April 26, (THEWILL) – The Bishop of the Atamunu Diocese of Methodist Church Nigeria, Cross River State, Rt. Rev. Barr. Utuekong Ukut P.hD, says Nigeria needs to be re-engineered.
Reverend Ukut, who stated this at the sidelines of this year’s 47th Synod of the Calabar Diocese of the church, maintained that the country’s full potential cannot be harnessed in the present arrangement.
He maintained that the present arrangement is a mistake by the colonial masters, and those who are against re-engineering are benefitting from the present state of the country.
“What we need to do in this country is to re-engineer our country, but people are afraid to re-engineer it.
“We need a situation where several countries that are embedded in Nigeria are diffused and released so that their potentials can come out.
“What stops Akwa Ibom and Cross River from becoming a country? The world’s biggest and most developed countries are very small countries like Singapore, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland with few populations.
“How do you merge several countries, a British 1914 mistake and still continue to call it a country because people that are benefiting from it do not want it to reach its full potential because of their benefits, but the people are not benefitting because the mass is so large for policing or any contingent to hold it down.
“The same thing with the army, but give it a smaller nomenclature or smaller manageable size, you will see passports, see immigration, all very manageable. We have an amorphous configuration of countries being put into one because of a 1914 mistake of Lord Lugard”, he said.
Speaking on the significance of the Synod, he said it is the final authority of any Diocese and that is where decisions are taken and it is held annually.
He said the primary reason for the Synod is the church’s spiritual life, not even the administrative.
Others he listed include revival, evangelism, and church planting, those are the issues that come up in worship, liturgy, praise of God, modes of worship, to meet the present and future times, real-time online services, decisions of the Synod, and highly spiritual.
He added that the Methodist Church is the first Church in Nigeria that brought Christianity in 1842 and so the ways of doing things and progressing have been laid down and the Synod is the highest policy-making body for that area.
THEWILL Correspondent, Aniekan Bassey has over six years experience that spans across several fields in print journalism including development communication, sexual reproductive and health rights issues, crime, climate change, social justice, business and human interest stories.
