Former Deputy Speaker, Oyo State House of Assembly and Presiding Pastor of Livingspring Chapel International, Femi Emmanuel, has said that the only way to rescue the nation from its current predicament is for various church leaders to get themselves and their members involved in politics right from the ward levels.
He said that is the only way through which the country could be saved from the serious predicament confronting it, or else it stands perilously on the threshold of an explosive catastrophe.
The cleric, in his book titled: “Urgent need to save Nigeria: The Critical Role of Christian Leaders,” said that a huge responsibility of what goes beyond prayers but which also requires strategic steps needed to be taken by Christian leaders to save the country as it moves towards another transition election.
“In Nigeria, the leadership crisis is truly vexatious. The worst set of people are ruling us, governing us, making unreasonable laws and putting together hostile and obnoxious policies that are largely retrogressive and of no significant value to the populace,” the cleric said.
He lamented that God had on His path blessed the nation beyond measure, but that the only thing the country lacked and urgently needed is “God-fearing, visionary, accurate and accountable leadership” to translate her huge human and material wealth into improving a lot of her people.”
Emmanuel noted that the church has a critical role to play in providing the needed leadership for Nigeria and further noted: “Church represents a special breed of people in any society. The people are by nature children of light. Revelation and direction are ours to give in the stormy sea of our chaotic national life. What then should be our contribution? What should we do to change the current path of destruction of our country? We must be responsible enough to devise ways to influence the political process to get the nation steered back to sanity.”
Emmanuel also said that Nigeria’s current democratic system is distorted whereby some few money-bags, who own political structures, put themselves forward or select and send their cronies into government houses to do their own bidding, which is always to marginalise the masses and loot the public treasury they are supposed to use to take care of the populace.
He, however, expressed dislike over the church’s lackadaisical attitude towards building a political structure or platform, saying: “That is why political office holders from the local council, state and national levels do not see the church as a force to reckon with. To them, the church is completely irrelevant.”
The cleric, therefore, charged the church to go beyond having a large congregation of worshippers.
He said: “How do we build this important structure? The church must “own” the ward executives. How do we make that happen? The church members of participating churches in a ‘ward’ will come together to form a caucus within the designated political party, which the ‘Fathers’ must have met to choose in their own wisdom. They must be card-carrying members of the chosen political party; they must attend ward meetings regularly and participate in their activities. These party members will form a caucus that will nominate among themselves to contest ward elections. The leaders of the wards are the ones who will go as party delegates for the party primary.”