...celebrates 39th birthday in grandstyle
Pastor Tobi Adegboyega, the London based Lead Pastor of SPAC Nation has marked his 39th birthday anniversary with a pledge to better the lots of Nigerian youths who, he noted, have been victims of poverty that has led many of them into crime and criminality.
Pastor Tobi as he is fondly referred to in UK, disclosed this during a press interview in London with “Sun Africa” as was contained in a statement made available to journalists after the birthday party.
“Our programme for Nigerian youths is on empowerment. The programme which is aimed at empowering many people will be called Empower The Young. It has nothing to do with any political platform and has been shifted to next year for better packaging.
“I understand the climate in Nigeria, and I think that what the people need now is an inspiration, something or someone to look up to.”
” It is about giving hope to young people. The number of youths in Nigeria is so huge and so many of them are unemployed. If we don’t do something about Nigeria right away,it would become a criminal state going by all we are reading in the media”, he said.
Pastor Tobi who left Nigeria about fifteen years ago admitted that though the Nigerian government is also trying to address the youth unemployment, the effort should be complemented.
“This is because these young people do not know where and who to turn to.They do not know what to do and that means we won’t live in safety.They won’t have any other option than going into crime.And that is why we have concluded plans to empower them”, the SPACE Nation Lead Pastor disclosed.
On what kind of empowerment, he explained that it was economic empowerment that was being planned. “First of all, how do we locally create jobs.? Thank God we have done similar things here. We have empowered those who are farmers and youths who wanted to go to vocational schools. We have a guy who has a large farm but wanted to go to Canada because he wanted a better life. We asked him and he said a certain amount would help him scale up his businesses and he would employ more people. We obliged him because having
him stay back would lead to him taking more employees and reduce the number of unemployed folks.”
” So what we want to do in Nigeria is to take a critical look at things and create jobs by bringing companies from London and other parts of Europe through our own initiative.This means we are not going through the government. We call this sustainable philanthropy.People who invest their money will see how they will sustain their investments, so they don’t need government”, he said.
Pastor Tobi disclosed that “a representative of one of the biggest insurance companies in the world was recently in Nigeria to meet captains of industry.They will come in and establish themselves.We will use seed funding to fund the young people who will in turn, employ other people within the Nigerian economy.
When asked if he has a plan to establish branches of SPAC Nation in Nigeria, he said “we will likely set a branch up in Lagos or Abuja. It is that Church that will be the springboard for everything we want to do.This means the Church will have an arm of youth empowerment which is going to be here as well.We will also have an arm of Tobi Adegboyega Foundation which is the arm that sends people to school. So we will have a Nigerian branch.
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