Senate Minority Leader George Akume yesterday accused Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor of undermining the sanctity of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). Akume was reacting to the involvement of Oritsejafor’s jet in a cash haul of $9.3 million to South Africa by two Nigerians and one Isreali. Akume said in a statement yesterday: “The circumstances surrounding the incident suggest that those ferrying the money did it in open breach of Nigerian and international laws. South Africa has already established a prima facie case of criminality involved in the questionable misadventure.” Oritsejafor’s church had issued a statement last week saying the the CAN president had interest in Eagle Air which owns the jet, but that he had no involvement with the cash haul because the plane had been leased to another company. Akume said, “His arguments are unsustainable because he has vicarious liability at several levels. One, the vessel used for criminal activity belongs to him. “Secondly, he commercially leased the vessel to Eagle Air, which is a company he holds an interest in and which in turn further leased same to the company that converted it to commercial use with his full knowledge and approval. “The chain of ethical liability is unbroken. How will the pastor explain his involvement with people engaged in the murky waters of international arms trafficking?” Akume said because of his actions, the CAN president “is working to destroy the little credibility that is left of CAN”, and urged all Christians to rise against such acts. He said Oritsejafor claimed that his congregation donated the same jet to him on the 40th anniversary of his ministry sometime in 2012 for doing God’s work. But he added that the three passengers arrested in South Africa with the aircraft were not on “pastoral visit to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Akume also criticised the way the CAN “jumped into this fray” by insulting people and making statements that are more political than spiritual. He lamented that CAN had been reduced into defending an apparent criminal act of taking such amount of money to South Africa to buy arms from the black market. He said, “This was a private jet for spiritual work but as the owner himself has confessed, it was leased out for financial gain. The jet was on a mission to buy arms or so we are told. The arms merchants who hired the jet behaved as outlaws by brazenly breaching the laws of Nigeria, South Africa and the United Nations. This is against all the teachings of Christ who urged all his followers to be law abiding and give unto Caesar what is his.” Akume said also “when on 27th August, 1976, Christian leaders first met at the Catholic secretariat, Lagos, they agreed to establish an organization that would promote cooperation among Christians, interfaith harmony and safeguard the welfare of all Nigerians. “When CAN was eventually registered in 1986, it’s constitution clearly articulated among other objectives to act as ‘watchperson of the spiritual and moral welfare of the Nation.’ Another core objective is to promote understanding, peace and unity among the various people of Nigeria.” He said the association had witnessed its glorious years through the promotion of religious harmony through inter-faith dialogue. “CAN in those years regularly advised government on diverse issues affecting ordinary citizens and remained a strident voice for the voiceless. Those were those days. Today, the story is different,” he added. “Since the present CAN leadership came on board, CAN has become a sorry appendage of the (Presidential) villa. It has become politically partisan, obscenely materialistic and the voice of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. “The situation degenerated to a state that the single largest block of CAN, which is, the Catholic Church suspended itself from the national leadership of CAN until ‘sanity’ returns to the leadership.” He accused the present leadership of CAN of silence in the face of scandals of President Goodluck Jonathan’s government. “My appeal to our brothers in the North is that, what they see in CAN today has nothing to do with Christianity but everything to do with crass materialism and self-seeking opportunism,” he said. He advised Oritsejafor “to sell this controversial jet and use the funds to reconstruct or rehabilitate churches destroyed by Boko Haram in the northeast of Nigeria.”
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 06:23:15 +0000
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