Acting President Yemi Osinbajo has admonished church leaders not to accord respect to treasury looters who he said brought misery to the country by their action.
Speaking on the occasion of this year’s Father’s Day celebration at Aso Rock Villa Chapel, Abuja on Sunday, he said it was wrong for the church to hold such individuals in high esteem.
He said: “The greed of many is what has landed this country to where it is today, many of who are in position of authority.
“It is the greed that has landed us to where we are. Many who say the reason why they are stealing is because they need to have an arsenal for future political experiment. It is a lie, it is greed.
“And if the church says you are not allow to steal and we will ostracise the thieves in our midst, if a man’s resources, what a man has does not measure up to what he earns, if you found that a man has more money than he should have, if a man is earning a salary in a civil service or public service and he has houses everywhere, we have to hold him to account.
“He must first be held to account in the church. He must first be told in the church, we will not allow this.
“If the church ostracizes the thieves; if the church says we will not accept thieves here or we will ensure that we expose you, you are stealing the resources of our nation, you are stealing the resources of a private company or other establishments, then we will not have the kind of problems that we have in this country. If only the church can.”
He stressed the important role of the church in nation building as the light of the world.
The acting President added: “I want to say that all of our leaders, the Christian leaders; the (Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria) PFN and (Christian Association of Nigeria) CAN, that it is the role of the church to build this nation. And the church has that role because God has said concerning us that we are the light of the world and we are the salt of the earth. That role is a very difficult role.
“We are not to teach the world how to be like the world but to teach the world how to be like our saviour, Jesus Christ.
“Every time we come to the church, we are told about giving, but we need to talk more about honesty.”
Osinbajo advised fathers to live by example and to build generation of righteous men and women by raising children with virtue of integrity.
While calling on fathers to emulate Abraham, the acting President also urged them to love their wives and refrain from any forms of domestic violence.
Meanwhile, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Yakubu Dogara, has warned against the collapse of family values in the country as he urged the government to invest more in the family.
Speaking with State House correspondents after the church service, he said when children are well brought up, it would spare the nation many of the troubles it is presently going through.
He said. “We should invest more, really as a nation, in fatherhood or in family. And when children are properly brought up, you will see that most of the resources we channel towards control of crime and so many other government programmes, there will be no need for them because we will have some kinds of transformation that only take place at the family level.
“Certain things cannot be done by the government. Like we cannot just outsource discipline in a home, the issue of imparting or instilling morality in the life of our citizens.
“Government certainly cannot do that. It is the role of the family. So, when we celebrate fathers like this, we celebrate fatherhood, we emphasize on the importance of the family as a unit in bringing up those components of society, performing its role and then turning citizens that are compliant.
“That therefore means that we won’t be spending money in fighting crime.
“When fathers do their work, the nation will have less work to do. And when next we have people in leadership who fail, who are patently corrupt, the question shouldn’t be ‘who is this?’ The question should be ‘who is the father of that person?’”
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