Many have criticized the Pastor saying
the acquisition of such an expensive item is an exploitation of members
of his church. Since the criticisms started, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Pastor Oritsejafor,
had not given any response. However, he broke his silence in an interview with Vanguard speaking about the private jet.
He narrated some difficult experiences
he’d had when he travelled to preach the gospel further justifying the
importance of the private jet.
“You may have heard me speak about
my trip to Indonesia, to Jakarta. In fact, it wasn’t even Jakarta I was
going to, but I had to stay inside an airport in Jakarta for five hours
to wait for my flight, to get to the very city I was going. I was only
going to preach for two hours there. I flew from Lagos to Dubai and I
spent over three hours, changed flight to fly to Jakarta and then stayed
five hours at the airport just to catch a flight to where I was going
to, where I was to preach for just two hours.
“And after everything, I got a
flight from that place again to Jakarta, stayed at the airport again for
another five hours, then flew into Dubai, stayed again at the airport
for another three hours before I flew into Lagos. It took me four days
to make a journey to preach for two hours. I’m a human being and I am
not getting younger every day.
“And locally, it is worse, for
instance, the acting General Secretary of CAN lost his father in a place
outside Uyo, Akwa Ibom State and I had to be there. I preached in a
place in Lagos on a Friday and needed to be back to Warri on a Saturday,
but at the end of the day, the plane that would have taken me was no
where.
“I had to charter a plane for N3.5
million to take me to Uyo, waited for me to finish and then take me back
to Warri. Two weeks ago, a young pastor in Port Harcourt built a new
church and had been on me all this while to come and dedicate the church
and suddenly from no where, there was this flood that cut off the road
to Port Harcourt.
“There is no road now to Port
Harcourt. If you want to go by road now, it takes you up to 12 hours to
get to Port Harcourt and I had to preach in Port Harcourt, I had to
preach in Lagos, I had to preach in Abuja and other places. Finally, I
was able to find my way to Port Harcourt, it was on a Saturday.
“I had to get to Warri that Saturday
so as to be able to preach the next day, Sunday. Do you know what I had
to finally do? I chartered a helicopter that cost me N2 million to drop
me in Warri. When they dropped me here, ah, I can’t tell you how I felt
that I had to part with that sum. But I had promised the young man and
the church and if I had said no, will it be right? I can go on and on
and on.”
He said he didn’t even know the church
members who donated the jet but that they constituted a committee for
the purpose and that his wife worked closely with the committee.
According to him, they decided to donate
the jet after they became aware of the suffering he was undergoing
whenever he travelled in and out of Nigeria to peach the gospel. “They feel the pain I go through and they feel painful for not seeing me most of the time,” he explained. “They don’t like it, they are troubled.”
He concluded by saying the plane was not a luxury but a necessity. “This
is my story about the plane. And I’m not ashamed to own a plane, I
think it is a necessity and not a luxury for some of us deeply involved
in the work of God to own planes.”
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