Odokonyero: We Should Stop Blaming God for our Own Woes

Ahead of the second YELP seminar in August, we tasked our Class of 2019 Fellows to reflect on the kind of change they would want to bring to their sector/industry through a performance speech.

Ahead of the second YELP seminar in August, we tasked our Class of 2019 Fellows to reflect on the kind of change they would want to bring to their sector/industry through a performance speech. The speeches would borrow from the four principles that underpin the YELP Fellowship: empathy, clarity, knowledge and volunteerism. Below we have reproduced some of the speeches.

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For those that are Christians, time and again, we have heard this saying that leaders are chosen by God.

Unfortunately when I tried to look up the verse yesterday, I couldn’t find exactly where it’s written in the Bible. Maybe those of you who are more staunch Christians, could later tell me the verse.

I think a lot of times we have found comfort in blaming God for own woes.

As Frantz Fanon rightly put in his book the wretched of the earth, 

“A belief  in fatality  removes all blame  from the oppressor;  the cause of misfortunes and of  poverty is attributed to God: He is Fate.  In this way the individual accepts the disintegration  ordained by God, bows down before the settler and his lot, and by  a kind of interior restabilization acquires a stony calm.”

At the peak of the crisis in Sudan where hundreds of protestors were reportedly killed on June 3, there’s a lot of sympathy from people around the world with the #Pray4Sudan trending globally. I wondered to myself if prayer is what Sudan really needed? Would it actually solve the root cause of their problem?

Are the leaders that orchestrated the massacre chosen by God? Or rather the choice of the leaders and their actions portrayed the rot  of leadership society?

My message to you this morning is to have a deep reflection on the actual root causes to problems in our communities and address them rather attributing all problems to God.

And that is how I intend to bring dignity to our world.

 

Kennedy Odokonyero, YELP Class of 2019.

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