Babatunji Wusu –
Rev Fr Chinenye Oluoma, a well-known priest from the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja, has expressed concern over the state of the country under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s current administration.
In a statement posted on his Facebook page over the weekend headlined ‘RENEWED SHEGE,’ Oluoma said politicians should stop promising people optimism and instead offer them jobs, energy, education, health care, and security, since these are what Nigerians require.
He expressed concern that Nigerians may not completely understand President Tinubu’s new hope agenda. Oluoma contrasted hope to anaesthesia, which is used to numb pain during life-saving surgery.
He expressed concern on Facebook over the naira’s struggle to stay below ₦1500 per dollar. Oluoma noted considerable price increases in essential commodities, including bread (from ₦500 to ₦1200) and other things that had doubled, tripled, or quadrupled in price.
According to him, “Hope doesn’t put food on the table, hope doesn’t pay school fees, hope doesn’t pay hospital bills, hope doesn’t pay house rent (which landlords increase indiscriminately and govt ignores infamously); Hope will not create jobs or make electricity supply constant.”
“The problem here is that successive governments in Nigeria keep administering large doses of anaesthetics to us without carrying out any curative surgery. Maliciously increasing the dosage and frequency once we wake up from the effect of the previous dosage.
“At worst, hope is an opium, a psychic drug that makes you feel okay and patient, maybe even comfortable with all the things going wrong.
“It sedates you but doesn’t change your condition. So, Tinubu offered us hope, not jobs, not improved earnings, not stable electricity or a buoyant economy. He offered us hope, and we bought it.”
Furthermore, Oluoma expressed the viewpoint that politicians should not be the ones providing “hope” to citizens; rather, this responsibility should be entrusted to religious leaders.
He emphasized that it is the duty of the government to create job opportunities rather than merely promising them.
He wrote: “Hope shouldn’t be what politicians offer its citizens, it should be left for clerics like my humble self. A government should offer job opportunities, not hope of jobs.
“A government should offer security, power, housing, affordable health care, education and not hope for these things. Why is Nigeria the place where politicians preach like clergy men and clergy act like politicians?
“While the former offer hope, the latter promise jobs, prosperity and other material well being they are in no position and have no capacity to give. What in God’s blue planet is going on with governance in Nigeria?
“As long as the purchasing power of the poor masses keep nose diving and the prices of basic goods and services keep skyrocketing further beyond their reach, what we have is nothing but ‘Renewed Shege’.
“Each administration will always leave our currency weaker than the previous one, a recurring decimal. One administration shows us Shege, another one comes and renews it and we keep dying gradually in hope. Let the poor citizens of Nigeria breathe, please.”
