The Citadel: In Defence of Pastor Tunde Bakare

By Malcolm Freeman Godfree

These days, I do my research, wait for days, before joining Nigerian social Media trending club that specializes in fake news..Tunde Bakare might have his flaws, but he is 100% honest than those Lagos/Ibadan church merchants.

Here is Pastor Tunde Bakare before now

Let’s talk about your Church, how were you able to build the Citadel?

When the citadel began, all that was in our coffers was N500 million and one day, my wife said it seemed a citadel was possible, because we had gotten the approval. The approval was given on my daughter’s wedding day – some five, six years ago. We didn’t have the money to build, but God granted us favour.

I’ve done some investment myself in times past. And there are members of the church, who gave their best, but I will tell you today, Citadel was financed by five banks, no government money, not one dime. The only person in government who gave us money was Buhari – the N5 million I mentioned earlier. There were individuals who gave this and that. Even the loans we took, we didn’t take a penny into account, they were paid directly to contractors. Out of the five banks, we have paid two off. We are on the third one now. And that’s Fidelity. We have paid off Unity bank, we have paid off UBA. We are paying fidelity now, and the two other banks have restructured the facility so that instead of two years, it is now five years where we can pay in instalments and I’m writing a book on how Citadel was funded so that people can keep quiet. And honestly, the only security they took for this was my name and the land upon which it is built and the old building.

But how smart is it to build a church with a facility, when it’s not a business venture?

Then you don’t understand nation building. The book of nation building is the book of Nehemiah, read chapter one, read chapter two, and go to chapter six, you will see it there, the house I will live in, the citadel, the tempo, and the commercial section. The commercial section in that place, but for COVID, will pay for everything there, and you don’t have to really pressurise people.

There’s a banking hall, there are big shops that will attract commerce. Why do you put billions in a building that you use twice a week? It is madness. The Bible says, your gate shall not be shut day and night. There must be activities going on there. There’s an event centre there. There are schools there. All the classrooms that I use for Sunday school, we use for school from Monday to Friday. It’s a complete community model.

“The Niger Delta region has been repressed, suppressed, marginalized and neglected. Respected Obasanjo, more than any other person,knows this very well, having had the rare privilege of governing Nigeria both in khaki and agbada.The poor people have had to pay with their sweat, sorrow, tears,blood, pains and pangs, over their God-given wealth. The wealth has become a curse rather than a blessing. I wholly disagree with Obasanjo’s thesis. I rather embrace wholly embrace Pa E.K.Clark’s anthesis, which wears a human face.”