The General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, on Thursday, took a swipe at developed nations for predicting that Africans will die of COVID-19 like chickens.
He stated this during the church’s annual Holy Ghost Congress programme which was held at the church’s headquarters along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.
The 79-year-old preacher, in a sermon titled, ‘The Siege Is Over’, stressed that the church must pray for the siege over Nigeria to be over and not carry placards.
He also sent a strong message to the West, saying though Africa might not have the technology and health infrastructure like developed nations, the black continent has God.
The cleric spoke amid the outbreak of the Omicron COVID-19 variant first detected in South Africa and which has spread to over 50 countries including Nigeria.
Many countries including the United Kingdom, the United States, and European nations have since slammed travel restrictions on African countries, a move that has been widely criticised as discriminatory.
Speaking on Thursday night, Adeboye said, “The highly developed nations of the world believe that they have all the technologies, that they have all the resources, that they can take care of themselves and many of them have forgotten God and then an enemy shows up, an enemy that they cannot see; an enemy that before you know it, it has attacked you and you are already in trouble.
“And they looked at Africa, we have no resources, we have no money, the few doctors we have, have left for greener pastures and they predicted that we will be dying like chickens but they left out one parameter: parameter God, they left out that there is still a group of people, who in their helpless estate, still lift up their eyes to the hills (and) say, ‘God help us’.
“I hear they are talking now, ‘We don’t even know what is going on in Africa?’ They should know. There are still some people who can cry to God, who can say, ‘God help us!’”
American business magnate, Bill Gates, had said he was yet to understand why COVID-19 cases and fatalities still remained low in Africa.
The billionaire philanthropist had in his 2020 Year In Review Notes titled, ‘These breakthroughs will make 2021 better than 2020’, said, “One thing I’m happy to have been wrong about—at least, I hope I was wrong—is my fear that COVID-19 would run rampant in low-income countries.
“So far, this hasn’t been true. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, case rates and death rates remain much lower than in the US or Europe and on par with New Zealand, which has received so much attention for its handling of the virus. The hardest-hit country on the continent is South Africa—but even there, the case rate is 40 per cent lower than in the US, and the death rate is nearly 50 per cent lower.”
Copyright PUNCH.
