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From George Onyejiuwa, Owerri
Dr Cosmos Ilechukwu is the General Overseer of Charismatic Renewal Ministries Worldwide and the National Secretary of Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria. He marked his 70th birthday recently and provided a good opportunity for him to bare his mind on the state of the nation in this interview.
How do you feel about hitting the milestone year of 70 years?
I do not have any special feelings about it. However, I am full of gratitude to God who has given me the grace to get to this point in the best health anybody can be, with sound mind, agility, energy and with purposefulness. So, it is all the Lord’s doing and I feel good at 70.
What is your general view over the declining life expectancy in the country?
Everybody in Nigeria knows that so many things are wrong in Nigeria. Why will life expectancy not be short? With all the hardship, difficulties and bottlenecks that one has to go through in virtually everything. You can’t drive freely on the road. Every five minutes you are stopped by the police, who demand money from you, waste your time and don’t care whether you have an emergency? Why won’t life expectancy decline? You go to the market with a huge sum of money in your hands and come out with a tiny polythene bag because the Naira is almost worthless. I was in the hospital the other day and the doctor gave me a bill of N 34,000 just for two sachets of tablets, which I put in my breast pocket. Things that will naturally make you happy are not there. We are here now in this office without electricity. The problems of Nigeria are innumerable. What makes me feel bad is that these are problems we can solve and not that they are impossible to solve, but because of wicked leaders that have formed a clique to impose themselves and their cronies upon the Nigerian populace backed by a corrupt Army and Police Force. That is why somebody will win an election but somebody else will be declared the winner. And, then ask you to go to court because they already know that you can’t get justice from the courts because the judiciary and the politicians are made of the same stuff. We run a system that is steeped in irretrievable corruption. But one day God will hear the prayers of Nigerians. And, yet people turn around to say that we are praying too much. We haven’t even started praying because that is the only way we can survive.
Why are things getting worse though the church is praying earnestly? Is it that the church is praying amiss – making the wrong prayers?
If things are this bad with all the prayers, then you should imagine what the situation would have been without the players. Imagine what Nigerians would have faced if God had withdrawn His hand from this country. Prayer is the sustaining power of this nation. We pray because there is no other person to turn to except God. One day my American friend, who visited me some time ago and heard praying in the church that there must not be power failure during the programme. He found it funny that we were praying for the power supply not to fail. So, I told him that we pray for everything in Nigeria.
Governors and government officials will demand kickbacks from contracts awarded for road construction and the road would not be properly constructed. Look at Wetheral and Okigwe road in the Imo State capital. Every day the potholes are being patched. The side streets in the town and roads in communities have all developed gullies. We have wicked leaders who hate Nigerians, and embezzle public funds, to impoverish the people. It is a deliberate ploy to keep the populace perpetually poor so they can be manipulated. I think it was Joseph Stalin who got a fowl and plucked out all the feathers. Could you imagine the traumatic experience that poor fowl must have gone through and at the end of the day he brought out a handful of grains and began to drop it on the floor. The poor, ugly wretched fowl was following him as he continued to move, picking the grains. Stalin reportedly said that is how to deal with the people. So, the intention of the leaders is to impoverish Nigerians, strip them naked as much as possible and come around and give them palliatives and they hail him for it. These wicked leaders are simply using palliatives to exhibit Stalin’s philosophy of leadership.
Are tribalism and religion the major problems of Nigeria?
The politicians have turned religion and tribalism into political weapons. It wasn’t always like this. I was old enough to know when a Hausa man was the Mayor of Enugu. I was old enough to know when Nnamdi Azikiwe and Michael Okpara worked seamlessly with the North – you didn’t even know who was northern or southern. We were all Nigerians back then. It was our leaders that raised the tribal and religious consciousness, because they weaponised religion and tribalism for political gains. Till today they still play that game for political interest.
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When I began my ministry I didn’t have a lot of money and I have travelled far and wide in this country. On many occasions in my innumerable journeys to the cities in northern Nigeria, I would sleep at the parks with the Hausa people selling tea and bread because I didn’t have enough money for food and hotel accommodation. They never asked, “Igbo man what are you doing here?” Rather, they will offer me a cup of tea and bread and everybody was happy. But today I won’t try it. This is because everybody has become too conscious of our differences that nobody is ever conscious of our commonalities. Tribalism and religion are two political weapons used by our leaders to divide and rule over us. God will judge them.
What are the religious leaders doing re-orient their members across cuitures?
In my ministry we practice Christian community consciousness and brotherhood where every person is your brother. In this ministry we usually fast 21 days or 40 days depending on your choice at the beginning of every year. We end that fast on the 18 February of every new year. We take love offering from all our fellowship centres across the world. Not one kobo of the money we raise, which is usually big money, is spent in our ministry. We give it all out to support people. For instance, this year we went as far as supporting the displaced people in Benue and Adamawa states, among others. They are not necessarily our people but they are human beings who need to be assisted. They are Nigerians. In our ministry you don’t know who is Hausa or Yoruba. If you are looking for where real Nigerians are, come to our church. You will see how we seamlessly blend. For instance, my wife is Yoruba. And many of us married Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba and it doesn’t matter. And, we joyfully practise the Christian love as enshrined in the Bible. We are doing our best, not only in preaching love but modelling it. For instance one of the most expensive projects that we have undertaken as a ministry was done in the North. The community is called Gidan Guasu in Kano state. It was a neglected community. I think our vehicle was the first to come to that community because there was no road, we constructed the road that went in there. When we got to the community, the people used to drink, dirty, yellowish water from a pond. They also used it for cooking. So, we sunk a borehole for them. Not a single person there was going to school. We built a school and put everybody who wanted to go school under scholarship. We built a small hospital and brought doctors from Kano to take care of them. We bought a giant generator to give them light. We brought the first idea of civilisation to that community. Who did we do it for? The Almighty God. They are God’s people and we don’t care what language they speak. But we saw a community that was abandoned and neglected because of their religion and we said no. We are all made in the image and likeness of God. So, where does tribe come in? I don’t understand. All of us an be traced back to one God whose image we are. That is why your blood and mine are not different. They are the same thing. I had a White Professor in the United States, who is now late. He had a son called Bryan and adopted a black boy as a son and also named him, Bryan. So we have Bryan one, who was White and Bryan two who is black. One day Bryan White said, ‘Dad, am white and he is pink but our poo poo is the same. The father said yes. The differences we see are only superficial and beyond this superficiality everyone is the same. That’s why your poo poo are the same thing because you eat the same thing.’
The church is doing her best. If the mosques do the same, there will be no problem. Have you ever seen where the church incited its members to kill anybody because of their faith? So, if Nigerians listen to what the church is preaching and doing, this country will be peaceful and will prosper.
Do you think the docility of the people has allowed oppressive leaders to thrive in the country?
Our docility is not a blessing but a social problem until we are able to say no to mistreatment. The reason Nigerians cannot stand against it is the issue of tribe and religion. Some people will say it is Igbo trying to attack Hausa or Hausa trying to attack Yoruba. Once the tribal or religious card is played, Nigerians cannot act in unity against bad leadership because we see things through the prism of religion and tribe. If you recall, most northerners saw the #EndSars protest which started in Lagos and in most southern states over the murderous activities of the Special Anti Robbery Squad of the Police as a plot to remove then President Muhammadu Buhari from office and were against it. They did not see it as a national problem that even affects them too. So, the politicians have always exploited this tribal and religious game to keep Nigerians divided. The second reason is the brutality of our security agents. Look at the teenage boys who were arraigned in court because they participated in the anti-hunger strike. In the #EndSars protests you saw how the security agents opened fire on youths who were not armed but holding only the national flag in Lagos.
When you see that level of brutality you will simply go and hide. We’re people that are gagged because we don’t have freedom of expressionm. The so called democracy we practice in Nigeria is fraudulent. The democracy we practice in Nigeria is by the elite and for the elite. The democracy we practice has no iota of interest for the ordinary man. It is just for the big man at the top. They don’t put us into consideration at all, it’s all about them. That is why you see the leaders buying planes, expensive SUVs, living ostentatious live when those they claim to govern cannot afford three meals a day. How many people can afford a bag of rice today and they say the minimum wage is N70,000. I used to buy many bags of rice and distribute to members of my community, but I am not able to do that this year at the current price which is over a N100,000 a bag. I just came back from the village yesterday and I told them that I cannot afford it this year because I don’t have that kind of money. But we don’t have freedom of expression to act. I know many times I have been sent queries for granting press interviews but we will still be talking to the extent we know. What we don’t do is to abuse anybody but we must continue to condemn bad leadership and corruption. Nigerians are not docile because they want to be. Nigerians are docile because they have been intimidated into that situation.
As the Coordinator of Concerned of Christian Leaders in the state, what is your advice to the state government to mitigate the suffering of the people?
The people in authority do not need advice because they don’t listen to one. Once upon a time, one of the governors who I thought was my friend stopped talking to me from day I gave him advise on the best way to manage the affairs of the state to benefit the people. He never spoke to me throughout when he was in office and he never picked my calls. Nigerian leaders do not need advice, they act like the proverbial “Eze Onye Agwalam” – a king who doesn’t need the advice. My mother used to talk to me about the king who danced with faeces on his regalia at the market square and people were just looking him saying he knew what he was doing.
Now, when we discovered that the government was not listening to advice we started using the radio station. For several months now every last Tuesday of the month we have been on the radio. If you don’t hear my voice, you will hear the voice of any member of my team. This month we have been talking about the rule of law, telling our government to obey the rule of law. God never intended anybody to be ruled by man. That was why he gave Moses the 10 commandments. He intended men to be ruled by law. Nobody, including the kings, should go contrary to the commandments. Moses went contrary to the commandments and lost his job. The same for Aaron. That is how God is. When law rules, man doesn’t rule. When man rules there will be sentiments such as tribalism, nepotism and clanishness but the law does not have a friend. The law does not smile and only goes for what is written. But unfortunately , there is no rule of law in Nigeria. We don’t even have a peoples’ constitution but only the one given to us by the military. It was imposed on us, so we don’t have a constitution which we as a people gave to ourselves. So really, what we have is nothing but a lawless society.
