The presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 election, Peter Obi, on Sunday, said his recent suggestion to convert ‘church vigils into night shifts’ has been misrepresented.
The former Anambra State governor came under heavy criticism
following his interview on the Honest Bunch podcast released on Saturday.
While emphasising that Nigeria suffers from poverty and is
unproductive as a result of two factors – politics and religion, Obi argued
that too much time was being spent attending church services from Monday to
Friday.
His position sparked mixed reactions among Nigerians with
many condemning it as an infringement on religious traditions.
Reacting via a statement issued by his media aide, Ibrahim
Umar, in the wake of the outrage, the former governor said his account was
twisted and blown out of proportion.
The statement partly read, “Our attention has been drawn to
a huge twist in his recent media interview, saying erroneously that he called
for the dismantling of churches in Nigeria.
“By the headline given
to the interview, the import of Obi’s message has been greatly overturned and
grossly distorted to serve a mischievous end.
“The Labour Party leader is well known as a man of strong
faith who has enormous respect and love for every religion and tried in the
referenced interview to bring to Nigerians how religion can be more effective
in their lives.
“Obi, in the interview, was merely underscoring what Apostle
James said in ‘Faith without Works is unhelpful.’ When Obi said that he would
turn night vigil into production night, he was only stressing the importance of
worshipping God through work.
“Even Jesus Christ never picked any of his 12 disciples
where they were praying but where they were working as fishermen and tax
collectors, among others.
“What we are doing in Nigeria, which Obi’s interview is
highlighting as wrong and should be discontinued, is exchanging work for prayer
when the two should go together.
“There is no evidence in the scripture that Jesus blessed an
idle person. The problem In some of Nigeria’s worship communities is that they
are not following St James advisory that we should be doers of the words.”
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