By Bisi Olayemi

It would appear that one of the aims of Archbishop Wale Oke when he assumed the leadership of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) in 2021 was to project himself as a doer of new things.

After assuming office, one of the things he did was to appoint for himself a Chief of Staff, a development that was strange to a Christian Fellowship like the PFN.

And that development immediately set the tone for the poor accessibility to Wale Oke vis a vis the stakeholders of the body.

Even fellow Executive Council Officers elected along with him allegedly had difficulty gaining access to him for crucial matters concerning PFN because of the needless protocol of having to go through a Chief of Staff with the attendant delay.

Many officials allegedly protested that this was slowing down official jobs but nothing changed.

Today, many senior leaders of the PFN are accusing the administration of non-performance.

The claim that officials of the Fellowship had little or no access to the National President possibly hindered information about important matters being brought to Oke’s attention, thus limiting the achievements that could have been jointly recorded by the leadership.

Number two, to bring about a cooperative, friendly and cohesive leadership, Bishop Oke was allowed by the Founding Fathers of the PFN to appoint all the seven National Vice Presidents for the zones and the Abuja FCT at the inception of the Fellowship national executive in 2021.

But one cannot categorically say that this cohesion in the national executive was 100 percent achieved as at least one VP allegedly resigned his appointment on the grounds of irreconciliable differences with Bishop Oke on matters concerning the PFN.

Additionally, Bishop Oke allegedly ran the PFN with people from his Sword of the Spirit Ministries, led by his Chief of Staff, rather than with core Fellowship officials.
Ordinarily nothing is wrong with this but the problem is that the core PFN officials and even the national executive members allegedly felt marginalized and complained that they had become ‘second class’ leaders of the PFN.

The PFN National Biennial Conference started in 1985 and is in its 18th edition.
When Bishop Mike Okonkwo presided over the Fellowship, he enlarged Biennial Conferences by involving the National Agency for Foods and Drugs and control (NAFDAC) with which collaboration had been established to wage war against fake drugs which had become a menace and was killing our youths like chickens.

Everyone remembers the late Prof. Dora Akunyili, even though a woman she stood against the scourge of fake drugs as the Director General of NAFDAC.

Akunyili was Guest Lecturer at one of the conferences held under Archbishop Okonkwo’s tenure.

And apart from Akunyili’s being the Guest Lecturer at the Biennial Conference, she was a recipient of the Fellowship’s grand award, coupled with the leaders prayer at the conference for her in recognition of her sterling contributions to the health sector of the nation at that time and a model for the upcoming generations that good deeds by public officials pay.

Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor took this bold step to another level when he succeeded Bishop Mike Okonkwo.

Pastor Oritsejafor’s National Biennial Conferences, about two times, featured colloquiums that saw respected Dr. Christopher Kolade, Dr. Gamaliel Onosode and many other captains of industry speaking to share ideas on how to move Nigeria forward.
That is what a big organization of Christians should be doing.

But what have we seen Oke done with this year’s Biennial Conference after the lack luster organization of the 2023 Edition?
Oke is boasting that this is the first time that the PFN is organizing a colloquium as if a colloquium is new to the PFN and it had not been organized several times under the Oritsajefor leadership.

The PFN land in Abuja is another controversial issue under Bishop Wale Oke.
Some senior leaders believe the project should not be a priority for the PFN at a time the Lagos National Secretariat built under Oritsejafor leadership and commissioned by the Omobude administration is lying grossly underutilized.

The Lagos building is an edifice made up of several storeys and, instead of rushing to Abuja to buy land at huge costs and constructing it with hundreds of millions of Naira, efforts could have been made to properly utilize the Lagos property from letting out the many floors now unoccupied, and funds invested on the Abuja property used to do other pressing things including empowering less privileged PFN members.

The Abuja land purchase slipped into controversy because some leaders alleged it was not properly analysed and, what is more, many key members of the Fellowship said the issue was not discussed with them at the National Advisory Council (NAM) of the PFN before the current leadership made its move in the name of fulfilling national quota, that is, North/South of the country.

Many avoidable mistakes would seem to have been made in the last four years of the Oke administration, but for the PFN, in the next four years, much hangs on the former National Presidents, the Founding Fathers, including Pastor Enoch Adeboye, Bishop Mike Okonkwo, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, Rev. Felix Omobude, Dr. Uma Ukpai, Bishop David Oyedepo, Pastor Paul Adefarasin, Pastor Wale Adefarasin, Rev. Mercy Ezekiel, Archbishop Margaret Idahosa, and Dr Abina, among other stakeholders, to make the PFN once again a vibrant Fellowship they all labored for and take it to a pinnacle of national relevance.

• Olayemi is a Lagos based public affairs analyst