Tag: CAN

In his response to allegations suggesting he was indirectly liable in the illegal haul of $9.3m cash to South Africa by two Nigerians and an Israeli, Ayo Oritsejafor, Pastor of Word of Life Bible Church, Warri, and President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), equated the attack on him with an attack on the Church in Nigeria. This is an insufferable conclusion. After finally but belatedly acknowledging that the aircraft used to ferry the money to South Africa was his, but only leased to a third party, he then launched into a winding, threatening and provocative defence of his conduct, also attacking those he describes as his enemies and enemies of the church.

Hear him: ‘In order to ameliorate the cost of maintaining the aircraft, I sought and got the permit to allow the aircraft fly in and out of Nigeria. Based on this, I leased the aircraft on August 2, 2014 to a company to run it. It was the lessee that entered into an agreement with the people who carried out the transfer of funds. Having leased the aircraft to the Green Coast Produce Company Limited, any transaction undertaken with the aircraft can no longer be attached to me. Inasmuch as I am shocked and distressed by the incident, I wish to appeal to Christians in Nigeria to remember that a war has been waged against the Nigerian church. This war is being fought on many fronts and this unfortunate incident is another dimension in the assault against the church. It is clear that those who manipulated this conspiracy desire to create a schism in the church. The media hype and the deliberate distortion of information that followed it confirmed that forces that desperately desire to cause division and disunity in the church are at work.”

Pastor Oritsejafor was wrong to suggest he owed only the church an explanation for his conduct. As a preacher of the gospel, and obviously now as an economic player leasing jet and receiving incomes from it, he owes all of us an explanation. Indeed, he has not yet fully come clean, as his one-sided and heavily edited statement suggests. It is important to know the details of the lease arrangement with Green Coast, the revenues that have accrued, and how much tax has been paid. We recall that he at first only acknowledged a ‘residual interest’ in the jet, and was at first silent over whether it was the same jet he said a committee in his church presented to him for evangelism in 2012. Now that the jet is his, has he explained to the church how an evangelism jet, notwithstanding maintenance expenses, has suddenly become a commercial jet?

When the controversy broke, he first got CAN to defend him. In a bad-tempered statement by the body, CAN displayed the worst forms of worldliness that even those who are not Christians would balk at. In the CAN statement, the body attacked politicians and especially the All Progressives Congress, and threatened obliquely that payday (electoral response, perhaps) was around the corner. The statement all but described the APC as an Islamic party, as if there were no Christians in the opposition party, and as if Christ had anointed one party above the other.

But Pastor Oritsejafor may wish to disavow the CAN statement for its poor logic, though it is unclear why he would do that. His own statement is, however, equally riddled with threats, bad logic and intolerable pride. He would go to court, he warned, to deal with those who suggest the plane was gifted him by the president. By far the worst logic in his statement concerns his conclusion about the interchangeability of his person and the church. He sees the attack on him, the association of his person with the cash export scandal, and his indefensible closeness to Dr Jonathan as an attack on the church. But Pastor Oritsejafor is not the church, and given his serial blunders, worldliness and humanity, can’t be the church. Had he not become the personal chaplain of the president, had he not fished in the murky waters of politics, had he not insensitively tried to drag the entire CAN into the PDP, no one would have accused him of politicising or corrupting the body.

A former CAN president, Anthony Cardinal Okogie, indicated in an interview two Saturdays ago that Pastor Oritsejafor had belittled CAN and unadvisedly pressed the body into service for a president who incompetently ruled the country. And contrary to what Pastor Oritsejafor says, no one is manipulating the private jet controversy to undermine the church. The controversy is entirely his making, and if the church is disunited, the pastor’s politics and style of leadership are entirely to blame. Today, it is clear Pastor Oritsejafor is more a businessman and politician than a pastor, more vituperative than temperate of speech, more divisive than unifying, more worldly than heavenly, and more contemptuous of his enemies than accommodating. So steeped in the affairs of the world has he become that he simply is unable to see just how much damage he is doing to the unity and sanctity of the church.

Pastor Oritsejafor hopes to punish the opposition in the next presidential poll, and perhaps wishes God would inflict much additional punishment on those he considers the enemies of the church. But the pastor has no example in scripture to learn from — not Moses whose humility and grace of speech overcame potent and internal opposition to his leadership; not Elijah who retained his moral force by immeasurable self-sacrifice and spoke truth to power; nor Peter who condemned doctrinal pollution and worldly gain; and certainly not Jesus Christ whose beatitudes stand in direct and mortifying refutation of all that Pastor Oritsejafor exemplifies with uncanonical self-importance.