Sam Adeyemi, Prosperity Preaching and Poverty in Nigeria

Sam Adeyemi. Source: Punchng.com

  

I first knew, Sam Adeyemi, when he was invited to minister at the Rock Word Church in Port Harcourt, South-South Nigeria. He is the kind of minister whose introduction will always be greeted with mass hysteria, every time. His niche is Prosperity Preaching.

Recently, I watched a video footage of Pastor Adeyemi remarking on the fact that there is something wrong with the module of Prosperity Preaching, something to which their energies have been channelled for the past thirty years. This, according to him, comes from recent statistics showing that Nigeria has overtaken India as a nation with the highest level of poverty in the world.

This is very humiliating, the fact that we have overtaken India in the ranks of nations with the highest degree of poverty. I first heard about the Indian poverty situation in a remark President Mohammadu Buhari made, sometimes during his long power struggle. He was in India as part of his series of military training. He remarked that every morning in India, a truck would move from street to street, picking corpses of men and women that have died of poverty the previous night. If this is how bad the situation was in India, it points to the seriousness of the situation in Nigeria.

This, however, is what Pastor Adeyemi needs to know. Not every indicator that comes out is reliable. Some statistics are purposely falsified to help the author, mostly a fraternity of powerful western nations, achieve a selfish goal. Sometimes, there are errors in the survey because someone sits far away and assumes certain things. We can’t be the richest African country and still have the worst rich-to-poor people ratio. At least, trucks don’t go around picking corpses in Nigeria.

Regardless of how hard prosperity preachers work, the body with the most powerful means of mitigating poverty is the government. It is the body worse primary duty is to make life easier for people by way of building the groundwork. Anything Prosperity Preachers do is complementary. Even NGOs, with the huge resources they deploy into helping alleviate poverty, admit their role is a drop in the ocean when put side-by-side with the roles of governments that includes the first, second and third tiers.

If we come down to the Nigerian population, poverty levels are higher among non-Christian populations found in the north. For those that have been following the speeches of the deposed Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi Lamido, you know he is someone that has not hidden his admission that there is a high degree of poverty among the Muslim population. He continued to give speeches to help alleviate severe poverty by advising Muslims to shun polygamy if they know they don’t have the resources to support large families. Remember, these speeches are among the reason he was deposed; people hate a man who talks against a culture they are used to and love. This is how profoundly rooted the culture of poverty is in Northern Nigeria. 

But, we also need to look deep into the pastors, congregations and the curriculum. Most prosperity preachers seem to be working for themselves. They are among the richest pastors not only in Nigeria or Africa but on the planet. They own private jets and a system of schools that ordinary Nigerians can’t enrol their kids as a result of exorbitant tuition fees.  According to Max Romeo, “while the Reverend drives expensive cars and buys everything tax-free, the poor will have to sacrifice to give in charity.” Jesus Christ, the pillar of Christianity, rode on donkeys to meet with the congregation. The donkeys he rode on were not even his. Meanwhile, we are advised, as Christians, to live the life that Jesus Christ lived. Jesus Christ was a personification of love and “humility” among other things.

Perhaps, prosperity preachers need to do the seemingly insurmountable by taking the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Muslim population in Northern Nigeria.