Climate Change: How Farooq Kperogi got it wrong in defence of Tinubu on the ‘church rat analogy” – Kalu Nwokoro Idika

@farooqkperogi got this wrong.

To understand what @officialABAT meant by that statement, one has to pay attention to each word and the context in which it was used.

What is the etymology of ‘Church rat’?

Church rat is used to denote extreme poverty.

Priests are extremely careful not to allow even a scrap of Holy Communion to fall to the ground. Even if the tiniest bit falls, it is immediately picked up.

This is based on the holy nature of Communion which represents the body of Jesus Christ.

So a rat which finds itself in a Church has a date with starvation and poverty.

In using the analogy of Church Rat and “poisoned Holy Communion” to explain his stance on climate change, Tinubu alluded to inevitability. He didn’t mean desirability as @farooqkperogi argued.

Holy Communion is not usually poisoned. If a church wants to set a trap for a rat, it can’t be with Holy Communion.

Tinubu meant that no one can stop a church rat from eating Holy Communion even if it was poisoned.

Therein lay his error and the danger.

He meant that Nigeria, being a poor country, cannot contribute positively to controlling climate change.

He said that the Western world must give us money or else we won’t act.

He mentioned coal.

Unfortunately, he also mentioned tree planting and firewood.

In one statement, he set back our achievements in stemming climate change back by 100 years.

The Presidential candidate of the ruling party in the largest black country on earth sincerely believes that tree planting is such a costly venture that we must be bribed to do it.

Shockingly, he was addressing a question about his plans to combat climate change in the part of the country which is most adversely affected by it.

“Climate change is a problem to us. How will you address it if you become President?”

Tinubu cannot relate deforestation to desertification in Northern Nigerians.

He failed to connect the dots between desertification to the southward migration of cattle herdsmen.

He cannot correlate this migration to the countless lives lost to herdsmen-farmer clashes.

Planting trees is one of the cheapest ways to control climate change.

Planting a tree for each one felled is proven to be an effective weapon in our battle against climate change and its deleterious effects on our earth.

But he doesn’t know that.

More shocking is that he could not relate combating climate change to our welfare.

He thinks it’s solely for the benefit of the Western world, therefore they must give us money to plant trees.

Yeah, the West contributes most to the activities which cause climate change.

But a man who wants to lead us should know that our response should be based on our vulnerability to the negative impact, instead of our contribution to the problem.

Who stands to lose if we fell all our trees, and refuse to plant new ones?

That’s the crux of the matter.

He could have made his point about why it’s necessary for the West which contributes most to the problem to bear a large chunk of the cost, without discouraging Nigerians from doing even the basics.

That’s what a leader should do.

I do not want to dwell on the impropriety of using a much-respected article of Christian faith in his analogy

The Holy Communion is so guarded that rats do not have access to it.

We cannot allow any rat access to the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Strangely, a man who wants to lead us from 2023 believes that we will remain so poor and wretched that it is inevitable that we cannot afford to contribute to combating climate change.

So we must go cap in hand begging for support to get even the basics done.

What kind of vision and goal is that?

It is wise that he sticks to subjects he understands.

Dinosaurs went extinct due to their inability to adapt to a fast-changing world.

We either grow or die.

I choose life.