How do you caution a father who you know has fallen foul of the moral rule? How do you tell a man who is widely respected for his evangelical work, even by the international media, that he may just have lost his sense of priority? These are some of the questions I have had to ask myself since news first broke that Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God had recently acquired a private jet at a reported cost of N4 billion.
Let me point out here that to sit in an armchair and place a value on anybody for following their heart’s desire is the most difficult pastime I can ever hope to indulge in for there aren’t many out there who are more impulsive than me. But faced with having to call a spade a fork, I’ll rather sit in the damned armchair.
Considering our fanatical devotion to religious issues in Nigeria, one would expect us to know that obscenity in and around places of worship, does not start and end with indecent dressing, indecent body contact, foul language and the whole gamut. And buying a jet for the head of a church in Nigeria – a country where more than 80 percent of the people live below the global poverty line – whereas even the Pope hasn’t got one, is certainly obscene enough to add to the list. A clergyman spending a monstrous N4 billion (or whatever billion) on a jet is as obscene as it is oppressive of the members of the congregation with whose money the aircraft was bought. I don’t think there’s a greater obscenity than having a clergyman’s aircraft, just by sitting idle in a hangar at an airport, gulp thousands of worshipers’ money monthly while the worshipers are supposed to subsist on a daily package of faith, the Holy Spirit, etc only.
When I was younger, missionary schools in this country were the most affordable, economically. Fast forward a few years and the picture you get is of religious organisation-owned schools where educating your child costs an arm and a leg, schools at which only a fraction of members of the parent religious organisation can afford the financial cost of educating their children. The eternal excuse for the obscene cost of getting an education in a Nigerian church-run university or any other grade of such institutions is that education generally, is expensive these days. But I dare say that education has always been expensive in this country. The difference with now, perhaps, is that evangelism or missionary work answered truer to its name and calling in those days.
Those days were before religion lost its innocence in these shores. But then that seems to fit religion in with the other pieces, isn’t it? Our religious buffoonery sure fits in with the lack of direction and sense of priority in our national economic, sports, political life and so on. And for these shortfalls, Dora Akunyili, our information minister, like others before her, is now in Sokoto searching for that which is right inside our sokoto.*
*To search in the wrong places for a lost item or apply the wrong solution to a problem
