Kwame Sowu Jnr.
Africa is not poor because God has cursed it. Africa is poor because its people have, for generations, disobeyed the very God they loudly profess to serve. It is high time we confronted this hard truth. God is not our househelp. He will not come down to till our soil, fix our roads, build our industries, or purify our water. He gave us the land. He gave us the sea. He gave us gold, oil, cocoa, lithium, sunshine, and rain. He gave us brains. What else are we waiting for?
Let us revisit Genesis, not for religious drama but for instruction: “Be fruitful and multiply. Subdue the earth and have dominion.” That was not a suggestion. That was a mandate—to work, to innovate, to build, to govern.
But what did we do instead? We turned God’s command into a church service—fasting ourselves into fragility, screaming prayers into the ceiling while our roads rot and our schools crumble. We mistake laziness for spirituality, and cowardice for faith.
African cities sprawl with churches, yet so few factories. There are more anointing oils than lubricating oils for factory machines. Our politicians quote scripture before stealing. Our people shout “Amen” louder than they learn to code.
Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday is a national religious holiday in some parts of this continent. Yet the Monday after looks no different—jobless youth, broken systems, and a continent that exports raw materials and imports processed shame.
We pray for rain but refuse to build irrigation. We ask for jobs while refusing to learn useful skills. We call for healing while living in filth and polluting our water sources. And when famine strikes, we blame colonialism—as if the colonialists still hover over our lands, stopping us from planting or trading amongst ourselves.
The tragedy is not that God has abandoned us. The tragedy is that we have weaponised God against our progress. We have built a theology of idleness, where sowing seeds means money in an envelope, and harvesting means waiting for a miracle. Meanwhile, Asia builds. Europe innovates. America disrupts. And Africa prays.
Let us be clear: there is nothing wrong with prayer. Prayer is powerful. But prayer alone is not enough. Those who connect prayer with thinking and action—with discipline, planning, and execution—are the ones who excel extraordinarily. Heaven responds to those who move with intention, not just emotion.
When the Bible said that the hand that does not work must not eat, it was not mere rhetoric. It was divine wisdom. And we must not be too blind or too foolish to ignore the visible consequences of disregarding this truth: the squalor, the hunger, the underdevelopment that plagues much of Africa.
We have even seen high priests of economic ruin, dressed in spotless white and armed with scripture at every budget reading, invoking the heavens as they presided over ballooning debt, vanishing funds, and a collapsed currency—as if quoting Corinthians could cover corruption or justify incompetence.
Here is the raw truth: poverty is not always a curse. It is often a consequence—a consequence of disobedience to God’s instructions to dominate, multiply, and sustain the earth. God said, take dominion. He did not say, wait for a breakthrough. That is our addition, and it is destroying us.
We need to repent not just from sin but from stupidity—repent from the idea that heaven will do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. Faith without works is dead. A continent without productive action is a cemetery of wasted potential.
Africans, rise. God is waiting on us. He has already blessed us with all we need. The next move is ours. Let us build, innovate, manufacture, farm, educate, and lead—not just with words or wishes, but with work.
Because no matter how long you pray over an empty field, if you do not plant, nothing will grow.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
