“This Company and Allied Matters Act is one that we understand obviously has some values in it. It has some values in it as far as regulation of companies, transparency of companies, Board of Trustees and all that. And that is good. However, what the Church is objecting to, is the fact that the Church is being treated, as if it were a company in the sense of the registration of Trustees. It is being looked upon in the same way registration of Trustees in companies are.
The Church is a religious institution and there are ways of managing the life of the church. But the law as it is today in principle is able to remove the Board of Trustees of the Church, and it is able without consultation in any way at all to impose its own persons upon the governance of the Church and that cannot be acceptable. That cannot be acceptable because the Church as a religious institution has its own processes that are not in the purview of any government to regulate. And this is why we constantly say that Government needs to review that law.
It needs to review that law in order to take the concerns of the Church into consideration. I believe that if the law has gone through the regular process of even consulting with all the stakeholders, this would not have happened. And this error in the law would not have been there. And so we expect that government will retrace its steps and remove this clause that is capable of creating problems and causing confusion in the land.” • Most. Rev. Dr. Alfred Adewale Martins, Archbishop of the Metropolitan See of Lagos
