By Paul Onomuakpokpo
It is unnecessary to
boast about the defeat of the contentious corporate governance code of the
Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN). Neither the religious people,
especially the Christians who felt affronted by it nor the government and its
officials have fought a good fight that requires self-adulation. The only loser
is seemingly the Executive Secretary of the FRCN, Jim Obazee. He overreached
himself by insisting on the implementation of the code that precipitated the
exit of Pastor Enoch Adeboye as the General Overseer of The Redeemed Christian
Church of God. Consequently, Obazee was sacked by the authorities he defied.
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| *Pastor Adeboye |
But the Christians must have a
fair share of the blame for waiting for the matter to degenerate to this
extent. It is good that the Christians as represented by Adeboye want to be
good citizens by obeying the laws of the land and this was why the famous cleric
offered to quit. But they should have also used the laws of the land to
relentlessly interrogate a policy they found iniquitous. They should not have
waited for the government to help them. It is not enough for them to seek
redress in the court, lose and give up. They should have gone the whole
judicial hog – to the Supreme Court. Even the policy was made when Christians
led by Goodluck Jonathan were in power.
Instead of pastors and bishops
leveraging the influence of these people to make policies in their favour, they
were busy collecting fat offerings in their churches when they came to give
testimonies of how God made them to win elections, without hinting at how their
so-called electoral victories were preceded by killing, maiming, lying and cheating.
It is the same way bad policies are made by the government and clerics watch in
acquiescence as their members writhe under them. They watch when teenage girls,
especially Christians, are forcibly converted and married off. In the same
vein, lawmakers in the National Assembly and other leaders in government, and
Christians and their clerics are now keeping quiet when efforts to forcibly
take over their land through the grazing bill are being made. After the law is
now made, they would now wait for a miracle to deliver them from its baleful
implications.
It is to the government’s credit that it took an
action that negated the suspicion that the administration of President
Muhammadu Buhari wants to Islamise the nation. This suspicion existed even
though the code was not originated by this government. However, the development
has also thrown into sharp relief how the rules of men and not those of the
land determine the actions of our government. For it is not likely that if
Adeboye were a different person, the government would have quickly roused
itself from its now familiar dithering and sacked Obazee as it did. There is
the perception that it is because the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, and the
Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah are pastors in
The Redeemed Church that the government’s intervention was timeous.
Since the government has proved to
be able to muster such a swift response to a controversial issue, it is
expected henceforth to react promptly to matters that affect the wellbeing of
the citizens. If it had been prompt in its responses, our teenage girls would
not be abducted, converted and forced into marriage with the complicity of
emirs. There would have been peace in all the parts of the country. The carnage
in southern Kaduna
and other forms of Fulani herdsmen’s terrorism would not have festered, and the
crises in the Niger Delta and the South East would have been resolved. And
there would have been restructuring of the polity which is believed to be the
panacea to the ills plaguing the nation.
