by Chuks Okeibunor

Recently I hosted a friend for a couple weeks; though Nigerian, he hadn’t been to Nigeria in more than 20 years.

As his visit wound down, he remembered some last minute items he needed to get done and we needed help if he was going to achieve them…so we decided to call someone we knew could get it done.

Of course, being a phone conversation, I couldn’t tell what was being said on the other end of the line, but next I heard was “if you’ not gonna help me, ‘f**king’ say so; what the f**k has the grace of God got to do with anything? You’re just being f**king lazy!!”. And he hung up on the guy.

See, this my guy has a short temper and he is easily irritated; so the first thing that came to my mind was the exclamation “Idiot!”. Then I walked over.

Long story short, he had asked the guy to help him out, and the guy had said he would do as instructed by the grace of God; my ignorant buddy felt the grace of God wasn’t needed for such a simple task and that it was merely an excuse to mess up…so I had to give him a schooling:

On this side of earth, if we agree to dinner and I had to come pick you up in an hour, I’d be wise to pray I have power to iron my clothes; if that is granted, then we’d need to pray traffic doesn’t have other plans for us; it’s also in our interest to pray that some rogue of a bus/keke driver does not bash my car, and that some LASTMA official does not collude with some hungry police officers to give me wrong directions so they can try to make quick cash off me. If we heed CBN and go cashless, best pray the POS machines find network to process our transactions.

So if you ask, and I say I’d come pick you for dinner in an hour by the grace of God, you best join me to believe God that his grace will be made abundant.

This heavy reliance on the grace of God to get things done smoothly is probably why we rank 169/189 on ease of doing business, according to the World Bank.

Last week I hosted some prospective clients from Accra. Being prospects, my team and I were desirous to give them a VIP experience. And we had everything lined up and rehearsed.

And on the day? Well, a flight of 10AM arrival got into Lagos by 12 Noon…good thing they weren’t too irritated from that experience…but any hope of making sure they didn’t leave Nigeria with a sour taste was thwarted when a 5:15 PM flight arrived Kotoka by 12 midnight…despite having checked in by 4:30pm. Mind you, Accra is only 45 minutes away.

Here, we need his grace to ensure that the basic factors of production get to us in a manner that allows us stay profitable: power (light), money, technical skillset, connectivity, fuel, etc.

And, yet, some wonder why Nigerians are one of the most religious folks in the world despite being second-comers to the faith.

Here’s to more of his grace jare…you’ll read from me again…by God’s grace

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Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

Chuks Okeibunor is a StartUp and human capital enthusiast. He tweets @CEOkeibunor