Pastor Adeboye, like other Nigerian religious leaders, have not risen above ethnic sentiments –Prof. Nimi Wariboko

SAHARA REPORTERS

Distinguished Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University, USA, Nimi Wariboko, has said the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) has not yet risen above ethnic sentiments in his interventions.

Prof. Wariboko made the remarks during an exclusive interview with Rudolf Okonkwo on 90MinutesAfrica on Sunday.

“The idea that our religious leaders have risen beyond ethnicity and certain sectional feelings is something we need to question,” the author of “Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria: Beautiful, Monstrous, Ridiculous” said.

 “Once we begin to question it, the result is not going to surprise us. Why are we not asking questions that when these religious leaders get the word of God to set up a university, they always will set up those universities in their own region or close to their own place, whereas for the money that would build those universities; the good Lord would mobilise them from all over Nigeria,” a one-time leading pastor at RCCG said.

“But when it comes to siting those universities, even if it is a second one, it will always go to their ethnic areas,” he continued. “Are we surprised also that they are positioning their children for leadership succession in the churches? These should tell us that these men and women have not risen beyond, sometimes the worst of, our cultures.”

The author of over a dozen books also said that the RCCG General Overseer had set himself up for accusations of ethnicity when he went out in protest to force a change during the administration of a past president who was from a different ethnic group but now interprets Nigeria’s problems as a spiritual one when a president of his ethnic extraction is in power.

He, therefore, advised religious leaders and other public figures to think through their actions and be sensitive to the public perception.

“If you want to do something, think about the future and how to be consistent,” he admonished.

Pastor E A. Adeboye has come under public criticism on social media recently over a viral video where he was heard saying that the problems of Nigeria are spiritual and the solution is to call on God Almighty to come to the aid of the nation.

However, Wariboko, a former journalist in Lagos and the author of “Economics in Spirit and Truth: A Moral Philosophy of Finance,” said that people should look away from Adeboye and look at what is generally wrong with Nigeria’s religious system that causes it to be captured by the worst elements of our culture, instead of improving the culture.

“In Nigeria, we don’t always like to scrutinize our men and women of God because we are afraid that God will strike us dead.

“So we then put them on a pedestal, and when they say something like this, we then pretend to be shocked while we know that oftentimes, the matters of the church are still driven by basic human and ethnic sentiments,” the ex-Wall Street investment banker said.

This article originally appeared in Sahara Reporters