Senior Pastor of House on the Rock Church, Paul Adefarasin, has expressed concern over Nigeria’s economic situation, describing the country as “dead and rotten” amid worsening hardship and the depreciation of the naira.
The cleric made the remarks during a sermon delivered to his congregation on May 17, where he lamented the declining value of the Nigerian currency and the rising cost of living in the country.
Adefarasin stated that anyone still measuring wealth solely in naira had become poor by present economic realities, noting that the value of money in Nigeria had drastically reduced compared to previous decades.
He recalled that his father earned about N18,000 in salary during the 1970s and 1980s, describing the amount as substantial wealth at the time.
The pastor further compared the current value of the naira to the past, stating that what amounts to billions of naira today translates to far less value in dollars than it did decades ago.
Adefarasin blamed the country’s economic decline on what he described as a lack of long-term planning and failure to prioritise future development.
According to him, critical thinking, research and data-driven planning have gradually disappeared from the nation’s academic and governance systems, leaving the country without adequate preparation for future challenges.
He said, ‘’Nigeria is dead, lets not deceive ourselves. Let me tell you something. Once you are counting in Naira, you are poor. I was not born poor. My father’s salary in the 70s or 80s was about N18, 000. That was money. How much is a billion Naira today in dollars or N1.4 billion in dollars? $1 million. Do you know what a billion Naira was when I was 15 or 16? $2.8 billion.’
‘’They have erased it out of our academic systems. We do not research data to know what our future looks like. So we are not doing the critical thinking so we have no combatant against our subconcious foolishness”