Senior Pastor of Trinity House, Ituah Ighodalo, has alleged that Nigerians have been bullied into submission whileothers fail to speak up for personal or business interests, weak institutions and others.
Ighodalo spoke during the Tri-Africa Empowerment Foundation/Africa Leadership Group (ALG) special edition on the Nigeria Leadership Series and ALG’s fifth year anniversary. The topic was, ‘The Journey So Far And What’s Next’.
He noted that Nigerians, who spoke against hardships in the past, could no longer do so under President Bola Tinubu’s government, that many Nigerians had been cowed and that they were cowed because of the power vested in the President and others in government.
“The government is powerful in three areas. The first area is that they control a lot of resources and have been able to persuade many to move to their side through the allocation of resources and positions they have.
“The second is that they warn those who they have not been unable to convince to mind their businesses if they have nothing to say about the government, and because everybody is a bit dependent on the governments to some extent, they tend to also fall in line because somebody is threatening their livelihood or businesses so, they fall in line and nobody is able to speak as boldly as they would have loved to or say the things they have seen.”
“The third is the failure of our institutions. The government has the military, the police, judiciary and others. We will engage the youth and bring them on board and see how we can engage them, but, unfortunately, they also were cowed when they tried to show up and it led to disasters.”
On the solution, he said there were only three ways Nigeria’s situation could be turned around, namely divine intervention, re-orientating the mind of an average Nigerian, and a kind of Arab Spring that sets up a chain of actions and reactions nobody could control.
Speaking also, Peter Eze, said: “There is a generational bridge. The generation that conceived ALG may not be able to address the reality of the current generation. I think it’s beyond bringing young people onboard, it’s getting young people engage and committing more to them. ALG needs a lot more revolutionary, more collective organized action enabled by education. ALG can mobilise funding for already existing platforms that can scale higher. The people we are contending with are doing collective action.
“For instance, every Agbero in Lagos is linked, money collected in Alimosho gets to the same pause, and I think we need to think in that aspect.
“If ALG was a country, how would we say we have felt? Someone was critising President Bola Tinubu and I said that regardless of the criticism, we can see action. We can see the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road, it’s not a campaign promise, we can see what he’s doing. We need to give it to him.
Also, Funke Awolowo, said: “We need to lend our voices to what is going on now in Nigeria. Someone asked what ALG has accomplished. We have accomplished a lot. We need the checks and the balancing; we need people to speak to power. President of ALG has been visible enough and they know here he stands and where we stand and that is why they have excluded us from certain thing.
“I am a pastor and I understand checking by speaking on and on. We are going to be fighting with the pen, our voices and when we are called upon, we will not call a fish a snake.
“One thing I’ve noticed about this government is that there is a defensive mechanism that makes it impossible for the truth to manifest. We know how they got there, we have looked at the criteria of the man and he lives a bit wanton, and we are wondering how he got there. We have a lot of questions. It’s not the best of government. This government is not truly working and we need to speak the truth.”
