I remember vividly growing up in Nigeria in the era of her oil boom when her national economy was truly prospering in the 1970s before Nigeria became a borrower nation, a reliable client and a good customer to the IMF, World Bank, European financial agencies and now the rising China. In the 1970s in Nigeria, there were no prosperity gospel pastors, preachers and prosperity-based Churches anywhere in Nigeria at that time.
The young men and women that graduated from the Nigeria's post-secondary institutions, such as, universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, nursing schools or trade schools all went directly into the workforce either in the public sector or in the private sector of Nigeria where they pursued their different professional careers and life goals unlike today when they are all flocking in droves into the pastoral work or the Church ministry for economic survival and free access to tax-free money from their devotees.
In those days in Nigeria, the post-secondary education was publicly regarded as the surest passport, the most reliable path and the easiest avenue to financial prosperity and financial security as well as to the Nigerian popular dream of a life of comfortable middle-class status, new car ownership every 4 to 5 years, a future home ownership, access to a good health care, periodic vacations even to the western nations, financial security or stability and a future that is very secured with a decent retirement.
Today in Nigeria almost 30 years or more later, we have Churches in every nook and cranny of this nation in the midst of rising youth unemployment, chronic poverty of 80%, massive official corruption, unabated mismanagement of our state resources, a nation of lawlessness, insecurity of life and properties, terrorism, lawlessness, the rule of brutality, violence, religious fanatism and bigotry, sectarian riots, kidnapping for ransoms, ritual killings and murders that all point to a truly failing nation indeed and in the making in 2013.
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