Posted by By TOPE ADEBOBOYE on
General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye has given details of a humiliating experience he was once subjected to at an international airport while visiting a foreign country.
General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye has given details of a humiliating experience he was once subjected to at an international airport while visiting a foreign country.
The respected cleric narrated how he was given a thorough search at the airport as soon as he tendered his Nigerian passport, saying the immigration officials became more suspicious of him when he claimed to be a pastor from Nigeria.
Pastor Adeboye, who spoke with a team from Zero Corruption, a magazine published by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), lamented that corruption has virtually destroyed the image of Nigerians outside the country, regretting that most foreigners now regard all Nigerians as fraudsters.
Said he:
'The moment they heard that I am a pastor, that's when they decided that the search must be thorough. In fact, they told me that I must preach a sermon! They asked me the last time I preached; I said last Sunday. They asked for the topic, I gave them. What was the theme? I gave them. What was the Bible passage? I gave them.
'At the end, they apologized, saying, ‘in your case, you are genuine. We have caught Nigerians who say they are pastors but who are fake. We have seen people who travelled with what is supposed to be a Bible and inside they had cut off a portion of it and put in drugs.' In a situation like that you find the innocent suffering because of the misdeeds of a handful of people.'
The man of God linked the alarming growth of corruption in the Nigerian society to the collapse of family ethos as well as the debasement of teachers by the government. 'Teachers used to be honourable people but we debased them,' he observed. 'We must do something to bring the teachers back to the position of honour that they were before things can begin to go right.'
He also regretted government's seizure of schools from religious institutions, saying the forceful take-over has contributed to the current rot in the society.
His words: 'The church used to be the educator. All the schools were run by missions, at least most of them. Only few were government colleges, like King's College. In the olden days, in the morning, before you go to classes, you pray, somebody in the school will say a word or two about God. But they threw God out of schools when they took the schools away from the missionaries. The children come to church once a week now, but they are in school five days a week. If we really want things to get back to normal, we have to restore things the way they were in the olden days.
'When we talk about the family also failing, in the olden days, many a time the father would earn enough to feed the entire family. Now, papa would work, mama must work, so there is little time left for parents to look after their children. So when we are looking at corruption as a very big monster, it has several roots and we must go to the root of it, not just cut off the branches and expect that the end of the story will come. We must go deep.'
Adeboye also reiterated that Nigeria would eventually become a great country that would be envied by the rest of the world, even as he advised Nigerians to be optimistic about the future. 'I know what God told me that a day is coming that the same people who are ill-treating us abroad when they see the Nigerian passport, they will want to touch you because they would have been convinced beyond doubt that God is in Nigeria. It doesn't look like it now, but that is what is going to happen,' he affirmed.