Tunde Bakare, serving Overseer of The Citadel Global Community Church, on Sunday, asked President Bola Tinubu to stop “playing God” and turning Nigeria into a mafia state.
He asked the president to think deeply and reflect that “no man is wise enough nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.”
In his speech at the state of the nation broadcast on Easter Sunday, Pastor ‘Tunde Bakare said Nigeria is too delicate for the kind of politics President Tinubu under whose brand of politics the institution of legislative oversight is collapsing and our democracy faced with an existential threat.
He said if this state capture was what Tinubu meant by emi lo kan, it is an anti-climax that can only be counterproductive in the end.
Bakare lamented that those entrusted with power appear determined to destabilise what is left of our political institutions and have committed themselves to obliterating the guardrails of constitutional governance.
According to him, “From the theatre of the absurd staged in Rivers State, with puppets on strings controlled by directors in Abuja, to the dance of shame performed by the National Assembly in their rush to suspend the constitution and endorse, through the backdoor, the usurpation of powers by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu; from the Senate’s shameless bid to silence Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan for demanding that the President of the Nigerian Senate uphold the moral standards required of that office, to the uncouth outbursts of an undistinguished senatorial misfit who tried in vain to silence the distinguished citizens attempting to testify on behalf of Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan, it is clear that our so-called leaders are determined to turn Nigeria into a mafia state.
“Fellow citizens, at the centre of this political banditry is the motor park brand of politics nurtured by the old brigade politicians and, in recent times, by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
“Mr. President, it is through your influence that the Nigerian National Assembly has become a haven for legislative rascality. Mr. President, it is under your watch that the National Assembly has become an extension of the executive, grossly violating the principles of separation of powers, and rubber-stamping the whims and caprices of your office, all while singing the international anthem of sycophants: “On your mandate we shall stand.”
“Mr. President, thanks to your political machinations, Nigeria is now bedevilled by a captured National Assembly, the most ineffective in its checks-and-balances role since the start of the Fourth Republic.
“As we may recall, the renewed hope upon which the president rode to power began to dwindle from day one with the mishandling of such sensitive transactions as the fuel subsidy and exchange rate regimes, and even the coup in Niger.
Within a year and a half of this administration, the implementation of the otherwise audacious economic policies triggered an avalanche of economic hardships for the Nigerian people. It led to excruciating food inflation, with over a million additional Nigerians thrown into severe food insecurity. It further led to an “over 430 percent increase in fuel price as of October 2024.
“At the same time, Nigeria experienced the highest ever rate of currency depreciation, and the lowest Foreign Direct Investment record going by data traced back to 2013, even as multinationals began to exit the country.
“To my fellow citizens now face-to-face with a surge in violence, with no clear intervention from the government in prevention or response; to all who are contemplating retaliation, I urge you to reflect on the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “In the guilt and confusion confronting our society, violence only adds to the chaos. It deepens the brutality of the oppressor and increases the bitterness of the oppressed…It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. […] Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.”
