its utter disingenuousness. And, by the way, what is the percentage of implementation of these budgets? In what ways have they improved the lives of ordinary Nigerians?
Every year, the Nigerian government votes huge sums for transportation, education, health, agriculture, security, etc. Take a look at our death-trap roads, decrepit educational system, procrustean agricultural facilities, death-inflicting healthcare, and ask where have all the budgeted monies been going? Our rulers steal us dead; it’s as simple as that. So I don’t waste my thought on their budget. Security, yes, the lion’s share mapped out for it. But then I ask again, whose security? How much of this is going to the fight against Boko Haram? Maybe a lot, but as I hinted earlier, Boko Haram is not something you can fight with money; no. This is why I say that our rulers should think; they need to think. Boko Haram is so grassroots that even when you see the enemy, you don’t recognise him. It’s more than anything we can fight with money. Bank robbers, highway robbers all over the place; are you going to distribute the money to them or are you going to arm the police?
How many police men and women do we have in this country? Nobody has done the ratio of policeman to criminal in this country. I don’t know but I think it’s very high. I pity our policemen in. Sun and rain, they are there, with many of them really looking scruffy and hungry. This is not how to treat people that you expect to protect you; no. The security of a country is its people. Let people have enough to eat, decent housing; let them have good education for their children; let there be hospitals when they are ill. Let life be more meaningful to them; it’s not likely that they will go out at night to rob their neighbours.
I knew this country when it was a country, when people went to bed with their doors unlocked. Nigeria didn’t have so many desperate people. The way Nigeria is today, nobody can maintain adequate security in it. You don’t know what your next door neighbour is up to. Parents task themselves to send their children to school; the children suffer in order to gain an education. They finish and there are no jobs. Our streets are bursting with hordes of able-bodied but jobless youth, desperate and down and out, a terrible waste to a society that needs all hands to be on deck. This is a country that creates desperate citizens, and that is why Nigerian citizens look very much like the enemy of their rulers, because their enemies are their rulers. Those who rule us don’t care; they don’t do anything to show us that they care. If they care, they won’t be stealing the funds meant for development the way they do.
Some describe the impoverished citizenry as being too docile. Is there the possibility of the Arab Spring Uprising in a country like Nigeria? Can Nigerians confront their leaders the way the Arab people did recently?
Good question. In the past five years or so, I have been reconsidering my long-held opinion about the relation between leadership and followership. Time there was when I laid all the blame on leadership. Now I’m beginning to say that the followership should also take their fate in their own hands. This is what I see most of the time, for example, in the plays of Femi Osofisan, one of our top writers. Play after play after play; the leaders are there doing things. But the address is to the people. Why must you continue to be ridden like a donkey? Why can’t you, too, get up in the saddle?
Nigerians are too docile, too forgiving of bad leadership. Why are they this way?
A number of reasons, the first one is religion. The kind of religion we have in Nigeria is one that puts you to sleep, and after that, puts you to death. It’s not the kind of religion that’s after social justice; it’s not the kind of religion that is after the welfare of the people and the independence of their existence. Particularly guilty in this regard are the Prosperity Gospellers of the Pentecostal variety who hawk faith on the air and convert religion into superstition. If you have no job, we are told, it must be because of your sin. Your poverty (or pauperization) is a result of the offence you have committed against God. Blissfully indemnified are the rogue-rulers whose greed has corrupted and ruined our social estate; those whose policies or lack of them have made job creation impossible by sabotaging our productive capacity? So, if you have no job, blame your sins; if you wallow in poverty, you only have yourself to blame. In the thinking and preaching of many of these latter-day evangelists, every scoundrel in power in Nigeria is “God-chosen” and must be treated as such. Religion in this country is a dangerous opium; really dangerous opium. And that is why our rulers are encouraging the building of churches and mosques all over the place. When in December last year the newspapers carried the picture of a kneeling President Jonathan with a ministering Pastor towering above him in prayerful supremacy, we were presented with an image so symbolic of the relationship between the state and religion in Nigeria. No picture could have been more emblematic!
Religion has killed rational thinking in this country. I say this all the time; our country is still in a pre-scientific era. That is why things are like this. We don’t think logically; that is why any ruler, any fool would seize the reins and rule us, because we would always find an excuse for being ruled or being led by the nose.
Not long ago a pastor said he was between two cities and he discovered that the fuel in his car had run out. He actually checked and saw the fuel in the car was completely gone. But because of his act of faith and on the strength of his prayers, he was able to do two hundred miles on an empty tank! When he declared this testimony, people clapped and shouted “Hallelujah!” I never heard anybody say how can? Nigerians don’t ask questions; that is why the imams and the pastors lead them by the nose, and the politicians also complete their humiliation and disempowerment. And between the clerics and the political functionaries, there is a very close liaison.
It’s a kind of power structure; one controls the political, social realm, the other controls the spiritual, metaphysical realm and they are together. Many Nigerians are not rational, interrogative people. In fact, in this country today, if you are the interrogative type you are easily labelled, branded, and condemned. People even wonder: why are you always asking questions?’ When the blessed Tai Solarin was alive, he agonised and agonised over this issue. The way he was misunderstood, the way he was misinterpreted and his anger at the way many of our people were going - that we should be up in the streets.
Another problem: well, our people are docile and the reason why they take all kinds of cheating is that many of them envisage themselves in the position of power someday, too. If I am X and the oppressor is Y, and the oppressor is oppressing me, stealing all the money, and making life difficult for me and my children, I am not likely to attack him. I’ll pray to God to let my own “miracle” happen so that someday, he will go and I will be in his place. No; I am praying for him to go but for the structure to remain.
This is the social psychology of Nigerian politics. So many people don’t see it as wrong. When they see it as wrong, it’s because it is putting them at a disadvantage; they are not really concerned with the social order or the commonweal. That’s a very important issue.
‘Fuel Subsidy Removal...
The IMF Is At Work Again’
Now government is talking about subsidy removal and we have the Minister of Finance, Okonjo Nweala, who is the coordinating minister for the economy in her second coming to that position. She is coming with IMF and World Bank background, with a certain skewed orientation towards Africa. What do you make of this mix?
The subsidy issue is going to decide the fate of this country in year 2012, whether we are still going to have a country called Nigeria or whether there will be none at all. That we are talking about subsidy or no subsidy now takes me back to the point I made earlier on. We don’t have rulers who think and feel; we don’t have rulers who have the interest of the people of this country at heart. But we’ve been through all this before. Who can forget in a hurry the way the then President Babangida got the country debating whether we wanted the IMF or not, how the country roundly rejected the IMF’s ‘conditionalities’, but Babangida and his group smuggled them in through a subterfuge called Sap (Structural Adjustment Policy). This was when the drastic devaluation of the Naira began, and with it the devaluation of the Nigerian life. Nigeria is still reeling in the fever of that economic-fiscal fiasco.
IMF is at it again. Its new president, France’s Christine Laggarde, has just visited Nigeria and has given a pass mark to the Jonathan administration. With Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, the IMF’s Trojan horse at the helm in the finance ministry, that international task master and global finance police has a jolly good friend in a powerful place indeed. There is no country in the world that has swallowed the IMF pill without spinning into retching bouts and, at times, rigor mortis. For, as I said in one of the poems in Songs of the Season,
The IMF Is a doctor Who heals the patient By killing him first
Yes, those clinical undertakers of vulnerable economies are at it again, and the very life of every Nigerian is on the line
Let us look at the ‘subsidy’ conundrum. Is there a subsidy really? Then who, what, is being subsidized? We all need to go back to Prof. Tam David West’s recent interview on this issue. If there is anybody who understands the oil and gas industry and how it works, it’s David West, Nigeria’s former Petroleum minister. Because Nigeria cannot run efficient refineries, and therefore it has to import the refined products, the government is now asking the Nigerian people to pay for its inefficiency and criminal mismanagement and corruption. The questions we should be asking are: who are the people responsible for the non-functioning of our refineries? Who are the beneficiaries from this dysfunction? Who are the lucky owners of oil blocks and instant billionaires from oil quotas?
If our rulers were people with a sense of shame, they wouldn’t be talking about subsidy at all. They should cover their faces in shame and apologize to the Nigerian people; for if anything, it is the Nigerian people that need some form of hardship allowance from their incorrigibly incompetent government.
And our President and his officials have been going from church to church (have they called at the mosques yet?), asking for God’s blessing for the kind of socio-economic mayhem they are about to unleash on the Nigerian people through the removal of the so-called subsidy; asking the pastors to pray to God to make Nigerians compliant to and accepting of their impoverished situation, begging Almighty God to soften the minds of Nigerians. But no one entered a plea for God to smash the incubus of corruption and mismanagement that has brought this country to its knees. Our President never asked God to grant him the courage and candour to make a public declaration of his assets as required by the constitution of the country he rules...
Nigeria is a country tottering on the precipice. Our rulers are doing everything to tip it into the abyss. As a student of history, I know that revolutions do not just happen. They are caused almost invariably by rulers that are blind, deaf, insensitive, and megalomaniacal. It is this insidious cocktail that produces the ‘Distance of Power’, that affliction that has always engaged my attention whenever I ponder the use and misuse of power. And I ask: President Jonathan, are you close enough to hear the heartbeats of those you rule? Can you hear the wailing in the land? Can you see the hunger in the streets? Can you see the protuberant stomachs of kwashiorkor-ravaged children? Can you see the hordes and hordes of our children who roam the streets because their parents are too poor to send them to school? Can you hear the unending screams from those face-to-face shacks where spouses tear each other into pieces over the non-availability of house-keeping money? Can you hear the interminable rat-a-tat of the sophisticated guns of armed robbers as they bloody our days and terrify our nights? President Jonathan, can you hear? Can you see? Can you feel? Your predecessors flogged us with whips; will you advance their various acts of cruelty by whipping us with scorpions?
President Jonathan, do you still remember that young, ambitious boy from Otuoke who never had shoes until well into his teenage years? Well, now he is a King in the Marble Palace with a wardrobe large as a house. Look through the tinted windows of power. You will see millions of children whose shoeless feet embarrass our land. You will behold thousands that have no feet to call their own. Some people say your government is under pressure to remove the ‘subsidy’ because Nigeria is broke. Ask: who broke the country? Can you confront corruption head-on? It is the giant monster responsible for all the holes through which the vital juice of Nigeria is leaking. The Nigerian people are not responsible for the heedless squandermania and arrant improvidence that got us into this mess. Don’t heave the burden on the backs of those already bent and bruised by the consequences of the foul actions of the powerful and well connected.
President Jonathan, our country would not be broke if our rulers stole less and served more, if our governments were not so bloated with redundancies, if we did not squander most of our resources on the maintenance of a parasitic political class of which you are an affluent member.
Mr President, please do not toy with the fate of this country. A still restive Niger Delta is simmering in the south; Boko Haram bombs make a mockery of your government’s security system in the north. Most of our people are poor (no, impoverished) and desperate and angry. They are like the savannah grass in the harmattan. Do not throw a flaming match into their fold.Remember: the country over which you preside (just like the election that brought you into office) is fragile and frighteningly flawed. Tell the IMF and its Trojan horse in your cabinet that you are not ready for the suicide which they are so heedlessly asking you to commit. Tell them you are not ready to commit ‘Nigeriacide’. A word, they say, is enough for the wise. For the wise, that is.
http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=72380:osundare-we-dont-have-leaders-who-think-and-feel&catid=175:kaleidoscope&Itemid=702
As the argument rages whether to remove fuel subsidy or not, eminent poet and public intellectual, Prof. Niyi Osundare, has called on President Jonathan not to further compound the hardship Nigerians currently undergo. In an interview with ANOTE AJELUOROU in Ibadan, last week, the award-winning poet, essayist and scholar took on many issues that stand at the cross-road of Nigeria’s quest for development. Excerpts:
In our earlier encounter, you said you finally came to the realisation that for a country to progress economically, there is need to ‘Seek ye the political kingdom first, and then all things shall be added unto you!’‘Seek ye the political kingdom first, and then all things shall be added unto you!’ How close is Nigeria’s political kingdom under President Jonathan’s watch?
Grasp ye the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto thee! Nigeria has not got it right politically. This is why all other things appear to have been falling out of sync in the eight months of Dr. Jonathan’s full presidency. Do we need anyone to tell us our country is in a state of depressive stupor, thrashing around like a half-beheaded snake. President Jonathan needs to ‘man up’ (to borrow an American phrase); he needs to convince us that he knows what time of day it is. He doesn’t look like a leader yet: a decisive, deliberate, insightful figure whose wisdom goes beyond mere political savvy and the nervous quest for self-preservation. In the past many months, the President has behaved very much like somebody who is being pushed in all kinds of directions, and who doesn’t know how to make up his mind. When people in this country look at him, he doesn’t look like the kind of leader who is in charge: confident and resourceful; one who radiates the kind of dynamism which a country like this needs so badly so urgently.
Meek-looking, yes. Soft-looking, yes. Pious-looking, yes (he once knelt head-bowed before a famous Pentecostal cleric, and regaled the nation with a front-page picture of this posture in several Nigerian newspapers!) But this President sorely needs more insight to his thinking, more energy to his action, more bones to his flesh. He needs to think beyond sorry clichés and hackneyed humdrums. He needs to convince us that he has the kind of ideas needed by a desperate country like Nigeria. Nigeria wants to see a President that can think on his feet. A president who has the vital ideas, and can surround himself with those who also have them, who can proffer them selflessly, while being sure that their words will count. Sad to say, but in so many respects, right now, the people of Nigeria seem to be far ahead of their President. He needs to catch up.
He has confessed to not being a Goliath or an army general…
You don’t have to be a general to have some strength in you! Goliath was an evil kind of power; a life-negating leviathan. He was too strong, too domineering, and that was why the God of the Old Testament made him face his waterloo through a pebble from the sling shot of a mere stripling. Jonathan is not a Goliath; nobody wants him to be a Goliath. Nigeria has had too many Goliaths in power and very few Davids. We’re not saying he should tower above us. No. We’re saying he should be man enough to also do the job he is elected to do: To think and act boldly.People who knows him say he is a good man. I have no right to doubt them, but I would like President Jonathan to be a good man and also an efficient leader, a leader who inspires. He’s not an army general; we know. We have seen too many army generals in this country to be comfortable with having more of them. Our prayer is that this country will never again be ruled by army generals! Soldiers are trained to kill and destroy; they become a disastrous aberration when they are brought to construct, to reconstruct, and manage a country.. The ‘Goliath-General’ metaphor is not a terribly well-chosen one, really.
Yeah, Dr. Jonathan, you may not be a Goliath or a general; we don’t want you to be any of those. We want you to be a president; a president who stands up and the people know he’s there for them; who thinks about our problems all the time, and also wakes up solving them. A president, who surrounds himself not with mediocre and political jobbers, but with men and women of ideas; and there are many of them in this country that can really contribute to the solution of our many problems.President Jonathan’s cabinet is too mediocre, and there are people there that Nigerians know that are corrupt, manifestly corrupt. I remember a minister in one of Nigeria’s most lucrative ministries whose reappointment was strongly petitioned a couple of months ago, but the President went ahead all the same with the reappointment. In Nigeria corruption and other forms of abuse of office still remain the main qualification for high office. Eight months after, this country has not made any progress. I think we have even retrogressed considerably. If in doubt, consider the on-going downward slide of the national currency
Consider Boko Haram. The biggest problem we have in this country is security. What is he going to do with Boko Haram? Does he apply the military solution? At times, he talks tough. Other times, he talks soft, and says oh yes, there is going to be reconciliation. Does our President really understand the dynamics of Boko Haram? Who are those beating the drums for the water dragons that are dancing on the water surface? Who are the Boko Haram? Faceless people, most of the time although they say they have caught their leaders. When the security agencies boast that they have Boko Haram right now in our palm, the group surprises them by bombing a neighbouring town the next day? So Boko Haram remains an understudied, underestimated group conveniently dismissed as ‘terrorists’. Have we tried to understand what Boko Haram really is?
Boko Haram is not a totally religious movement, from my understanding of it. There are social sides to Boko Haram, social underpinnings which we have to understand. This looks very much like the movement of the under-privileged, of the dispossessed, the alienated. It looks to me like the movement of people who have nothing to lose in society. I think it was Malcolm X, the African-American leader that said that ‘a society that creates people who have nothing to lose is digging its own grave’. There is a lot of work Dr. Jonathan should be doing that he is not doing at the moment. This country is in a very perilous state. When I arrived in last week, I think for a day or two, no bank in Ibadan was open owing to an armed robbery scare. When I complained to my friend in another state, he said ‘for five days our own banks have been closed; robbers just jump in, operate any time of the day, anywhere; they don’t care a hoot!’ Nigeria is a jungle, a thick medieval jungle, lawless and predictably precarious.
Dr Jonathan hasn’t done much, and that is why the country is like this. Nobody sleeps in this country with both eyes closed, not even the governors with their panoply of security detail, because I have read in the papers of some gubernatorial motorcades being ambushed by armed robbers. Perhaps the men of the underworld are trying to tell our governors that our rulers don’t have a monopoly of impunity! This is a dangerous country today, extremely dangerous. We have to tell the truth to ourselves. Money is coming in; the oil in the Niger Delta is still pumping, but there is no honest management, no proper husbandry, no organisation, no transparency, and no accountability. That’s why we are where we are today.
So our politics is that awry. What do we say about our economy? Nigeria doesn’t produce anything. I say this all the time, and I think it’s obvious to everybody. Anytime I’m on the road or standing by the roadside, and I see cars and other vehicles passing, I keep telling myself, ‘oh yes, that one is made in Sweden; that one is made in Germany; that one is made in Japan, that one is made in the U.K. Now, there is Kia, Hyundai from Korea; Tata from India. And I say to myself, how can a country afford to live like this? All the things we consume are made somewhere else. What are we doing with all these universities, with all the intellectuals we have around? How can a country create wealth when it cannot manufacture, when it cannot produce? Even the oil we depend so vitally on is not being refined by Nigeria, and Nigeria doesn’t know how many barrels of oil are really leaving her shores on a daily basis. Nigeria has no control over her own affairs even in year 2011, with all these universities, for goodness sake. How can a country feel so satisfied with producing nothing and consuming everything?
Coming back to Dr. Jonathan, how can he lead the country to confront our pathological dependency? To be able to do this, he himself will need to stop being a pliable blaze-trailer; we need a trail-blazer! He will need to show us he is capable of generating fresh ideas and following them through That is the kind of leader Nigeria needs at the moment.
‘President Jonathan Needs To Justify the PhD After His Name’
Jonathan is the first truly educated Nigerian to occupy that seat, with a doctorate degree, and an academic. Why is it so difficult for him to navigate himself through whatever obstacles that is on his way?
The university does not necessarily an educated person make (pardon my archaic inversion!). A truly educated person is one who thinks beyond the walls of any institution. He’s one who has that amplitude of mind and vision, whose knowledge is broad, who is able to relate the past with the present, and therefore, anticipate the future.
Yes, a truly educated person is one with a refined sensibility, a humanist, a person who is capable of going from mere fellow-feeling to compassion; who is able to say, ‘oh my God, when my people are hungry, I, too, am hungry’. So, the word ‘educated’ is loaded. Our problem in Nigeria and Africa really, is that we have so many ill-literates. Panoply of diplomas may not total up to insight and resourcefulness. Truly educated people wouldn’t rule us the way our rulers are ruling us today. Remember I haven’t said ‘leaders’. A truly educated person is the one that can become a leader. The half educated, merely literate people we have at the moment can only stop at the threshold of amateurish ruler-ship
Jonathan has a PhD after his name, and I think this country is telling him to justify that title. It doesn’t matter if it’s from Zoology or Microbiology or Astra-physics or Religious Studies. No; there is a discipline that goes with the acquisition of these degrees, a certain development of the mind; a certain toughness of thinking, and a roaming capacity for making decisions and following them through. These are the things we expect from a leader. So, it’s not a matter of how many degrees. A truly educated person is also a conscientious person, a person who will think twice before stealing public funds. The illiterate ones will think about the millions they have and how to increase their loot. They hardly ever think about the future; that future is buried in their stomachs. This is the category of rulers we have in this country today, and that is why our situation is as it is. Does it matter whether they went to university or not?
In the budget Jonathan recently presented, security took the lion share. Do you think that is what it will take to curb the security monster?
I don’t always like to comment on Nigeria’s budgets. As a writer, I eschew clichés and hackneyed expressions. Every budget that has been read in this country has come with some hackneyed sobriquet or another. “Budget of Hope”; “Budget of Reconciliation”; “Budget of Consolidation”; budget of this, budget of that. Hasn’t President Jonathan’s own been tagged “Budget of Transformation”? Insufferable mantras and irritating nonsense, so galling in its utter disingenuousness. And, by the way, what is the percentage of implementation of these budgets? In what ways have they improved the lives of ordinary Nigerians?
Every year, the Nigerian government votes huge sums for transportation, education, health, agriculture, security, etc. Take a look at our death-trap roads, decrepit educational system, procrustean agricultural facilities, death-inflicting healthcare, and ask where have all the budgeted monies been going? Our rulers steal us dead; it’s as simple as that. So I don’t waste my thought on their budget. Security, yes, the lion’s share mapped out for it. But then I ask again, whose security? How much of this is going to the fight against Boko Haram? Maybe a lot, but as I hinted earlier, Boko Haram is not something you can fight with money; no. This is why I say that our rulers should think; they need to think. Boko Haram is so grassroots that even when you see the enemy, you don’t recognise him. It’s more than anything we can fight with money. Bank robbers, highway robbers all over the place; are you going to distribute the money to them or are you going to arm the police?
How many police men and women do we have in this country? Nobody has done the ratio of policeman to criminal in this country. I don’t know but I think it’s very high. I pity our policemen in. Sun and rain, they are there, with many of them really looking scruffy and hungry. This is not how to treat people that you expect to protect you; no. The security of a country is its people. Let people have enough to eat, decent housing; let them have good education for their children; let there be hospitals when they are ill. Let life be more meaningful to them; it’s not likely that they will go out at night to rob their neighbours.
I knew this country when it was a country, when people went to bed with their doors unlocked. Nigeria didn’t have so many desperate people. The way Nigeria is today, nobody can maintain adequate security in it. You don’t know what your next door neighbour is up to. Parents task themselves to send their children to school; the children suffer in order to gain an education. They finish and there are no jobs. Our streets are bursting with hordes of able-bodied but jobless youth, desperate and down and out, a terrible waste to a society that needs all hands to be on deck. This is a country that creates desperate citizens, and that is why Nigerian citizens look very much like the enemy of their rulers, because their enemies are their rulers. Those who rule us don’t care; they don’t do anything to show us that they care. If they care, they won’t be stealing the funds meant for development the way they do.
Some describe the impoverished citizenry as being too docile. Is there the possibility of the Arab Spring Uprising in a country like Nigeria? Can Nigerians confront their leaders the way the Arab people did recently?
Good question. In the past five years or so, I have been reconsidering my long-held opinion about the relation between leadership and followership. Time there was when I laid all the blame on leadership. Now I’m beginning to say that the followership should also take their fate in their own hands. This is what I see most of the time, for example, in the plays of Femi Osofisan, one of our top writers. Play after play after play; the leaders are there doing things. But the address is to the people. Why must you continue to be ridden like a donkey? Why can’t you, too, get up in the saddle?
Nigerians are too docile, too forgiving of bad leadership. Why are they this way?
A number of reasons, the first one is religion. The kind of religion we have in Nigeria is one that puts you to sleep, and after that, puts you to death. It’s not the kind of religion that’s after social justice; it’s not the kind of religion that is after the welfare of the people and the independence of their existence. Particularly guilty in this regard are the Prosperity Gospellers of the Pentecostal variety who hawk faith on the air and convert religion into superstition. If you have no job, we are told, it must be because of your sin. Your poverty (or pauperization) is a result of the offence you have committed against God. Blissfully indemnified are the rogue-rulers whose greed has corrupted and ruined our social estate; those whose policies or lack of them have made job creation impossible by sabotaging our productive capacity? So, if you have no job, blame your sins; if you wallow in poverty, you only have yourself to blame. In the thinking and preaching of many of these latter-day evangelists, every scoundrel in power in Nigeria is “God-chosen” and must be treated as such. Religion in this country is a dangerous opium; really dangerous opium. And that is why our rulers are encouraging the building of churches and mosques all over the place. When in December last year the newspapers carried the picture of a kneeling President Jonathan with a ministering Pastor towering above him in prayerful supremacy, we were presented with an image so symbolic of the relationship between the state and religion in Nigeria. No picture could have been more emblematic!
Religion has killed rational thinking in this country. I say this all the time; our country is still in a pre-scientific era. That is why things are like this. We don’t think logically; that is why any ruler, any fool would seize the reins and rule us, because we would always find an excuse for being ruled or being led by the nose.
Not long ago a pastor said he was between two cities and he discovered that the fuel in his car had run out. He actually checked and saw the fuel in the car was completely gone. But because of his act of faith and on the strength of his prayers, he was able to do two hundred miles on an empty tank! When he declared this testimony, people clapped and shouted “Hallelujah!” I never heard anybody say how can? Nigerians don’t ask questions; that is why the imams and the pastors lead them by the nose, and the politicians also complete their humiliation and disempowerment. And between the clerics and the political functionaries, there is a very close liaison.
It’s a kind of power structure; one controls the political, social realm, the other controls the spiritual, metaphysical realm and they are together. Many Nigerians are not rational, interrogative people. In fact, in this country today, if you are the interrogative type you are easily labelled, branded, and condemned. People even wonder: why are you always asking questions?’ When the blessed Tai Solarin was alive, he agonised and agonised over this issue. The way he was misunderstood, the way he was misinterpreted and his anger at the way many of our people were going - that we should be up in the streets.
Another problem: well, our people are docile and the reason why they take all kinds of cheating is that many of them envisage themselves in the position of power someday, too. If I am X and the oppressor is Y, and the oppressor is oppressing me, stealing all the money, and making life difficult for me and my children, I am not likely to attack him. I’ll pray to God to let my own “miracle” happen so that someday, he will go and I will be in his place. No; I am praying for him to go but for the structure to remain.
This is the social psychology of Nigerian politics. So many people don’t see it as wrong. When they see it as wrong, it’s because it is putting them at a disadvantage; they are not really concerned with the social order or the commonweal. That’s a very important issue.
‘Fuel Subsidy Removal...
The IMF Is At Work Again’
Now government is talking about subsidy removal and we have the Minister of Finance, Okonjo Nweala, who is the coordinating minister for the economy in her second coming to that position. She is coming with IMF and World Bank background, with a certain skewed orientation towards Africa. What do you make of this mix?
The subsidy issue is going to decide the fate of this country in year 2012, whether we are still going to have a country called Nigeria or whether there will be none at all. That we are talking about subsidy or no subsidy now takes me back to the point I made earlier on. We don’t have rulers who think and feel; we don’t have rulers who have the interest of the people of this country at heart. But we’ve been through all this before. Who can forget in a hurry the way the then President Babangida got the country debating whether we wanted the IMF or not, how the country roundly rejected the IMF’s ‘conditionalities’, but Babangida and his group smuggled them in through a subterfuge called Sap (Structural Adjustment Policy). This was when the drastic devaluation of the Naira began, and with it the devaluation of the Nigerian life. Nigeria is still reeling in the fever of that economic-fiscal fiasco.
IMF is at it again. Its new president, France’s Christine Laggarde, has just visited Nigeria and has given a pass mark to the Jonathan administration. With Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, the IMF’s Trojan horse at the helm in the finance ministry, that international task master and global finance police has a jolly good friend in a powerful place indeed. There is no country in the world that has swallowed the IMF pill without spinning into retching bouts and, at times, rigor mortis. For, as I said in one of the poems in Songs of the Season,
The IMF Is a doctor Who heals the patient By killing him first
Yes, those clinical undertakers of vulnerable economies are at it again, and the very life of every Nigerian is on the line
Let us look at the ‘subsidy’ conundrum. Is there a subsidy really? Then who, what, is being subsidized? We all need to go back to Prof. Tam David West’s recent interview on this issue. If there is anybody who understands the oil and gas industry and how it works, it’s David West, Nigeria’s former Petroleum minister. Because Nigeria cannot run efficient refineries, and therefore it has to import the refined products, the government is now asking the Nigerian people to pay for its inefficiency and criminal mismanagement and corruption. The questions we should be asking are: who are the people responsible for the non-functioning of our refineries? Who are the beneficiaries from this dysfunction? Who are the lucky owners of oil blocks and instant billionaires from oil quotas?
If our rulers were people with a sense of shame, they wouldn’t be talking about subsidy at all. They should cover their faces in shame and apologize to the Nigerian people; for if anything, it is the Nigerian people that need some form of hardship allowance from their incorrigibly incompetent government.
And our President and his officials have been going from church to church (have they called at the mosques yet?), asking for God’s blessing for the kind of socio-economic mayhem they are about to unleash on the Nigerian people through the removal of the so-called subsidy; asking the pastors to pray to God to make Nigerians compliant to and accepting of their impoverished situation, begging Almighty God to soften the minds of Nigerians. But no one entered a plea for God to smash the incubus of corruption and mismanagement that has brought this country to its knees. Our President never asked God to grant him the courage and candour to make a public declaration of his assets as required by the constitution of the country he rules...
Nigeria is a country tottering on the precipice. Our rulers are doing everything to tip it into the abyss. As a student of history, I know that revolutions do not just happen. They are caused almost invariably by rulers that are blind, deaf, insensitive, and megalomaniacal. It is this insidious cocktail that produces the ‘Distance of Power’, that affliction that has always engaged my attention whenever I ponder the use and misuse of power. And I ask: President Jonathan, are you close enough to hear the heartbeats of those you rule? Can you hear the wailing in the land? Can you see the hunger in the streets? Can you see the protuberant stomachs of kwashiorkor-ravaged children? Can you see the hordes and hordes of our children who roam the streets because their parents are too poor to send them to school? Can you hear the unending screams from those face-to-face shacks where spouses tear each other into pieces over the non-availability of house-keeping money? Can you hear the interminable rat-a-tat of the sophisticated guns of armed robbers as they bloody our days and terrify our nights? President Jonathan, can you hear? Can you see? Can you feel? Your predecessors flogged us with whips; will you advance their various acts of cruelty by whipping us with scorpions?
President Jonathan, do you still remember that young, ambitious boy from Otuoke who never had shoes until well into his teenage years? Well, now he is a King in the Marble Palace with a wardrobe large as a house. Look through the tinted windows of power. You will see millions of children whose shoeless feet embarrass our land. You will behold thousands that have no feet to call their own. Some people say your government is under pressure to remove the ‘subsidy’ because Nigeria is broke. Ask: who broke the country? Can you confront corruption head-on? It is the giant monster responsible for all the holes through which the vital juice of Nigeria is leaking. The Nigerian people are not responsible for the heedless squandermania and arrant improvidence that got us into this mess. Don’t heave the burden on the backs of those already bent and bruised by the consequences of the foul actions of the powerful and well connected.
President Jonathan, our country would not be broke if our rulers stole less and served more, if our governments were not so bloated with redundancies, if we did not squander most of our resources on the maintenance of a parasitic political class of which you are an affluent member.
Mr President, please do not toy with the fate of this country. A still restive Niger Delta is simmering in the south; Boko Haram bombs make a mockery of your government’s security system in the north. Most of our people are poor (no, impoverished) and desperate and angry. They are like the savannah grass in the harmattan. Do not throw a flaming match into their fold.Remember: the country over which you preside (just like the election that brought you into office) is fragile and frighteningly flawed. Tell the IMF and its Trojan horse in your cabinet that you are not ready for the suicide which they are so heedlessly asking you to commit. Tell them you are not ready to commit ‘Nigeriacide’. A word, they say, is enough for the wise. For the wise, that is.
Utomi: Majority Of Young Nigerians May Live Out Their Productive Years Unemployed
Utomi: Majority Of Young Nigerians May Live Out Their Productive Years Unemployed
SUNDAY, 01 JANUARY 2012 00:00 MARCEL MBAMALU BUSINESS SERVICES - BUSINESS NEWS
In this chat with MARCEL MBAMALU in Lagos, Professor of Political Economy and Founder, Centre for Values in Lagos, Pat Utomi, warned of possible wastage of a generation of employable young Nigerians unless government delivers on its mandate to create jobs. He also spoke on a wide rage of issues, including the banking reforms, which, he said, had negatively affected financial intermediation and halved the collective worth of the banks in real terms. Excerpts:
How has the economy fared in 2011 and what are the prospects for 2012?
The Nigerian economy remains a paradox. The enormous prospect stare you in the face; yet, performance leaves much to be desired.
In 2011, the keys to quality of life went south on almost all the dimensions: Unemployment, by government’s admission, became much worse. The truth is that up to 70 per cent of Nigerian’s young employable people may live out their most productive years unemployed and ultimately unemployable. Yet one cannot see the evidence that public policy has seen this as a crisis that has assumed the moral equivalent of war.
There is still no grand strategy obvious to the outside observer. The government may have one but they have not told us. Surely, the entrepreneurship initiative announced cannot be the main response. In addition, infrastructure suffered further deterioration.
One government agency admitted that Nigerian roads were the second worst in the world. This is amazing for a country that won laurels in the 1970s for road development. Check the MDGs and the UNDPs Human Development Index and see how we are falling further behind much poorer African countries.
Nominal economic growth numbers have been relatively high. The reasons include generosity of the rains boosting agriculture, which makes up for a good portion of GDP, remittances from Nigerians abroad to relations, which has kept up consumption and trade in consumer goods and then oil prices.
Unfortunately, we have failed to honestly engage the damage the so-called Central Bank’s reforms of the banks have done. It has negatively affected intermediation, resulting in huge jump in unemployment. I recall a recent international conference at which a Goldman Sachs execution was perplexed that the reforms have resulted in a halving of the real worth of Nigerian banks, using traditional indices for measuring their worth.
Our collective guilt in allowing this wilful damage of the Nigerian economy, which I think will cost us two decades of progress, should still be part of one of two book projects I hope will be my next academic goals.
One, underway, is titled The Pursuit of Poverty, about how insultingly some countries opt to be poor. The second, to steal a bank will be the story of how a Central Bank can ruin an economy and be hailed while at it even though history’s verdict is obvious to the serious minded. I feel a big need to make this point because I still feel a huge burden of guilt that I did not shout loud enough when the Obasanjo debt deal was done. I complained that it was not the best use of our oil windfall.
When I spoke to people like Chief Philip Asiodu about it, I found that there were many more who shared my views. But I did not want to be too disagreeable.
As I reflect now and realise it was probably the worst blow the Nigerian poor have suffered in a generation, I am inclined not to fall into that trap again. History will be a harsh judge. The poor continue to have too few champions and as their voice is lost so the potential for their violent future revenge grows.
The 2012 challenge stems from a view enshrined in the budget and the fuel subsidy debate, which assumes that the solution is in government raising revenues. This is the exact opposite of the true problem. The trouble with government is that it has too much money in its pocket relative to the households and the private sector.
Given the pathetic state of corruption in that sector and the inefficiencies that breeds that has been negative for development, I have come to embrace Xavier Sala–i-Martin thesis in dividend distribution to citizens where the government has not utilised mineral resource wealth effectively. Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian had written this daming IMF paper that described Nigeria as metaphor-per-excellence of a failed development experience.
Has your position on a part-time or citizen legislature as cost-cutting measures changed?
Not at all, I am more convinced that Nigerians are living for politicians, whereas politicians should be people who have been accomplished elsewhere and come into the public arena to sacrificially give of themselves in pursuit of glory or immortality.
Besides legislators, who live and work with the people will better relate to their challenges than those cut off from the people in Abuja thinking only of their own good.
Even when they are altruistic, the burden on budget could be spared the people.
What do you think of the current security situation in the country?
It is painful and must be managed with great care. All must speak up and act up against the murder of innocents. Be they Christian, Moslem, animist or whatever, the death of every man diminishes us and drives down Nigeria’s prospects. We must condemn terror and contain it but it will be terrible to allow those who do it the victory. All who fail to act now will suffer history’s vilification.
You speak often about the debt you owe for the gift of life. As you turn 56 very soon, what is the biggest of this debt?
For this patch of God’s big space I occupy I know I am in debt of rent. The rent I owe I struggle to pay in a variety of ways.
I recognise that the most important debt is the duty of care for neighbour. The logic of the good Samaritan and human solidarity has in many ways defined the core of being most of my life. But it has not been easy in a culture that has suffered collapse as Nigeria has.
You constantly have to explain yourself. Few people in today’s Nigeria seriously believe you can do anything for reasons beyond material self-love. So, they constantly use their values to judge you. They ask what is he looking for. The common good and simple citizenship duty of raising your voice is not acceptable reason for acting in a manner that can be considered altruistic.
I do not even think of what motivates me as altruism. It is simple enlightened self- interest. The self- interest, I have repeatedly argued, is best pursued within the advance of the common good. But what rules Nigeria today is a sad narcissism in which you pursue whatever you can grab even if everybody else suffers from the burden of such conduct.
So, sometimes, I feel exhausted and wonder if I should continue to raise my voice against this unjust system that almost assures an anarchic tomorrow when the long held off revenge of the poor manifest.
Very sadly, at the heart of the short-sightedness that has caused our elite to act so narrowly, thus shooting themselves in the foot without realising what they are doing is poor education (the certificates they may carry not withstanding) and a crisis of values. A limited understanding of money and what it can do for you is at the root of this crisis of values in which delayed gratification is abandoned in favour of ephemeral and unsustainable instant gratification.
SUNDAY, 01 JANUARY 2012 00:00 MARCEL MBAMALU BUSINESS SERVICES - BUSINESS NEWS
In this chat with MARCEL MBAMALU in Lagos, Professor of Political Economy and Founder, Centre for Values in Lagos, Pat Utomi, warned of possible wastage of a generation of employable young Nigerians unless government delivers on its mandate to create jobs. He also spoke on a wide rage of issues, including the banking reforms, which, he said, had negatively affected financial intermediation and halved the collective worth of the banks in real terms. Excerpts:
How has the economy fared in 2011 and what are the prospects for 2012?
The Nigerian economy remains a paradox. The enormous prospect stare you in the face; yet, performance leaves much to be desired.
In 2011, the keys to quality of life went south on almost all the dimensions: Unemployment, by government’s admission, became much worse. The truth is that up to 70 per cent of Nigerian’s young employable people may live out their most productive years unemployed and ultimately unemployable. Yet one cannot see the evidence that public policy has seen this as a crisis that has assumed the moral equivalent of war.
There is still no grand strategy obvious to the outside observer. The government may have one but they have not told us. Surely, the entrepreneurship initiative announced cannot be the main response. In addition, infrastructure suffered further deterioration.
One government agency admitted that Nigerian roads were the second worst in the world. This is amazing for a country that won laurels in the 1970s for road development. Check the MDGs and the UNDPs Human Development Index and see how we are falling further behind much poorer African countries.
Nominal economic growth numbers have been relatively high. The reasons include generosity of the rains boosting agriculture, which makes up for a good portion of GDP, remittances from Nigerians abroad to relations, which has kept up consumption and trade in consumer goods and then oil prices.
Unfortunately, we have failed to honestly engage the damage the so-called Central Bank’s reforms of the banks have done. It has negatively affected intermediation, resulting in huge jump in unemployment. I recall a recent international conference at which a Goldman Sachs execution was perplexed that the reforms have resulted in a halving of the real worth of Nigerian banks, using traditional indices for measuring their worth.
Our collective guilt in allowing this wilful damage of the Nigerian economy, which I think will cost us two decades of progress, should still be part of one of two book projects I hope will be my next academic goals.
One, underway, is titled The Pursuit of Poverty, about how insultingly some countries opt to be poor. The second, to steal a bank will be the story of how a Central Bank can ruin an economy and be hailed while at it even though history’s verdict is obvious to the serious minded. I feel a big need to make this point because I still feel a huge burden of guilt that I did not shout loud enough when the Obasanjo debt deal was done. I complained that it was not the best use of our oil windfall.
When I spoke to people like Chief Philip Asiodu about it, I found that there were many more who shared my views. But I did not want to be too disagreeable.
As I reflect now and realise it was probably the worst blow the Nigerian poor have suffered in a generation, I am inclined not to fall into that trap again. History will be a harsh judge. The poor continue to have too few champions and as their voice is lost so the potential for their violent future revenge grows.
The 2012 challenge stems from a view enshrined in the budget and the fuel subsidy debate, which assumes that the solution is in government raising revenues. This is the exact opposite of the true problem. The trouble with government is that it has too much money in its pocket relative to the households and the private sector.
Given the pathetic state of corruption in that sector and the inefficiencies that breeds that has been negative for development, I have come to embrace Xavier Sala–i-Martin thesis in dividend distribution to citizens where the government has not utilised mineral resource wealth effectively. Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian had written this daming IMF paper that described Nigeria as metaphor-per-excellence of a failed development experience.
Has your position on a part-time or citizen legislature as cost-cutting measures changed?
Not at all, I am more convinced that Nigerians are living for politicians, whereas politicians should be people who have been accomplished elsewhere and come into the public arena to sacrificially give of themselves in pursuit of glory or immortality.
Besides legislators, who live and work with the people will better relate to their challenges than those cut off from the people in Abuja thinking only of their own good.
Even when they are altruistic, the burden on budget could be spared the people.
What do you think of the current security situation in the country?
It is painful and must be managed with great care. All must speak up and act up against the murder of innocents. Be they Christian, Moslem, animist or whatever, the death of every man diminishes us and drives down Nigeria’s prospects. We must condemn terror and contain it but it will be terrible to allow those who do it the victory. All who fail to act now will suffer history’s vilification.
You speak often about the debt you owe for the gift of life. As you turn 56 very soon, what is the biggest of this debt?
For this patch of God’s big space I occupy I know I am in debt of rent. The rent I owe I struggle to pay in a variety of ways.
I recognise that the most important debt is the duty of care for neighbour. The logic of the good Samaritan and human solidarity has in many ways defined the core of being most of my life. But it has not been easy in a culture that has suffered collapse as Nigeria has.
You constantly have to explain yourself. Few people in today’s Nigeria seriously believe you can do anything for reasons beyond material self-love. So, they constantly use their values to judge you. They ask what is he looking for. The common good and simple citizenship duty of raising your voice is not acceptable reason for acting in a manner that can be considered altruistic.
I do not even think of what motivates me as altruism. It is simple enlightened self- interest. The self- interest, I have repeatedly argued, is best pursued within the advance of the common good. But what rules Nigeria today is a sad narcissism in which you pursue whatever you can grab even if everybody else suffers from the burden of such conduct.
So, sometimes, I feel exhausted and wonder if I should continue to raise my voice against this unjust system that almost assures an anarchic tomorrow when the long held off revenge of the poor manifest.
Very sadly, at the heart of the short-sightedness that has caused our elite to act so narrowly, thus shooting themselves in the foot without realising what they are doing is poor education (the certificates they may carry not withstanding) and a crisis of values. A limited understanding of money and what it can do for you is at the root of this crisis of values in which delayed gratification is abandoned in favour of ephemeral and unsustainable instant gratification.
Oil Subsidy Is Fiction-Okonjo Iweala Is Here To Seduce People To Accept The Callous "Oil Subsidy" Removal-Tam David West-TheNEWS
Oil Subsidy Is Fiction-Okonjo Iweala Is Here To Seduce People To Accept The Callous "Oil Subsidy" Removal-Tam David West-TheNEWS
caption: Professor Tam David-West
By TheNEWS
Professor Tam David-West, Petroleum Minister during the era of General Muhammadu Buhari, and Mines, Power and Steel in the General Ibrahim Babangida government, spoke with GBENRO ADESINA on the controversy over oil subsidy removal.
For the layman on the street, does oil subsidy exist?
There is no oil subsidy in Nigeria. It is a lie and fraud. After the regime of General Buhari, I challenged government after government, from General Ibrahim Babangida and Chief Ernest Shonekan to General Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, to appear on national television with me to justify their subsidy. Let me introduce you to the basics. Let us say a particular commodity like gari is sold for N10 per bag hypothetically and the farmers are producing to make us self-sufficient at N10. But at a time, they can’t produce enough because of either bad harvest or natural causes, the government now says since garri is a staple food, the government goes to another country where gari is produced and buys it at N20 per bag and brings it to Nigeria to sell at N10 per bag. The government now writes off the extra N10 –– that is subsidy. The extra N10 the government pays on behalf of the people for them to still buy at N10 is the subsidy paid on that commodity.
No government should exist if it can’t serve the people because government is a trust. They are trustees for the people. Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher, said that government is a contrivance of human wisdom and the wisdom should be used to satisfy people’s needs. Any government that can’t satisfy the need of its people is irrelevant and must be overthrown and kicked out.
Coming to petroleum, there is no oil subsidy. Oil subsidy in Nigeria is fiction, it doesn’t exist and it is a fraud. During Buhari’s time, we had three refineries. When necessary, I mean, whenever there was shortage of oil, we embarked on offshore processing. If at a time, the production of oil couldn’t satisfy our needs, we selected oil companies like Shell and others that we would give crude oil to refine abroad, sell at foreign exchange and pay to our account. We got quantum of barrels of crude oil and gave to these companies and after they might have refined it, let’s say they got one million litres and we needed only 200 litres, they would give us the quantity we wanted and sell the remaining and give us foreign exchange. We only took our fuel back, never imported fuel.
This time what do they do? These fraudulent people will take our oil, refine it and bring it back and sell it at foreign exchange. This is fraud in the highest places. Why is it that during Buhari era, with three refineries we were self sufficient but at their time, with four refineries we are now importing fuel?
I personally signed the contract of the fourth refinery which we call new Port Harcourt Refinery in 1984. It was one of the best in Africa, with a capacity of 160,000 barrels per day. The first refinery, in Port Harcourt, was built in 1965; Warri refinery in 1978, and Kaduna refinery in 1980. A newly constructed refinery can’t have major problem for about 30 years. The problem they will not tell you is that after Buhari, every Minister and Head of State became an oil sheikh, except General Abdulsalami Abubakar.
Some ministers have petrol stations and oil blocs. You can’t serve the nation and serve yourself at the same time because you can’t serve two masters at a time. One must serve his country and the dividends of doing this is satisfaction. Total capacity of our four refineries is 445,000 barrels per day. If the refineries are working even at 80 per cent, we will have more than enough product. They did not do that but sabotaged our refineries.
I have been shouting since 1995 and I wrote that they are killing Nigeria and poor men. And in 2009, the House of Representatives corroborated me by saying that refineries were sabotaged. Abdulsalami as head of state, reacting to the state of our refineries, said he didn’t want to open a box of scandal. Why did they do this to the common man? Who are the importers? Big people!
A senator said this year, Nigeria spends N860 million on fuel importation and they projected that by the end of the year, over N1 trillion will be spent on importation of fuel when our budget is N4.3 trillion. Insanity! Dan Etete said they needed $250 million to repair the refineries but the same minister said Nigeria is importing fuel at $900 million. Is that not insanity? If you need this huge amount of money to repair refineries, why don’t you build new refineries? The money you are using to import, use it to build refineries.
Why do you think Obasanjo did not repair the four refineries we had and build four extra for petroleum to be sold at N20 as he analysed when he was in power?
Olusegun Obasanjo is a great liar. They will not do so in order to continue to import fuel for selfish reasons.
Is it true that Nigeria has the lowest prices of refined products among oil producing countries?
Forget Jonathan! He doesn’t understand what he is saying. He is only parroting what they told him. He talks like a parrot. Can he remove what doesn’t exist? Can’t we build our own refineries to serve us and remove the untold hardship they want to impose on us? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the subsidy goes to the wrong hands. If they remove it, will people not suffer the more? Everything will increase. The new minimum wage of N18,000 will become N2,000.
But Obasanjo said because it is built in phases, it will take about five years to build a refinery?
It is a lie. I told you Obasanjo is a liar. It took just two years to build the fourth refinery. I signed its contract. It is between two and three years. The problem is that there is intellectual laziness and physical indolence. In developed countries, the president will not just talk without being well quizzed. But in Nigeria, at a media chat once, Obasanjo shouted on journalists or talked to them as a teacher. They kept quiet. It doesn’t take five years to build a refinery.
Okonjo-Iweala talked about cushioning the effect of the removal of oil subsidy?
Rubbish! She is sermonising to seduce people to accept the callous oil subsidy removal. Things she promised are palliative, nobody should agree. Labour and Nigerians should make it impossible because you don’t take away what doesn’t exist. We don’t need oil subsidy to build roads, provide water and electricity; vote for capital projects has taken care of that. Degrees don’t guarantee good governance.
Can a school certificate holder rule a nation?
Yes and very well. What degree does Shehu Shagari and Balewa have? School teachers. Winston Churchill was among the dullest in his class and he became one of the greatest British leaders. Degrees don’t make leaders. Leadership is a natural endowment or one acquires it by hard work.
Jonathan wasn’t born great, he said he was born poor. Rubbish! It is a privilege to be born into a wealthy home. I was born into a wealthy home but one can’t control where God puts you. I tell my son that he should not allow the wealth of his father to go into his head because his minister father could as well be a driver. You don’t regret where you were born. So, I didn’t have shoes or wasn’t born great is rubbish. God is not partial. He does things with reasons.
Being born humble is not an issue. How you articulate your humble situation is the issue. That you are born rich doesn’t say you should look down on people. The problem with Jonathan is that though he has Ph.D, he is a brilliant man, but there is a difference between native intelligence and book intelligence. Jonathan is basically brilliant. The danger in that is that such people whenever somebody like Iweala comes talking, they idolise them like mental geniuses and become internally inferior to them. Whatever they say goes –– garbage in, garbage out. He doesn’t have the stamina to challenge them.
For a prince to be advised wisely, he must be wise too. Iweala is not the most brilliant economist. There are hundreds of people more brilliant than she is. Pius Okigbo and Ojetunji Aboyade, they served the nation meritoriously. She is working with somebody psychologically inferior and she will lead him into a ditch. She talks like the president. She once said that government would not negotiate with the Niger Delta militants. Did they not negotiate later? She was paid in dollars when she served in Obasanjo’s cabinet and her monthly pay was N2.8 million and now she is saying oil subsidy is killing the economy. Hypocrite!
If you know that what you are doing is right, convince people in arguments, facts and figures, not by sermonisation. Now, they have hired consultants with millions of naira to convince Nigeria to accept their rubbish. It was done during Shonekan’s time when a Nigerian was given N20mn for public relations job. He collapsed. They have started again. Please, Senators, Honourables of the House of Representatives, throw out this bill. Don’t think and say we are safe in Nigeria. There could be corporate protest here, just like what is happening in the Arab world. If you do anything that will make Nigerians suffer more, they will go on the streets because the suffering is already too much. I can afford things but millions of Nigerians that form the majority cannot. They should know that government is not about commissioning or investment and profits. Government should have moral dimension. Any government that disregards the moral dimension, that is, respect of God, God will punish such for making Nigerians to suffer.
How do you react to the fact that governors have endorsed it and labour has tactically endorsed it with conditions?
All that is nonsense. NLC should represent the masses well. NLC should not give any condition for the consideration of the removal of oil subsidy. Government has ways of compromising labour. When things are hot, they can approach them with millions and buy them over and they will start to talk with double tongues. NLC should be firm. The government should publish the names of those that are importing fuel and government should sign that if it is removed and the effects are not felt between three and six months, then we must dissolve the present government. If they remove oil subsidy, l will lead a protest. I will organise students for demonstration.
Do you still have faith in Nigeria?
My dear young man, if I don’t have faith in Nigeria, I will not be talking to you. I still have faith in Nigeria. To keep Nigeria as one is a task that must be done. We should differentiate between metaphysical Nigeria and political Nigeria. Nigeria is a great country blessed by God. The way we are going, the political Nigeria will destroy the metaphysical Nigeria. Most of those in government are rogues and thieves. They love themselves more than Nigeria. Every Nigerian owes Nigeria more than what Nigeria owes him/her. Nigeria will change for better when we have more statesmen than politicians.
Now, we have a bunch of politicians who only think of the next election while a statesman thinks of the future. Nigeria will collapse if we have more politicians than statesmen. Nigeria is a country where a senator is earning more than the President of America. They even buy government houses. They spend billions on cars and they can’t pay N18,000 minimum wage. They have morally crippled the country and the governance. They will be destroyed by God. Nigeria is a great country –– no natural disaster, there are able men and natural resources. But people are still crying, no job, graduates are driving taxis, doing menial jobs. Many now engage in armed robbery because they have to survive. May God bless us with good leaders.
The worst enemy of Buhari says that Buhari is not corrupt and that is the truth. It takes integrity and rigidity not to be corrupt and lead the nation. You don’t lead like Jonathan. God will punish those that are punishing Nigerians and Nigeria. When the poor man weeps, the tears go to heaven and come down with burning fire and consume his enemies. And that is what will happen in Nigeria.
caption: Professor Tam David-West
By TheNEWS
Professor Tam David-West, Petroleum Minister during the era of General Muhammadu Buhari, and Mines, Power and Steel in the General Ibrahim Babangida government, spoke with GBENRO ADESINA on the controversy over oil subsidy removal.
For the layman on the street, does oil subsidy exist?
There is no oil subsidy in Nigeria. It is a lie and fraud. After the regime of General Buhari, I challenged government after government, from General Ibrahim Babangida and Chief Ernest Shonekan to General Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, to appear on national television with me to justify their subsidy. Let me introduce you to the basics. Let us say a particular commodity like gari is sold for N10 per bag hypothetically and the farmers are producing to make us self-sufficient at N10. But at a time, they can’t produce enough because of either bad harvest or natural causes, the government now says since garri is a staple food, the government goes to another country where gari is produced and buys it at N20 per bag and brings it to Nigeria to sell at N10 per bag. The government now writes off the extra N10 –– that is subsidy. The extra N10 the government pays on behalf of the people for them to still buy at N10 is the subsidy paid on that commodity.
No government should exist if it can’t serve the people because government is a trust. They are trustees for the people. Edmund Burke, the great British philosopher, said that government is a contrivance of human wisdom and the wisdom should be used to satisfy people’s needs. Any government that can’t satisfy the need of its people is irrelevant and must be overthrown and kicked out.
Coming to petroleum, there is no oil subsidy. Oil subsidy in Nigeria is fiction, it doesn’t exist and it is a fraud. During Buhari’s time, we had three refineries. When necessary, I mean, whenever there was shortage of oil, we embarked on offshore processing. If at a time, the production of oil couldn’t satisfy our needs, we selected oil companies like Shell and others that we would give crude oil to refine abroad, sell at foreign exchange and pay to our account. We got quantum of barrels of crude oil and gave to these companies and after they might have refined it, let’s say they got one million litres and we needed only 200 litres, they would give us the quantity we wanted and sell the remaining and give us foreign exchange. We only took our fuel back, never imported fuel.
This time what do they do? These fraudulent people will take our oil, refine it and bring it back and sell it at foreign exchange. This is fraud in the highest places. Why is it that during Buhari era, with three refineries we were self sufficient but at their time, with four refineries we are now importing fuel?
I personally signed the contract of the fourth refinery which we call new Port Harcourt Refinery in 1984. It was one of the best in Africa, with a capacity of 160,000 barrels per day. The first refinery, in Port Harcourt, was built in 1965; Warri refinery in 1978, and Kaduna refinery in 1980. A newly constructed refinery can’t have major problem for about 30 years. The problem they will not tell you is that after Buhari, every Minister and Head of State became an oil sheikh, except General Abdulsalami Abubakar.
Some ministers have petrol stations and oil blocs. You can’t serve the nation and serve yourself at the same time because you can’t serve two masters at a time. One must serve his country and the dividends of doing this is satisfaction. Total capacity of our four refineries is 445,000 barrels per day. If the refineries are working even at 80 per cent, we will have more than enough product. They did not do that but sabotaged our refineries.
I have been shouting since 1995 and I wrote that they are killing Nigeria and poor men. And in 2009, the House of Representatives corroborated me by saying that refineries were sabotaged. Abdulsalami as head of state, reacting to the state of our refineries, said he didn’t want to open a box of scandal. Why did they do this to the common man? Who are the importers? Big people!
A senator said this year, Nigeria spends N860 million on fuel importation and they projected that by the end of the year, over N1 trillion will be spent on importation of fuel when our budget is N4.3 trillion. Insanity! Dan Etete said they needed $250 million to repair the refineries but the same minister said Nigeria is importing fuel at $900 million. Is that not insanity? If you need this huge amount of money to repair refineries, why don’t you build new refineries? The money you are using to import, use it to build refineries.
Why do you think Obasanjo did not repair the four refineries we had and build four extra for petroleum to be sold at N20 as he analysed when he was in power?
Olusegun Obasanjo is a great liar. They will not do so in order to continue to import fuel for selfish reasons.
Is it true that Nigeria has the lowest prices of refined products among oil producing countries?
Forget Jonathan! He doesn’t understand what he is saying. He is only parroting what they told him. He talks like a parrot. Can he remove what doesn’t exist? Can’t we build our own refineries to serve us and remove the untold hardship they want to impose on us? Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said the subsidy goes to the wrong hands. If they remove it, will people not suffer the more? Everything will increase. The new minimum wage of N18,000 will become N2,000.
But Obasanjo said because it is built in phases, it will take about five years to build a refinery?
It is a lie. I told you Obasanjo is a liar. It took just two years to build the fourth refinery. I signed its contract. It is between two and three years. The problem is that there is intellectual laziness and physical indolence. In developed countries, the president will not just talk without being well quizzed. But in Nigeria, at a media chat once, Obasanjo shouted on journalists or talked to them as a teacher. They kept quiet. It doesn’t take five years to build a refinery.
Okonjo-Iweala talked about cushioning the effect of the removal of oil subsidy?
Rubbish! She is sermonising to seduce people to accept the callous oil subsidy removal. Things she promised are palliative, nobody should agree. Labour and Nigerians should make it impossible because you don’t take away what doesn’t exist. We don’t need oil subsidy to build roads, provide water and electricity; vote for capital projects has taken care of that. Degrees don’t guarantee good governance.
Can a school certificate holder rule a nation?
Yes and very well. What degree does Shehu Shagari and Balewa have? School teachers. Winston Churchill was among the dullest in his class and he became one of the greatest British leaders. Degrees don’t make leaders. Leadership is a natural endowment or one acquires it by hard work.
Jonathan wasn’t born great, he said he was born poor. Rubbish! It is a privilege to be born into a wealthy home. I was born into a wealthy home but one can’t control where God puts you. I tell my son that he should not allow the wealth of his father to go into his head because his minister father could as well be a driver. You don’t regret where you were born. So, I didn’t have shoes or wasn’t born great is rubbish. God is not partial. He does things with reasons.
Being born humble is not an issue. How you articulate your humble situation is the issue. That you are born rich doesn’t say you should look down on people. The problem with Jonathan is that though he has Ph.D, he is a brilliant man, but there is a difference between native intelligence and book intelligence. Jonathan is basically brilliant. The danger in that is that such people whenever somebody like Iweala comes talking, they idolise them like mental geniuses and become internally inferior to them. Whatever they say goes –– garbage in, garbage out. He doesn’t have the stamina to challenge them.
For a prince to be advised wisely, he must be wise too. Iweala is not the most brilliant economist. There are hundreds of people more brilliant than she is. Pius Okigbo and Ojetunji Aboyade, they served the nation meritoriously. She is working with somebody psychologically inferior and she will lead him into a ditch. She talks like the president. She once said that government would not negotiate with the Niger Delta militants. Did they not negotiate later? She was paid in dollars when she served in Obasanjo’s cabinet and her monthly pay was N2.8 million and now she is saying oil subsidy is killing the economy. Hypocrite!
If you know that what you are doing is right, convince people in arguments, facts and figures, not by sermonisation. Now, they have hired consultants with millions of naira to convince Nigeria to accept their rubbish. It was done during Shonekan’s time when a Nigerian was given N20mn for public relations job. He collapsed. They have started again. Please, Senators, Honourables of the House of Representatives, throw out this bill. Don’t think and say we are safe in Nigeria. There could be corporate protest here, just like what is happening in the Arab world. If you do anything that will make Nigerians suffer more, they will go on the streets because the suffering is already too much. I can afford things but millions of Nigerians that form the majority cannot. They should know that government is not about commissioning or investment and profits. Government should have moral dimension. Any government that disregards the moral dimension, that is, respect of God, God will punish such for making Nigerians to suffer.
How do you react to the fact that governors have endorsed it and labour has tactically endorsed it with conditions?
All that is nonsense. NLC should represent the masses well. NLC should not give any condition for the consideration of the removal of oil subsidy. Government has ways of compromising labour. When things are hot, they can approach them with millions and buy them over and they will start to talk with double tongues. NLC should be firm. The government should publish the names of those that are importing fuel and government should sign that if it is removed and the effects are not felt between three and six months, then we must dissolve the present government. If they remove oil subsidy, l will lead a protest. I will organise students for demonstration.
Do you still have faith in Nigeria?
My dear young man, if I don’t have faith in Nigeria, I will not be talking to you. I still have faith in Nigeria. To keep Nigeria as one is a task that must be done. We should differentiate between metaphysical Nigeria and political Nigeria. Nigeria is a great country blessed by God. The way we are going, the political Nigeria will destroy the metaphysical Nigeria. Most of those in government are rogues and thieves. They love themselves more than Nigeria. Every Nigerian owes Nigeria more than what Nigeria owes him/her. Nigeria will change for better when we have more statesmen than politicians.
Now, we have a bunch of politicians who only think of the next election while a statesman thinks of the future. Nigeria will collapse if we have more politicians than statesmen. Nigeria is a country where a senator is earning more than the President of America. They even buy government houses. They spend billions on cars and they can’t pay N18,000 minimum wage. They have morally crippled the country and the governance. They will be destroyed by God. Nigeria is a great country –– no natural disaster, there are able men and natural resources. But people are still crying, no job, graduates are driving taxis, doing menial jobs. Many now engage in armed robbery because they have to survive. May God bless us with good leaders.
The worst enemy of Buhari says that Buhari is not corrupt and that is the truth. It takes integrity and rigidity not to be corrupt and lead the nation. You don’t lead like Jonathan. God will punish those that are punishing Nigerians and Nigeria. When the poor man weeps, the tears go to heaven and come down with burning fire and consume his enemies. And that is what will happen in Nigeria.
Senate did well by resisting same sex marriage – Bishop Okeke
Senate did well by resisting same sex marriage – Bishop Okeke
By IJEOMA ONUORAH, Nnewi
Wednesday, December 28 , 2011
•Okeke
Photo:The Sun Publishing
More Stories on This Section
Most Rev. Hilary Paul Odili Okeke, is the Chief Shepherd of Nnewi Catholic Diocese, one of the three Catholic Dioceses in Anambra State. In an encounter, issues such as same-sex marriage, fuel subsidy, bombings, Ikemba Nnewi and others were discussed.
Excerpts:
Do you believe that the advocates of same-sex marriage are being denied their rights as they claim?
Sexual immorality and perversion are the order of the day. Right is not something absolute, it also has responsibilities, and the public good overrides rights. In all constitutions and all legal systems, the exercise of right is overshadowed by the public good. So, when we talk about same sex marriage, and we see that the religious and natural tradition are opposed to such aberration, then it will be preposterous for them to say that that is their right. I’m not sure these people who say it is their right, are aggrieved that it is the right of another person to kill his nieghbour, to carry cocaine anyhow, to shoot people and to kidnap anybody. If they mean that their right is absolute and unfettered, then I don’t think so.
Even those countries that are advocating same sex marriages. Don’t allow anybody to just do whatever they like. Society cannot exist without rights being regulated by certain principles. That is why I commend the Senate for making the law, at least giving the direction and even resisting the pressure from some Western countries that want same sex marriage in Nigeria. It is a very courageous thing to do and that is what we mean by doing the right thing, regardless of what you’re going to lose. Like, Nigeria might stand to lose foreign aid from America. Britain and all those countries that are putting pressure on Africans to change their tradition and their religious tradition. Since it is not something we can say it is somebody’s right, evil can never be the right of anybody.
Fuel subsidy removal
If the president goes on to put his foot down in the face of Nigerian masses, and then we can begin to wonder if the masses elected him to oppress them. I believe that democracy is a question of listening; listening to the masses. Removal of subsidy may be a good thing, but in this situation, is it the right thing in the face of the opposition? Let him go through an intelligent discourse with the Trade Unions, the Media, let everybody be given an opportunity to express his views and if the consensus is to remove fuel subsidy, then the people are prepared to face the sacrifice that comes with it. But then, the people will be assured that the money made from removing the subsidy will be used judiciously to enhance the quality of life of the masses.
Then it can be wrong logic to say that we are removing subsidy in order to improve the lives of the people. People will pay more for fuel and suffer more. So, let the issue be debated intelligently. Let there be consultations. And let the President who was elected to be the voice of the people, take a decision that is guided by democratic principles.
Message to Christians in the face of continued bombings
Always the message of peace. Christians must follow Jesus Christ, we cannot follow any other person. Whatever the situation we find ourselves, Christians must be first in peace, praying for peace, working for peace and especially, the Catholic Church has been strong on this. The last Synod for Africa was for peace and reconciliation. And the Pope recently released a document that works for that peace. We strive to give the message of peace, which comes from right conduct. If people behave, and do the correct thing, peace will be the result. And we wish everybody the peace that comes from God.
Ikemba Nnewi
People make impact in various ways. Knowing he had not been living in this diocese for a long time and that he has been sick, you would not expect too much impact on this diocese. But he was a man who was larger than life and he continued to make impact on politics. Ojukwu was a great man, a great leader, who has left his mark on Ndigbo. He was a wonderful man.
Morality in school children after return of schools to churches
Government has returned primary schools to their rightful owners, believing that the rightful owners are in the best position to use those schools to deliver integral education to the majority of the children of Anambra State. Governor Peter Obi knows that the churches are not business people, they are there for the integral development of human beings and to teach. Now, the government knows that those children did not fall down from the sky, there are Anambrarians and the money brought for that purpose is for the good of these children, and the government is wise in investing its money on the future of these children.
In the Catholic Church, especially in this diocese, we are getting ready to rebuild human beings. This is our first priority. The takeover of schools has destroyed human beings, discipline and character. We have to even start rebuilding the humanity of the teachers themselves. So, when we have done that, we will rebuild infrastructure. You cannot admit children in an unhealthy environment, which is also depressed. These are not good for them. We believe that the government has taken a large step in the transformation of the state, by rebuilding the human capital which is a very important source of cultural agent. We are preparing to discuss with the state holders to see that the good intentions of the Church and the government are realized for the benefit of the children of the state.
The diocese 10th anniversary
Well, we are happy that on February 5, 2012, Nnewi Diocese will be celebrating its 10th year as a diocese. This celebration will be an important landmark in the history of this diocese. We are expecting the Papal Nuncio, Most Rev. Augustine Kasujja will be here for the celebration. It will be not just a national, but international event. We are also expecting delegations from France, Sierra-Leone, Ghana and from other African countries and Nigeria. We equally want to thank God for his graces, these years we have been here, because, without Him, the progress we have made so far wouldn’t have been possible. But God the great provider has been smiling at this diocese, and I am grateful for that. We also have wonderful people who have been very generous. We thank God for them. As we prepare for this 10th anniversary, we are confident that God, who brought us so far, will continue to lead us. Our dreams and ambitions are becoming bigger, buy my trust in God is also becoming deeper. God has raised up Mr Ifeanyi Uba to help us build God a befitting cathedral to the greater glory of God.
Presently, we have about 225 priests and 180 senior Seminarians in this diocese. For me, we don’t yet have enough. We still have to borrow two priests from Onitsha. We have six priests outside the diocese, working in Nigeria and Seirra-Loane. We don’t yet have enough, but we thank God who has been keeping and sustaining us, by giving us vocation. We continue to thank God also that since 2002, when we took over, we have expanded; in the number of Catholics, parishes and activities that are making Christ more present in the society. I took off with 47 parishes, today; we have 88 parishes, which is almost double. And the number of Catholics continues to increase, and we continue to thank God that the work of new evangelization is going on strongly. This in our own context means bringing Christ to people who have gone away, either into noe-paganism or traditional religion, or people who have left the Catholic Church for other churches.
In the coming years, we would want to bring Christ anew through this new evangelization to our brothers and sisters who have left Christianity.
The less privileged
Faith without good works is dead in itself. Christianity is all about hugging our brothers and sisters, especially those who are in need, so the diocese has always taken care to be always available to listen to the cry of our brothers and sisters. We have a regular office, which is the Justice, Development, Peace and Charity (JDPC) that takes care of the less privileged on a regular basis. But in other to have a sustained and sustainable programme, the diocese set up ‘Chukwunenye Charity Trust Fund’. This trust fund makes it possible for us to have at our disposal, funds and other resources to be able to care for our brothers and sisters in amore sustained way. Also, we took up the RECDOT at Ozubulu. We are sponsoring that outfit started by Mrs Rosemary Odunukwe and Bro Azubhekai. It is not a diocesan project but we are sort of sponsoring it. Since we have not been able to set one up in the dioceses, we took up the one that was already set up by private individuals, to make also a diocesan project and support it in various ways. We equally urge people to support it.
Vision for the next 10 years
Big vision. Yes, that our diocese will continue to be a family of God. Our 10 year pastoral plan covers evangelization, catechetic, vocation, the dignity of women, Construction and other things in that plan. But we have this vision of where the diocese will become the family of God, where everybody is at home with every other person and is in solidarity with every other person, especially, those that are in need. We are really confident that God, going with us as he has been with us, our diocese will move from strength to strength in grace and truth.
“Even those countries that are advocating same sex marriages. Don’t allow anybody to just do whatever they like. Society cannot exist without rights being regulated by certain principles. That is why I commend the Senate for making the law, at least giving the direction and even resisting the pressure from some Western countries that want same sex marriage in Nigeria”
By IJEOMA ONUORAH, Nnewi
Wednesday, December 28 , 2011
•Okeke
Photo:The Sun Publishing
More Stories on This Section
Most Rev. Hilary Paul Odili Okeke, is the Chief Shepherd of Nnewi Catholic Diocese, one of the three Catholic Dioceses in Anambra State. In an encounter, issues such as same-sex marriage, fuel subsidy, bombings, Ikemba Nnewi and others were discussed.
Excerpts:
Do you believe that the advocates of same-sex marriage are being denied their rights as they claim?
Sexual immorality and perversion are the order of the day. Right is not something absolute, it also has responsibilities, and the public good overrides rights. In all constitutions and all legal systems, the exercise of right is overshadowed by the public good. So, when we talk about same sex marriage, and we see that the religious and natural tradition are opposed to such aberration, then it will be preposterous for them to say that that is their right. I’m not sure these people who say it is their right, are aggrieved that it is the right of another person to kill his nieghbour, to carry cocaine anyhow, to shoot people and to kidnap anybody. If they mean that their right is absolute and unfettered, then I don’t think so.
Even those countries that are advocating same sex marriages. Don’t allow anybody to just do whatever they like. Society cannot exist without rights being regulated by certain principles. That is why I commend the Senate for making the law, at least giving the direction and even resisting the pressure from some Western countries that want same sex marriage in Nigeria. It is a very courageous thing to do and that is what we mean by doing the right thing, regardless of what you’re going to lose. Like, Nigeria might stand to lose foreign aid from America. Britain and all those countries that are putting pressure on Africans to change their tradition and their religious tradition. Since it is not something we can say it is somebody’s right, evil can never be the right of anybody.
Fuel subsidy removal
If the president goes on to put his foot down in the face of Nigerian masses, and then we can begin to wonder if the masses elected him to oppress them. I believe that democracy is a question of listening; listening to the masses. Removal of subsidy may be a good thing, but in this situation, is it the right thing in the face of the opposition? Let him go through an intelligent discourse with the Trade Unions, the Media, let everybody be given an opportunity to express his views and if the consensus is to remove fuel subsidy, then the people are prepared to face the sacrifice that comes with it. But then, the people will be assured that the money made from removing the subsidy will be used judiciously to enhance the quality of life of the masses.
Then it can be wrong logic to say that we are removing subsidy in order to improve the lives of the people. People will pay more for fuel and suffer more. So, let the issue be debated intelligently. Let there be consultations. And let the President who was elected to be the voice of the people, take a decision that is guided by democratic principles.
Message to Christians in the face of continued bombings
Always the message of peace. Christians must follow Jesus Christ, we cannot follow any other person. Whatever the situation we find ourselves, Christians must be first in peace, praying for peace, working for peace and especially, the Catholic Church has been strong on this. The last Synod for Africa was for peace and reconciliation. And the Pope recently released a document that works for that peace. We strive to give the message of peace, which comes from right conduct. If people behave, and do the correct thing, peace will be the result. And we wish everybody the peace that comes from God.
Ikemba Nnewi
People make impact in various ways. Knowing he had not been living in this diocese for a long time and that he has been sick, you would not expect too much impact on this diocese. But he was a man who was larger than life and he continued to make impact on politics. Ojukwu was a great man, a great leader, who has left his mark on Ndigbo. He was a wonderful man.
Morality in school children after return of schools to churches
Government has returned primary schools to their rightful owners, believing that the rightful owners are in the best position to use those schools to deliver integral education to the majority of the children of Anambra State. Governor Peter Obi knows that the churches are not business people, they are there for the integral development of human beings and to teach. Now, the government knows that those children did not fall down from the sky, there are Anambrarians and the money brought for that purpose is for the good of these children, and the government is wise in investing its money on the future of these children.
In the Catholic Church, especially in this diocese, we are getting ready to rebuild human beings. This is our first priority. The takeover of schools has destroyed human beings, discipline and character. We have to even start rebuilding the humanity of the teachers themselves. So, when we have done that, we will rebuild infrastructure. You cannot admit children in an unhealthy environment, which is also depressed. These are not good for them. We believe that the government has taken a large step in the transformation of the state, by rebuilding the human capital which is a very important source of cultural agent. We are preparing to discuss with the state holders to see that the good intentions of the Church and the government are realized for the benefit of the children of the state.
The diocese 10th anniversary
Well, we are happy that on February 5, 2012, Nnewi Diocese will be celebrating its 10th year as a diocese. This celebration will be an important landmark in the history of this diocese. We are expecting the Papal Nuncio, Most Rev. Augustine Kasujja will be here for the celebration. It will be not just a national, but international event. We are also expecting delegations from France, Sierra-Leone, Ghana and from other African countries and Nigeria. We equally want to thank God for his graces, these years we have been here, because, without Him, the progress we have made so far wouldn’t have been possible. But God the great provider has been smiling at this diocese, and I am grateful for that. We also have wonderful people who have been very generous. We thank God for them. As we prepare for this 10th anniversary, we are confident that God, who brought us so far, will continue to lead us. Our dreams and ambitions are becoming bigger, buy my trust in God is also becoming deeper. God has raised up Mr Ifeanyi Uba to help us build God a befitting cathedral to the greater glory of God.
Presently, we have about 225 priests and 180 senior Seminarians in this diocese. For me, we don’t yet have enough. We still have to borrow two priests from Onitsha. We have six priests outside the diocese, working in Nigeria and Seirra-Loane. We don’t yet have enough, but we thank God who has been keeping and sustaining us, by giving us vocation. We continue to thank God also that since 2002, when we took over, we have expanded; in the number of Catholics, parishes and activities that are making Christ more present in the society. I took off with 47 parishes, today; we have 88 parishes, which is almost double. And the number of Catholics continues to increase, and we continue to thank God that the work of new evangelization is going on strongly. This in our own context means bringing Christ to people who have gone away, either into noe-paganism or traditional religion, or people who have left the Catholic Church for other churches.
In the coming years, we would want to bring Christ anew through this new evangelization to our brothers and sisters who have left Christianity.
The less privileged
Faith without good works is dead in itself. Christianity is all about hugging our brothers and sisters, especially those who are in need, so the diocese has always taken care to be always available to listen to the cry of our brothers and sisters. We have a regular office, which is the Justice, Development, Peace and Charity (JDPC) that takes care of the less privileged on a regular basis. But in other to have a sustained and sustainable programme, the diocese set up ‘Chukwunenye Charity Trust Fund’. This trust fund makes it possible for us to have at our disposal, funds and other resources to be able to care for our brothers and sisters in amore sustained way. Also, we took up the RECDOT at Ozubulu. We are sponsoring that outfit started by Mrs Rosemary Odunukwe and Bro Azubhekai. It is not a diocesan project but we are sort of sponsoring it. Since we have not been able to set one up in the dioceses, we took up the one that was already set up by private individuals, to make also a diocesan project and support it in various ways. We equally urge people to support it.
Vision for the next 10 years
Big vision. Yes, that our diocese will continue to be a family of God. Our 10 year pastoral plan covers evangelization, catechetic, vocation, the dignity of women, Construction and other things in that plan. But we have this vision of where the diocese will become the family of God, where everybody is at home with every other person and is in solidarity with every other person, especially, those that are in need. We are really confident that God, going with us as he has been with us, our diocese will move from strength to strength in grace and truth.
“Even those countries that are advocating same sex marriages. Don’t allow anybody to just do whatever they like. Society cannot exist without rights being regulated by certain principles. That is why I commend the Senate for making the law, at least giving the direction and even resisting the pressure from some Western countries that want same sex marriage in Nigeria”
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