Dr. Philip Igbinijesu
BY NATHANIEL AKHIGBE
With an alarming African youth unemployment statistics, it’s gradually dawning on leaders across all sectors of the African economies that agriculture is a viable and sustainable alternative that can address the problem – both in the present and the future. But how to get the people, particularly the young ones to see agriculture for what it really is, the oldest business on planet earth, has been a difficult task for governments in the search for a solution to youth unemployment.
And the Church is not left behind in this campaign. Some pastors and church leaders in Africa are quietly leading the way by involving in agriculture themselves and encouraging members to join the farming train. It’s in this light that Dr. Philip Igbinijesu, the Senior Pastor of Word Assembly, an international denomination headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria, invited Kenya’s Dr. Bishop Titus Masika to the church’s November 2019 International Festival of Victory (IFOV); with the mandate to bring forth God’s Word as it relates to agriculture. The potency of his words on that fateful day took off the veil from the inner eye of several listeners and inspired a Godly agricultural comprehension in the audience, as he engaged his God-given agricultural wisdom to keep his hearers at the edge of their seats throughout the duration of the sermon that lasted for about two hours.
nurtured in nursery, and transplanted when they are a few weeks old
His message on Day 2 of the festival was even more revealing. The Bishop delivered another agribusiness sermon supported by PowerPoint slides containing texts and pictures of subsistence farmers in East Africa who are gradually migrating to commercial farmers because of this solution, currently being sought after by those who are in haste to solve the problem of hunger, malnutrition, unemployment and poverty.
Like the manifestation of the biblical Ezekiel who prophesied life on dry bones, one of the amazing aspects of the agricultural wisdom of Masika, as endowed on him by the Almighty God, is the power to speak to the barren lands of centuries, and then put sinew and fresh back on it. Many ears are yet to hear and several eyes nor see where lands formerly declared barren are now bearing luscious fruits, to the astonishment of all.
Now, if you are an African and you have been weeping because your land is in a barren state and thus, yields lower than the seed that was sown, weep no more for your light has come, and the God of agriculture is mindful of your profit. In fact, the anointing that came with the Wisdom of Masika is raising dead land back to life again and causing barren soil to bear fruit through appropriate treatments, technological procedures, scientific observations and most importantly, prayer and the Word of God, which are the foundation of his current work that is attracting global institutions, donor organisations or high profile individuals to him.
“I met Dr. Masika when I went to speak at a conference in Kigali, Rwanda”, says Dr. Igbinijesu, “and I was blown away by the things he said about agriculture. No one needs to tell you that such wisdom comes only from God. And being a pastor leading a congregation of people, knowing that you never go wrong with agriculture, because nobody exists without eating, I knew instantly that I am inviting him to Nigeria to share this God-given agricultural wisdom with Nigerians”, he told AAA in an interview.
According to him, being deliberate in creating systematic optimization cropping, as the developed world is doing, it’s where Africa is lacking behind, and the basic business sense of agriculture like how to ensure that Africans are networking with other people to increase the possibilities that come out of agriculture must be taken seriously by concerned leadership.
He said “take Nigeria for instance, with 200, 000, 000 people, and it has been projected that by 2035, Nigeria will likely be the third most populous country in the world. We would have overtaken the United States of America. Right now we have a food crisis. The other day, the Niger State Government of Nigeria signed an MoU with the Word Bank, begging to come and help them overcome malnutrition. Shun of all the grammar, “malnutrition” means you are unable to feed your people. And that for me is ridiculous! Nigeria has no reason not to be able to feed her people: with vast arable land and boundless youthful population. This is one land where you don’t even need to pray and fast; just put something in the ground and it comes out.
“As for motivation, pastors have come under the hammer for taking advantage of members. While that may be an over-flogged truth, the reality of the matter is that the job of every pastor is to be touched by the feelings and infirmities of the people. Pastors do a lot beyond what people know and largely don’t know, in educating people to be better husbands, better wives, better students and better citizens, and you can’t put a cost on that because there are people who could have been in jail but are not, because of pastors; homes that could have been broken and the resultants effects. So, how do you put a cost on such work and evaluate what pastors do in society? Churches and pastors do more than take people to heaven. Part of our job is to make people better citizens through consistent training and living and leading as a good example.
“And agriculture just happens to be one of the many things we believe we can educate and train our people about, which was the reason Dr. Masika was in Nigeria at a great cost to us. But more precisely, Word Assembly is a church that is very big and deep in community social responsibility initiatives. There are lots we are doing in this regard. Anything that adds value to the people, it’s a yes. And this is not just Word Assembly, but the whole Church, globally. The Church does a lot of work all the time; incredible things churches are doing all over the world”.
Speaking further, on Dr. Masika, he said “he is somebody that came under very profound and revolutionary ideas on how to optimize the agricultural potential of African communities. Dr. Masika is a highly sought consultant in virtually all the East African countries. A lot of multilateral institutions and bodies including the United Nations (UN) came all the way to visit him in Kenya, to witness the revolution that was birthed through a very creative concept that God gave to him on how to be able to transform peoples’ opportunities in the place of agriculture.
“Anybody that is involved in the agricultural value chain, from the basic subsistence farming to mechanized farming, to agro-production and processing and all the other things that have to do with the different aspects which can transform the agricultural produce must seek to listen to Bishop Masika. He has been a minister of the gospel and he is a much-read man. Precisely, as part of his quest to see how he can transform communities and empower them to be self-sustaining that God gave him a revolutionary idea to optimize crop yield, how to be able to fast track the production of basic and other kinds of crops, how to synergies, and when your land is arid, how to create a system that can be able to water your land and many great revolutionary and creative ideas without the high cost that will go into it, when you ordinarily want to meet experts or business people to come to help you overcome some of these challenges, depending on where the people are located and the quality of their soil. So, how to be able to manipulate your way around these challenges are part of the many things that Dr. Masika is doing for Africa’s agriculture”.
