Should a pastor own a private
jet? That this is even a debate
issue in Nigeria reflects just
how wayward some of our
Christianity has travelled,
particularly since the end of the civil war and the arrival of
large piles of oil money. We are good adopters, and in
the past 20 or 30 years, these
Christian strands in Nigeria
have “grown” side by side
with the monies flowing in the
streets and the technologies produced by others.
Christianity has moved from
the pews into the realm of
business, and from the pulpits
to American-style television. In the process, some of the
emerging Christian leadership,
adopting the culture of
American television and stage,
became celebrities and rock
stars. Christianity became marketable, and marketability
became mistaken for
commercialization. These pastors also became
instant television producers,
concerned about their looks
and make-up as they prepared
for worship services tailored
for broadcasting. They worked on scripts and colours and
lighting, and arrived in
stardom wearing expensive
suits and jewelry. They became stars as their
Ministry became a business.
And since there is no business
without politics, business took
politics in its arms and kissed
her. Increasingly, pastors prayed not for right over
wrong, nor simply for the
mercy of God or the wisdom
of Solomon, but for specific
individuals or political parties. Increasingly, pastors enshrined
and preached the immediacy
and centrality of prosperity,
often praying for prosperity
answers before nightfall. Prosperity is good. In a way,
our entire journey as homo
sapiens is about prosperity:
health, education, longevity;
heaven is prosperity over
earth, and if we make heaven, we triumph—that is, prosper
—over humanity. The problem is that some of
our Christian leaders often
neglected the fact that
prosperity is not always about
materialism. From their
glittering thousand-dollar suits, some of them prospered into
the best cars, alligator-skin
shoes, suites in five-star hotels. All of this often happened
alongside barbaric
businessmen, guzzling
governors and looting
legislators many of whom, in
moments of guilt or periods of sickness or sadness, sought the
comfort of a pastor. As you know by now, many
pastors pray with their eyes
closed. It helps focus on the
celestial, but also conveys the
impression of holiness.
Evidently, it also helps block out the obvious: that some of
the powerful people appearing
for prayers in the dead of
night, or conveniently
arranging to meet with the
pastor in faraway lands, are thieves who have robbed the
people blind. Now, forgiveness is normal in
Christianity. It is the
foundation of the Christian
Church, as the entire mission of
Jesus Christ, in the Christian
faith, was to take away sin and effect reconciliation with the
Father. It is the place of a
Christian leader to help with
that process, so when he
engages a sinner, it is to be
expected. The only problem is that in
Nigeria, some pastors have
often seemed to close their
eyes a little too much and too
long: allowing celebrity thieves
to impoverish the people longer or escape justice. The
pastor thereby becomes an
accomplice, accepting vast
“contributions” they had
reason to know could not have
come from a legitimate income. In 2007, Archbishop Peter
Akinola, the leader of the
Anglican Church, showed up at
a “glorious homecoming”
celebration for one Olusegun
Obasanjo, who had recently, reluctantly, and vindictively,
given up the job of President of
the Federal Republic. “You have got the best in the
world and your eyes have
seen the worst in the world.
All that is left now is to make
heaven,” he told Obasanjo.
He assured the former president that while he had
finished his “horizontal fights,”
his spiritual journey had just
begun, and urged him to fight
the battle of his conscience, and
seek forgiveness from those he has wronged. The people Obasanjo had
wronged, for eight long years,
were the people of Nigeria,
and the good bishop knew it
as did all of the pastors who
followed Obasanjo around and prayed with him routinely. Akinola told Obasanjo God had
blessed him with everything.
“You have enough money, you
have enough houses, you have
enough land, enough (cars),
and enough properties, even enough children and all should
be enough God has given you
far too many houses. What to
eat is not your problem.
Paying children’s school fees is
no longer your problem…” He did not tell Obasanjo that all
those riches were at the
expense of his deeply
disappointed people. Indeed, many of the Christian
leaders who interpret
Christianity as a tool for
personal prosperity pretend to
see no link between bad
governance and the manna from heaven they preach to
their exhausted
congregations. For them, their
access to the corridors of
power is merely part of their
own prosperity. They do not see their blindness
to bad governance to be
collusion, or their silence to be
support. This is really a double rape,
because on the other side, the
pastors collect relentlessly
from the poor to fund an
affluent lifestyle. It is the
collections that are now said to be lucrative enough for pastors
to bank hundreds of millions
of Naira in personal wealth,
and purchase jets by which to
rule the sky. In the case of Pastor Ayo
Oritsejafor, the President of the
Christian Association of Nigeria
(CAN), he did not even have to
work at buying the jet himself:
his congregation presented it to him as a “gift.” It is
impressive when a
congregation can raise $40 or
$50 million to buy a jet. According to a recent
newspaper story, in Nigeria
private jet ownership has
grown by 650 per cent in the
past five years, with those
wealthy enough to afford it, including our pastors,
spending about $7.5 billion Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah
has described this trend on the
part of Christian leaders as an
embarrassment because it
diminishes the moral voice of
the church in the fight against corruption. It is not surprising that he
immediately came under
attack. Sunday Oibe, a
spokesman for CAN, said: “If
there is any clergyman in the
country whose constituency is government, it is Bishop
Kukah, who served every
government in power in the
last decade.” Kukah, he accused, served in
the Obasanjo government,
only to later attack the former
president. Kukah, he accused,
fraternized with former
Governors James Ibori and Peter Odili. Kukah never served in the
Obasanjo government.
“Fraternized” with corrupt
governors? Does that mean he
knew them, accepted contracts
from them, used them as his route to riches and glamour? Which explains the very point:
corruption fights back.
Corruption not only defends
itself; in Nigeria, it advertises in
Eagle Square. Corruption
blackmails; on the offensive, it paints everything in its own
colours. The obvious is that it is those
pastors who buy jets remind
one less of a Christian leader
and more of a playboy or a
corrupt former governor. A
pastor who buys a jet, even from “legitimate” resources,
cannot avoid being perceived
as being corrupt or
compromised The reason is that a private jet
is not just a mode of
transportation. It symbolizes a
lifestyle of opulence and
challenges the Christian values
of humility. It suggests matching riches and
possessions, affluent luxury
homes, exotic cars, expansive
hotel suites and immense bank
accounts. A private jet, for a Christian
leader, suggests the corruption
of the Christian spirit and
contradicts the life of Christ and
the ability to live a life of
humility and compassion, or to serve the poor. A private jet may be
transportation to a
businessman, and a Christian
leader can argue eloquently
that he needs it to simplify his
mission. In a country as desperate as Nigeria, the only
destination to which a luxury
private jet transports a pastor
is away: from his ability to
confront power, and from the
mission. sonala.olumhense@gmail.comwww.saharareporters.com/column/private-jets-jesus-sonala-olumhense