Many people have left the real issues of climate change and carbon emissions to complain about how someone with a Muslim Muslim ticket use the analogy of the Holy Sacrament being poisoned. However the real issue is who poisoned the communion and rat in Tinubu’s church. There is ample evidence that Tinubu poisoned the Holy communion and unfortunately it wasn’t the church rat that was poisoned, but 11,200 Lagosians that die on the average every year due to his criminal negligence, 60% of them children, according to a World Bank Report!
Tinubu’s spokesmen tried to explain that he was talking about global warming and the Western global warming lobby pushing that manufacturing should switch from using fossil fuel that release carbon monoxide that depletes the ozone layer. Instead of addressing issues directly related to his failure in Lagos, Tinubu adopted the stance of countries like India and China that insist they didn’t burn the hole in the ozone layer since historically and currently the USA and the West are the world’s top polluters per person. The developing world argued that being pushed to leaving fossils fuels for sustainable energy will drastically increase their production costs and arrest their development from catching up with that of the West.
The question is why is it so important to Nigeria since we don’t have a growing manufacturing economy like China and India. That is not to say we are not contributing to the carbon footprint, but in a different way. Yes cities like Lagos are highly polluted with recorded levels of 68 μg/m3, in the same range as other polluted megacities such as Beijing (73 μg/m3), but not by our production techniques, but by the failure of the likes of Tinubu and his surrogate governors.
According to the World Bank Report titled ‘Cost of Air Pollution in Lagos’, road transport and the legendary Lagos traffic is the main source of carbon monoxide emmisions, yet Tinubu has arrested the development of an environmental friendly electric train system, by building a mere 12km of the required 120km of four Metrolines in 23 years. Gross criminal negligence that exposes 24 million Lagosians to be poisoned with carbon monoxide every day from 27 cars every kilometers of road, most with poor emissions systems especially poor control systems.
Generators are also a major source of pollution since they provide a third of Lagos energy needs and rising, since Tinubu’s Lagos despite having the money has refused to take advantage of the unbundling of Nigerias electricity sector by building plants and especially taking advantage of wind energy and solar sources, being a coastal rainforest city. In short, Tinubu and his team have failed woefully in reducing air pollution and providing renewable energy. A failure that costs Lagos over $2b every year in addition to N4 trillion lost due to traffic and wasted productivity.
So, whether it was an overzealous speechwriter or age is catching up with Tinubu, it was the height of hypocrisy and cynicism to tie his failure to do the right thing to poisoned communion the most important Christian sacrament. It is therefore understandable that people see a trend of open disrespect by Tinubu by linking his use of fake Bishops when he failed to secure a balanced ticket, to his failure to effectively reduce consumer related carbon emmision and blame the poisoning of the image of the Church.
It would have been more appropriate for him to use an Islamic analogy since his Muslim-Muslim candidacy and his Islamic North audience were major culprits of global warming with their herdsmen and cattle business. Beef has by far the largest carbon footprint of any food and has been pronounced unsustainable.
The average footprint of beef, excluding methane, is 36 kilograms of CO2eq per kilogram. This is four times the mean footprint of chicken. Majority of all the world’s cropland is used to feed livestock, rather than people. The cattle business is a threat to vegetation and a major cause of deforestation due to the amount of vegetation consumed by a single cow.
In-between Tinubus arrested development of the railway and electricity sectors due to his preference for Danfos over trains for the byproducts of IGR and thuggery, and North’s penchant for the ancient practice of herding cows that has deforested the North and threatening the South, they account for the most carbon emissions, which has nothing to do with the Church most sacred sacrament, the Holy Communion.
Prince Justice Faloye
