Job Osazuwa
A group of clerics and professionals, under the aegis of Christian Financial Accountability Association (CFAA), has embarked on a mission to educate churches and Christian organisations on transparency and accountability.
Explaining how the association was formed, the senior pastor of Daystar Christian Centre, Sam Adeyemi, said the body was a self-regulatory association of churches and Christian faith-based organisations dedicated to ensuring financial accountability, ethical and governance standards. He said that the group was also formed to help churches and their organisations to comply with mandatory government regulations.
He said that, considering the role of the church in society, CFAA would help strengthen the capacity of the church in accordance with the law of the land as well as what is enshrined in the Bible.
At the cultural level, Adeyemi decried the level of mass illiteracy on how to run profit and non-profit organisations. He revealed that the group would be engaging churches and their businesses to key into the campaign.
On how to ensure that the targeted organisations embraced the message being championed by CFAA, the cleric said that the campaigners would focus more on leadership reorientation. He said, so long as leadership deals with change, people hardly embrace it, even the people who want their situations and lives to change are the ones who quickly back out when faced with the implications of change.
“People want their lives to change but change threatens the status quo, which they won’t want to accept. And that is why we keep doing things the same way for decades. When the motive is pure and with the love for the masses, the people who introduce change tend to make people’s lives better. Though it might take time, we believe that we will make a big difference as we continue to spread this positive message. We will use marketing skills to convince the organisations to embrace the ideas, and marketing requires one to show a buyer the benefits that are attached to the product or service.
“The people that came together to start this crusade were mostly professionals such as lawyers, accountants, theologians and so on. They told us what the governance structures are supposed to look like. The lawyers have to study the legal aspects, the accountants look at financial management, while the theologians analyse what the Bible says,” he said.
Adeyemi noted that the association would partner with individual and Christian organisations and other groups to enable it to reach a wider audience. He stressed that, though more than 75 per cent of churches do not have enough money to manage, most of their leaders do not have the financial management skills needed to effectively utilise the meagre resources.
“We all need this intervention because it will bring about sustainability, which is lacking in this part of the world. We are preaching a cultural shift. We should be asking why most businesses owned by Nigerians don’t outlive their owners. If accountability is effectively not practised in the church, I wonder where else it will be practised better. Jesus Christ demonstrated the importance of accountability with the parable of how different numbers of talents were given to three servants. While others managed theirs and increased them, the one with the least talent did nothing with it. This made the one talent to be collected from the servant because he could not account for it,” he said.
Also contributing to the initiative, a financial analyst, Mr. Yinka Ogunnubi, said the issues that the association was set to achieve were not new but to reawaken all stakeholders to know how moral values were germane to the body of Christ.
He said the role of the church in Nigeria could not be overemphasised, especially in the areas of social security system, interventions in health care, education, youth development, job creation and shaping morals.
He said: “There are things that are basic that no one should be forced to do them. This is not to pull churches down neither to take over their leadership structure. The message is for them to do the right thing in the right way. This has nothing to do with a particular denomination but Christianity as one body. The strategy will be educating the organisations to voluntarily join the movement. Membership is open to all Christian denominations and Christian faith-based organisations.”
On his part, a lawyer, Mr. Tomi Vincent, said the mission of the association was also a proactive one so that they would not be caught unawares when the relevant authorities take further steps to beam the searchlight on their activities.