Ben Akabueze is the former Lagos State Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget and pastor-in-charge of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) Province 39. In this interview with YETUNDE OLADEINDE in his office at the King’s Court, he talks about accountability, corruption, ethical behaviours and grooming a new breed of citizens with the annual Kingdom Summit organised by his church.
You operate in the house of God and the marketplace. Why do you think it is difficult for a lot of people to give effective leadership in church and find it difficult to operate the same way in the market place?
Broadly speaking I would say that three things could be responsible for this. Number one is possibly ignorance. There are people who think it is okay and that is their own understanding of giving to God what is God’s and to Caesar’s what Caesar’s. They think that they can operate this way but they need to understand that that is not the correct thing to do. The second thing that is responsible is that in our own particular environment, corruption is so pervasive and not just so much as someone collecting bribe but so much that not giving people value for money are all forms of corruption.
It has almost become the norm. You have the phenomenon that I call the normalisation of the abnormal. A lot of people just get swept in that daily tide and say that is how it is. The third reason is what I call personal responsibility and this is that in the reality, a lot of people are drawn by their own lust. When people fall into temptation, it is because they are drawn by their own lust. Whether it is the lust of the flesh, you have people who indulge in illicit sexual activities at work; they see members of the opposite sex under them as part of the pecks of the office. Then the lust for money and properties and these are the three categories responsible and at the summit, we would be addressing all the three areas.
Could this all be because something is wrong with the system?
It is totally abnormal that somebody works and at the end of the month, they do not get paid for one month, not to talk of two or three months. Now, we discuss it and it sounds somehow and when I am watching the TV and some governors say that we are only owing for a few months and not as much as the other , I get worried. It is totally abnormal that someone works and is not paid at the end of the month.
A labourer deserves his or her wage. It is reprehensible that you do you do not pay someone the wage and if on that account, the person is drawn into sin, you are a partaker of that person’s sin. That is the system but at the end of the day, God has only one set of rules. He doesn’t have one for Nigeria and one for the other countries. And He is not going to judge Nigeria based on a different set of principles and so, we need to understand that at the end of the day there is something called if I perish, I perish.
We ought to have found out that the call includes resisting things even to the point of dying. In Revelation, the word says, ‘They overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony’. It doesn’t end there; it says that ‘they love not their lives unto death’. So, that have not been paid is not a justification to set up a toll gate and start collecting money illegally. I have to do some legitimately, things to generate money, use legitimate things to generate income, even if it means that I would be down to eating one meal a day instead of our famous Nigerian three square meals. It is tough to be a Christian in Nigeria.
There is so much emphasis on money in the marketplace today. Is there something we can do about this?
The Bible says that the love of money is the root of all evil, not some evil, all evil. The people should be delivered from the love of money and the only thing that can deliver them is the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the love for God supercedes their love for money but if their love for money supercedes their love for God, then there is a problem. Unfortunately, that is the trend here; you can see how many people in church whose love for money supercedes their love for God.
What is the theme for conference this year?
‘Purposeful capital and leadership responsibility and impact’ and it is coming up from the 23rd to 25th of October 2015.
First of all, the whole idea of a summit is to provide a platform to promote Godly principles in the marketplace. The broad definition of the marketplace here would include business; it includes the profession, it includes government and it includes education. These are sectors that are broadly categorised into the marketplace; pretty much every sphere of human engagement outside the church. What you find is that a lot of people tend to be different persons in church and in the marketplace.
People tend to live what you call dichotomised lives, one person here and another person there but that is not how God intended it to be. Our faith is supposed to be our way of life and who we are. Who we are should not change whether we are at home, at work, in church or anywhere. Of course, the market place thus presents a lot of challenges to the persons of faith on how to live their faith in the market place and stand by those principles. Very often, the market place is run on principles that are opposed to Godly principles, principles embodied in ethics, equity, fairness, justice and morality.
The point about this summit is to bring this to the fore. Sometimes, a lot of this people do these things out of ignorance. For instance, a lot of Christians do not understand that timeliness is a Godly principle. When you are not timely, in effect like a thief of other people time and this affect people.
So the summit would provide a guide on this and teach these principles. It also provides a platform and then it is one thing to know the theoretical principles and another to understand the tactical applications of the principles. At the summit, it is not just about teaching and sharing the principles but practical examples of how people have applied the principles to their businesses in the marketplace.
It is also about establishing an accountability platform that people subscribe to in the marketplace. And as more and more people do so, we would be able to see the fruits in the marketplace and we would have less of the phenomenon where you have more and more believers, yet our society is not better for it. The Bible tells us about 12 unlearned men who turned their world upside down or more appropriately right side up and yet there are so many of us and our impact is not felt like these 12 men because one of them departed and was subsequently replaced. When we begin to live our old Christian lives, our own lives would become the bible that others read. The Bible says that the followers of Christ were first called Christians in a place called Antioch.
They were called Christians not because they labelled themselves Christians but the people who saw them and how they lived perceived that these ones had been with Christ. So if we say we are Christians, the people that encounter us in the marketplace would be left with the perception that these ones are true Christians and everything we do must reflect. Currently, this is not generally the case in our country.
As we said, this is also a platform to create spiritual accountability. This is something specific that we are doing this year. We would be launching the Nigerian chapter of the Unashamedly Ethical (UE). Unashamedly Ethical is a global movement of Christians and people in the marketplace, mostly business owners and professionals who sign on to operate their business in an ethical manner with some ethical codes that derive from Godly principles.
That means that that code goes beyond the usual ethical code in a world where people can hide behind some basic structures like if you got someone to give a bribe on your behalf and go home feeling ethical. With God, that would not be ethical and so we are launching this chapter, ask people to subscribe and when you sign on at the place of your business , you would have the sign in of UE and you are holding yourself out to the general public, that here, we operate these principles.
So anybody who comes there would expect that every engagement with you would reflect these principles and where that is not the case, they can file a report to the UE that this is our experience with these people.
Of course, there is no legal thing involved, we can’t charge the person; we cannot close the business but we can hold them accountable and reach out to the person to find out what is happening. Sometimes, the owner may not be personally responsible, he may lay out the guidelines for operations but behind your back, your people may do something different. So when you get that feedback, you can go and fix whatever is wrong or whoever is out of order in your organisation.
This year, we have quite an impressive pack of speakers, about 28 speakers. It would be hard to find another conference that has an array of such length and breadth of speakers that you can attend free.
Is the project tagged Unashamedly Ethical open to all or is it for a select few?
The programme is the brainchild of the Kings Court, a parish of the RCCG but its about identifying the root cause of the cancer in the society and finally getting to a place where Christians take responsibilities for the decay in our institutions, the decay in our government and our family structure. It is not exclusively for those who have arrived but those thinking of building a foundation for their businesses. We have a number of young people who are building good businesses and they need to learn about the principles of success and how to do things the right way.
