Rev. Paul Emeka, the suspended Assemblies of God Church Nigeria General Superintendent in this interview opened a can of worms and revealed the true picture of things. Read on…  

The crisis in the Assemblies of God Church has been in the news for sometime now and you are being accused of embezzling church funds. This led to your suspension and many stories have been flying around. What really happened?

Thank you my brother, I have actually decided not to talk again to the press on this crisis, but for the love I have for The Sun, which is our own paper. I will try to be brief and touch the major areas. The constitution and by-laws of the church states that to remove an officer (we are four officers), I am number one, my Deputy, General Secretary and Treasurer. We meet almost on daily basis for the running of the church. It is assumed that my position is number one among equals. It is spelt clearly that things could lead to the cessation of an officer from office and these include if he is dead, if goes insane, if he is no longer living in this country, if he is convicted of a crime by a law court and if he is recommended by the General Committee to be disciplined or removed from office. The same constitution said that if the General Committee recommends that this person be disciplined that way, it must be by two-third of the General Committee and if they pass it, he is not removed until he comes to the general council in session. The general council in session is the one that will take place in November when delegates from all over the nation will gather and one of the items in the agenda will be the recommendation by the General Committee for removal. The two-third majority will say yes we support that the General Committee for removal. The two-third majority will say yes we support what the General Committee has said and that will be the only time, they have succeeded in removing someone. But in this case, all these things are not followed. The past General Superintendent used his influence as a retired Minister and an old person to be doing what he is doing now in the church.

Were there things that they want you to do that you felt otherwise. How highhanded are you?

To tell you the truth, I try as much as I can to be a very careful man. I do not take pleasure in lording it over people. I feel cheated if I cheat somebody and that is why I insist on going by the constitution. Since I started as the General Superintendent in 2010, there has been cordiality among the Executive Committee members so much that each session will attract praises from them for me. But rancor sprang up when the Ambassadors wrote, when the issue of money came up. The Ambassadors started infiltrating the Executive Committee members; they started having meetings with them even in the night until promises began to come about my removal. The minutes are intact because it is distributed during each meeting. This is a church set up, even if someone desires a thing, he may not come to mention it straightforwardly, he tries to go about it in different ways. I am not a hard man, if you work with me; I try to make provisions for people to be taken care of. None of the Executive Committee members can say he has not benefited from the largesse. I am not strict to that point. If I am that conservative, I cannot bring innovations. We take care of ministers. The church made rules against itself even by my predecessor especially on those retiring. I told them that people will call us wicked when we don’t do something to improve their condition. My predecessor when he was going on retirement, we sent him off, with a jeep of about N16milion, we gave him N25million for a house and a package of N50million as he was going. We organized that he should tour round each district and each district he toured gave him gifts. We did the same to the past treasurer and even people serving today are benefitting. The only thing that I would not accept is stealing or committing outright fraud, not me. Paul Emeka is a clean man and let them stand boldly and accuse me of anything if not all these things they are writing in the papers.

So, what and what do you think have necessitated this action against you?

Everything has immediate and remote causes. So, in a situation like this, you don’t really know where to start, but I will start at a manageable point. When we came into office, we discovered that for more than 12 years, one of the Ambassadors of the Kingdom is the Treasurer of the Easter retreat. Well, we have a body of Ambassadors. Ambassadors of the Kingdom are people in Assemblies of God whom my predecessor felt had served the church to a point and called them and gave them the award as ‘Ambassadors of the Kingdom’. It was not meant to be an association; it has no place in our constitution or the organogram of the church. But somehow, the people (Ambassadors) came together and began to see themselves as a pressure group, as a political arm. The Easter retreat is a major programme of the Assemblies of God and each Easter retreat; funds are raised all over the districts. But that department never cared to have an account. It would go into one man’s personal account and this continued until I took over. When I took over I said it wouldn’t be business as usual, we reorganized the board and appointed a treasurer and they opened an account in the bank. I tell you for an Easter retreat that has spent more than 12 years and raising funds and when they were handing over, they were only able to hand over about N2 million. But when I reorganized it and there was a proper account, do you know that right now, the Easter retreat is building a guest house of up to 124 rooms within the three years I have been in office and the man who had been the Treasurer is not happy with me because he wanted it to continue that way.

Another example is Sunday School. Assemblies of God has a printing press in Aba, it has been in existence for over 70 years and the press prints and uses the money and never brings anything to the General Council, even the Sunday school manual that is printed twice yearly. When I took over, I said that this is not the way to do business because when you do business, you do account. We have a Sunday School Department that owns the manual and I said they should print and give back to the Sunday school who now sells and we tried this for the first time last December and they printed and the Sunday school department under Rev. Oriuwa took a delivery and I want to tell you that right now in a separate account for the General Council, we have not less than N106 million and our Sunday school is twice in a year. You have us begging for money here and there when we have things that will yield us money. When I set a new board for that Assemblies of God Ministers benefit fund, they have been able to acquire estates even in Enugu and people are going to live there even the retired ministers because I told them to spend less in the office to enable the fund serve the purpose for which it was established. These things are happening but when I think people will be clapping, they turned round to say Paul Emeka is a thief.

In the Women department before my wife took over, they had women wrapper that they use to sell. The department was gaining nothing, rather what happened was that members of the department would go to the factory and tell them to print for her and they will print for her to sell and make gain. When I was Assistant General Superintendent, I settled a matter between the producer and the women department where I discovered all these fraud. When my wife took over, she was very astute in that and she told them it will not be business as usual. She set up a body, women brought the money to the executive committee of the women for the purpose, and they now produce and sell and put the money in their account. They have been able to buy a bus that costs about N7.5 million recently and instead of commending this woman; they turn around and say they are thieves.

There were the issues of the Evangel University, you buying houses in Germany, the Pastors’ Fund and so on?

Yes, there was a time we got license to operate the Evangel University. The Board of Trustees employed people and of course members of the church, but they began to mismanage and equally mis-run the university, making it too expensive for us to continue with. They employed without looking back, and employed without consulting, because by the law of the University, statutorily as the General Superintendent, I am the Chancellor, the Proprietor and equally the Visitor. The proper thing is that I am the Proprietor, Assemblies of God is the proprietor but I represent it looking for the money with which the university will be run, so I was concerned that they were spending too much. We had 73 students who were admitted but they went ahead and employed 135 workers. In their first salary schedule, they brought N6 million. We protested but helplessly paid. In the second one, it went up to N9 million and it never came down until it came to N13 million. They were employing they were not consulting us, they just kept employing their brothers and these and that and they were meant to interview people and bring the list to us to look through and make recommendations which they did not do.

Each time we call them to give account, they said no, that they were not accountable to the BOT or even the Executive Committee of the church, that they were accountable to the Governing Council. So there was a problem, nobody was actually accounting to us, so many other things cropped up. The Board of Trustees in the course of reorganizing, adopting a pragmatic approach in the running of the university suspended them and then set up a panel to look into how the university was being run. An independent body was set up to go and look into the university and after looking at it, one of the members of the Ambassadors now started shouting that I am a thief. He promised that he will donate books to the library of the school and they clapped and he donated what he called books but in the night he brought a bill of N1.2 million for the books. Imagine a Governing Council that should sit and go and receive only the sitting allowance, but they set up sitting allowances for themselves and didn’t come to the BOT that set them up for approval. They established medical allowances for themselves per annum, signed it to be executed. The Vice Chancellor came with a car of N19.6 million that he wanted to be bought for him and we said to him, that even I who is the Chancellor has not got such car and this is a university that is beginning newly. NUC had told them that they were not getting it right and they took us to court. This university sued me as a General Superintendent, sued the Trustees, sued Assembly of God and these are the people who are supposed to be suspended for suing the church, but nobody did so. With the suspension and setting up of the panel, these people ran to the Ambassadors. The Vice Chancellor of the university happens to be a member of the body and he ran to them and called on them to help him out. They came to see us in the Executive Council (BC) and we told them to wait that we will invite the BOT and explain everything to them. They laid their complaints that this young university will soon be closed, that they were not happy that these people were suspended and didn’t care to know the reason for our action. Few weeks later, they came up with a write up that they addressed to the Presbyters (These are Pastors in Assemblies of God and are up to 2000 in number). They didn’t address it to the EC members which is the highest decision making body of the church. This was where the trouble started. All of us had different approach towards solving it.

They came up with so many allegations that didn’t only have to do with the University but other things. They alleged many things against me, for example, they talked about a house we bought in Germany, they just called it mismanagement, misappropriation, fraud, what have you, and they were very free with language not even caring about the definitions of the language provided they achieved their aim. The allegation associated with the Germany house purchase is very shapeless, the story keeps increasing by the day. They calculated all these to smear my image in the public.

– Courtesy: The Sun