Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah
People of my technology grew up with what in these days was known as, The Penny Catechism, a little bit booklet that lined the fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church. An excellent reminiscence of its contents was a situation for getting baptized. We didn’t fairly perceive the deeper theological points however we repeated the solutions with gusto. The first query in that little guide requested: Who made you? The reply, God made me. The second query, Why did God make you? The reply, God made me to like him, to serve him and to be pleased with him in heaven.
Heaven has been projected as a spot of final happiness, relaxation, bliss, and peace in the presence of God endlessly. This is on situation of course that we preserve His commandments and do His will. Hence, when folks die, we frequently say and pray that they’ve gone to be at peace with the Lord. St. Paul says that with ideas akin to these, we must always console each other [1 Thes.4:18]. However, we’re nonetheless right here on earth, kids of two cities. A musician as soon as warned that: You make your heaven or hell right here on earth. In moments of happiness, some folks usually say, they felt as in the event that they have been in heaven on their marriage ceremony day. Caught in the online of struggling, some folks say they really feel like they’re dwelling in hell! Yet, on the ultimate judgment day, Jesus says that attending to heaven or hell is tied to our actions right here on earth [Matt. 25:31ff].
Between life right here on earth and heaven or dying, a lot occurs and loads of it’s based mostly on the non-public selections we make. An excellent life right here on earth or in attending to heaven all depend upon obedience to each the legal guidelines of God and civil legal guidelines. Many would argue that protecting the legal guidelines of God already makes dwelling beneath civil authorities simpler. This is why St. Augustine is credited with a most radical assertion which says, Love God and do no matter you’ll. This isn’t a license to be irresponsible. Rather, it merely amplifies John when he says, if we’re of God, we can not sin [1 Jn 3:9]. My curiosity in the following couple of minutes is to attempt to name your consideration to the challenges of what, to borrow the phrases from the well-known American Declaration of Independence, they consult with as, the pursuit of happiness. Graduating from a prestigious Catholic college akin to yours, named after the best theologian ever to come back out of Africa, we’d hope that you’ve been outfitted with essentially the most sound ethical instruments to navigate by way of life. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to see that how we outline happiness ultimately determines what we pursue, what we love and what we construct.
Therefore, Class of 2026, let me add my voice to the voices of your mother and father and household, your academics, and all these whose onerous work has introduced you to this present day. Many of you arrived at this establishment a lot youthful and largely inexperienced and strangers to at least one one other. It is my hope that every one of you are actually higher human beings, extra mature, have made extra mates and are ready to face the following section of your life which begins proper now. Today, you’ll occasion, believing you are actually free from examinations. In many prestigious universities all over the world, college students have usually suffered self-inflicted bodily hurt and even misplaced their lives in the course of these put up graduate orgies. I enjoin you to relax, hearken to your senior brother, Kiss Daniel. If you propose to be wealthy until you die, please put on face masks! The actual battle of your life is nearly to begin.
Some years again, in an tackle akin to this to college students in an American college, the then first girl, Michelle Obama informed the graduands a narrative about her kids. She stated she usually asks her kids what sports activities they like or dislike. She stated she would usually ask them to go and discover ways to play the sport they didn’t like. The lesson for the kids is: Life isn’t going to provide you solely the belongings you need. You will meet folks you don’t like in faculty or one place of work or the opposite. The world is not going to shift its furnishings to accommodate your wants. So, whilst you have the possibility, make new mates, study a brand new language, style new meals, in quick, attempt various things. Do not despise the meals, language, or tradition of your new hosts. Life will embrace you when you divulge heart’s contents to new concepts.
Until I got here to Lagos, the concept folks ate snail was revolting to me. Time handed, a collection of visits to households and mates, affords right here and there. I lastly succumbed. The late Archbishops Ganaka, Jatau, Bishops Aje and Abba used to make enjoyable of me, saying that I’ve come to shame the north in Lagos. They would say I’ve been contaminated by the Yorubas. Today, I’ve efficiently transformed just a few of our bishops from the north to the delicacy of snails! I’m relying on Archbishop Martins to assist me convert his two mates, President of Conference, Archbishop Ndagoso and Archbishop Kaigama, former President of Conference. Snail could also be a matter of style. There are different selections in life that can’t merely be decreased to style.
The pursuit of happiness is a private enterprise, however lived absolutely in relation to others, most of them full strangers to you. I’ve seen younger women and men who discovered themselves in completely different elements of Nigeria amongst completely different folks, compelled to eat meals they’d by no means imagined, compelled to drink water from streams away from the consolation of their silver taps at dwelling. I’ve seen individuals who held others exterior their ethnicity in contempt flip round to settle amongst these folks. Today, by way of college life, away from the womb of household and ethnic consolation, many have ended up falling in love and marrying ladies and men of ethnic or non secular teams they held in contempt. I’m hopeful that many of you’ve gotten made mates from different elements of Nigeria from completely different social strata apart from yours. Please preserve these friendships and develop your social networks. You by no means know the place you’ll find yourself and whom you’ll encounter tomorrow. For your academics, it is necessary that you recognize that one of these younger males or ladies might be your President, Senator or Governor tomorrow. He or she might be your son or daughter in legislation.
As younger folks, it’s simple to change into pissed off and dejected in Nigeria as a result of of the ethical chaos round us. We now dwell in a society that’s on an ethical free fall. From prime to backside, we’re a nation averse to obeying legal guidelines. Those we relied on for management and instance are doing far worse. If you ask a median Nigerian how you can safe admission right into a college, how you can get a first-class, how you can safe a job after you’ve gotten graduated with a first-class, you usually tend to be informed, all of it relies upon. A younger technology of Nigerians and their mother and father are satisfied that nothing can come to you as a result of of benefit and that each alternative relies on whom you recognize not what you recognize. From breaking the legislation with out penalties to dwelling out a jail sentence, every little thing might be negotiated. Enter a tradition of ethical relativism. A compass whose north modifications in line with who’s holding it can not information anybody dwelling.
It is in opposition to this background that the japa syndrome got here in as an answer. It turned a rave and a deluge. Young folks have been bought the story of an El Dorado overseas, in all places was paradise besides Nigeria. For the higher half of the final ten or so years, each the Atlantic Ocean and the Sahara Desert opened up as graveyards that swallowed the our bodies and desires of hundreds of our younger folks. In reality, over time, many younger folks have discovered a brand new life overseas and we thank God for that. Migration is a human occasion and is a component of our civilization. I used to be subsequently when Pope Leo, talking to school college students in Cameroon, acknowledged the comprehensible want of younger Africans emigrate in search of a greater future. Yet he requested them to have “an ardent desire to serve your country” and to make use of what they’d learnt for the profit of their fellow residents. Some of you’ll depart Nigeria. Some will keep. Wherever you go, stay builders. But don’t conclude too shortly that nothing might be constructed right here.
Class of 2026, it is a time so that you can make crucial selections in your life. The penalties of some of the alternatives you make now will dwell with you endlessly. Now is the time to replicate on the type of life you want to dwell, single or married, the kids you’ll have, the profession you’ll construct, the desires you’ll have. Pack the device package to your pursuit of happiness effectively. So, assume effectively, pray effectively and select effectively. Your pursuit of happiness is a respectable enterprise that you just can not outsource to another person as a result of it’s the foundation for human flourishing and half of taking accountability to your life.
The circumstances beneath which we take that accountability are additionally formed by the society in which we dwell. When the Americans wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they acknowledged that: We maintain these truths to be self-evident, that every one males are created equal and that they’re endowed by their creator with sure inalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doc went on to say that governments are arrange exactly to reinforce the prospects of the pursuit of happiness by residents. The legitimacy of each authorities is predicated on its potential to create appropriate circumstances for the pursuit of happiness of all residents. Exactly what constitutes happiness, who sacrifices what for the attainment of another person’s happiness, these are the problems round which governance revolves. Here, constitutions and different state legal guidelines are sometimes made to make sure that there’s a stage taking part in subject for the attainment of these rights that are outlined as being inalienable. They are inalienable as a result of they aren’t the free reward of some benevolent dictator irrespective of the scale of his military or supply of energy. This is why elections when effectively carried out, enable residents to determine who can finest assist safe their happiness.
When Rev. Martin Luther King delivered his well-known, I Have a Dream Speech on August 28, 1963, he known as consideration to the contradiction between these guarantees of equality in each the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the way they associated to the circumstances of black folks in America. He employed searing metaphors to make his case. He stated that black folks had gathered to dramatize a shameful situation to which America had subjected them and that they’d come to the nation’s capital to money a cheque. He stated each paperwork have been promissory notes that will assure the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to all residents. However, he stated, black folks went to money this cheque and it was returned to them on grounds that the banks had inadequate funds! He categorically stated: We refuse to just accept that the financial institution can have inadequate funds and, he acknowledged thrice, We can’t be glad. Government can construct the street, however the citizen should nonetheless stroll it. Of course, we can not blame folks for failing to reach the place no street was constructed.
What does this say to us? It is that the combat for our dignity, the pursuit of happiness, is an ethical name. It isn’t an obligation that may be outsourced to authorities or different generations. The wrestle for attainment of the circumstances for the pursuit of happiness have to be based mostly on first, a correct understanding that the pursuit of happiness is a name to reclaim our dignity and self-worth. This is the place religion, understanding the thoughts and the need of God comes in. It is right here that, in our case right here, the Church steps in. In different phrases, what does the Church train us about happiness? How does it regulate its pursuit? How does it arm us to efficiently make the precise selections that may assure us happiness? Here, the Church affords us the ethical instruments with which to make these selections.
If we return to our penny catechism referred to above, we recall that God created us to like and serve him. To this finish, He has given us sacred Scripture, his phrase to information the alternatives that we make. Often, in actual life we are inclined to deal with the superficial and ephemeral definitions of happiness. The human pursuit of happiness in a human sense, usually leads us on an exhausting chase of will-o’-the-wisp. No sooner do we predict we now have discovered it than it slips by way of and we wish one thing else. Thus, to this point, the most effective definition of this irritating however elusive pursuit of happiness has been supplied to us by your patron saint, St. Augustine who spent the higher half of his life in its hopeless search in the fallacious locations. When he lastly discovered what actual happiness was, he stated: You have made us for your self O Lord and our hearts are stressed till they relaxation in you. There is one other saying of St. Augustine that I’ve grown fond of: Pondus meum amor meus. My weight is my love. What we love offers path to our lives. What we love shapes our selections and, over time, these selections change into what we construct. In different phrases, for the Christian believer, there is no such thing as a true happiness exterior God. This is why Jesus stated at first of his ministry:
I’ve come to deliver excellent news to the poor, sight to the blind [Lk. 4:18]. In explaining the true which means of life, he says; My kingdom isn’t of this world [Jn. 18:36]. I’m the bread of life, he who involves me won’t ever be hungry [Jn. 6:35].
The Catholic church has given us a wealthy corpus of teachings that ought to function an assist. From the sacred scriptures, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, the Corporal Works of Mercy, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Conciliar paperwork, Papal encyclicals, Apostolic and Episcopal exhortations amongst so many different means of catechesis. These fixed reflections are supposed to present us with solutions to the limitless questions that problem our lives. Building a great society is a precondition for serving to residents pursue happiness by making the precise ethical selections.
St. Augustine expresses this fantastically in one other phrase: Pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis. An excellent society in line with St. Augustine is predicated on peace which he says is the tranquility of order. This tranquility creates the precise circumstances for {our relationships} and helps us handle tensions arising from conflicts. As such, peace isn’t seen as simply the absence of struggle.
St Paul warned of these instances when folks is not going to put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to go well with their very own wishes, they’ll collect round them an important quantity of academics to say what their itching ears need to hear [ 2 Tim:4:3]. These are the instances they’ll say the church is conservative, it’s historical, they’ll accuse the church leaders of not dwelling in the true world, incapability to understand that instances are altering and that to them, the one everlasting actuality is change. Enter the echo chamber of ethical relativism. In the course of our pursuit of happiness, our imaginative and prescient is usually blurred by the dearth of the right information that we require to create the simply order St. Augustine envisages. In this echo chamber of ignorance and lack of an ethical imaginative and prescient, the choices of ethical relativism come in to blur and color our imaginative and prescient. Pope St. John Paul laid the muse for what Pope Benedict XVI later known as the dictatorship of relativism which solely values one’s ego and wishes, a sort of pay-as-you-go morality that sees ethical selections as a menu from which we select what fits our style. Pope Francis and Leo have continued with these similar themes arguing that ethical relativism is harmful as a result of it denies pure legislation, confuses good with evil and denies goal reality. To take care of these challenges, it is necessary that younger folks open themselves as much as new concepts whereas additionally deepening their information of the religion. Pope Francis inspired us in Fratelli Tutti to develop new friendships. Now Pope Leo has positioned this accountability instantly earlier than your technology. In Magnifica Humanitas, he says: “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era.” Class of 2026, that is now your period.
The period you might be being requested to form is altering with extraordinary velocity as a result of of synthetic intelligence. I’ve tried to grasp what AI means to your technology. Education, drugs, banking, agriculture, legislation, engineering, enterprise and authorities are all being reshaped. It jogs my memory of cement whereas it’s nonetheless being blended. While it’s moist, you possibly can nonetheless assist decide what can be constructed with it. Your technology has arrived whereas the cement continues to be being blended. The IMF estimates that AI will have an effect on about 4 out of each ten jobs in the world. Some of these jobs are the professions you might be getting ready to enter.
These modifications are additionally placing new instruments in your fingers. The distance between an concept and what might be constructed from it has shortened dramatically. One particular person can now do work that when required an workplace, workers and enormous quantities of capital. Human beings have been given extraordinary new powers of information, manufacturing and group. When I examine the instruments accessible to you with these accessible to my technology at your age, the distinction is staggering. Scripture reminds us that to whom a lot is given, a lot is predicted. What is know-how for, and what variety of human society are we constructing with it?
The Church’s understanding of growth helps us reply this. I’ve had the privilege of serving in the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The Church makes use of that expression to remind us that growth should attain the entire particular person and each particular person. This conviction can be one of the explanations I accepted to be one of the leaders of Veritas Enterprise, the place we’re bringing universities, know-how, enterprise and capital collectively round sensible issues of poverty and growth. At the guts of this work is the ambition to eradicate excessive poverty utilizing AI and enterprise. Augustine University has a pure place in work of this sort, and a few of you sitting earlier than me might but change into half of what we construct.
This concern for the entire particular person additionally helps us perceive the place of materials issues in our pursuit of happiness. Material and temporal issues which we will see and really feel usually may give us happiness, however in the top, happiness isn’t the identical as pleasure. The wealthy younger man who ran and knelt earlier than Jesus asking what he wanted to inherit everlasting life was real in his request. Yet, three contradictions emerge in the textual content. First, he’s younger and wealthy and he ought to not be both working or kneeling in public. He betrays himself by in search of the dominion as an inheritance, maybe the identical manner he has acquired his wealth! Not all issues might be inherited. An excellent life nonetheless needs to be lived. His riches have been a assure of his happiness. When Jesus made the final word demand of him, to promote every little thing and provides the proceeds to the poor, he turned his again. Misused, riches might be an impediment to the pursuit of actual happiness.
Class of 2026, we even have to consider what we hope to inherit as a technology. We all admit that these are tough instances however they’re additionally instances of promise. We will not be on the lookout for completed merchandise to inherit. Nation constructing is about every technology making its personal contributions. Only lately at St. Finbarr’s College right here in Lagos, I recalled St. Augustine’s phrases: Pondus meum amor meus. My weight is my love. I stated then that each establishment reveals what it loves by what it builds. I consider the identical is true of a technology. If corruption is what we construct, it reveals one thing about what we love. If we construct good faculties, functioning hospitals, dependable vitality, sincere companies and establishments in which abnormal folks can flourish, these too reveal what we love. If we construct a Nigeria free of poverty, that too will reveal what we love.
There is one thing right here that troubles me. Nigeria has the second largest Catholic inhabitants in Africa. Yet the World Bank estimates that 123 million Nigerians, greater than half our inhabitants, lived in excessive poverty in 2025. Nigeria additionally carried the most important quantity of folks dwelling in excessive poverty in the world in 2025. Each truth ought to concern us. Put collectively, they need to disturb us much more. I can not consider {that a} religion which has fashioned so many thousands and thousands of us ought to depart so little proof in the circumstances beneath which so many of our folks dwell. Helping to eradicate excessive poverty should change into half of that proof. We all know what these numbers appear like. It is the mama in the village who can not attain first rate main healthcare when her little one is sick. It is the household that also lives with out dependable vitality. It is the kid whose training might finish as a result of her mother and father can not afford the following step. It is the younger man or lady with an concept, keen fingers and ambition, however no means to construct an enterprise. These are the folks behind the numbers.
UNICEF reported in 2024 that 18.3 million Nigerian kids of main and junior secondary faculty age have been out of faculty. How many future docs, engineers, academics and entrepreneurs are amongst them? How many might by no means uncover their skills? Universities exist to enlarge information and assist societies clear up their issues. A medical diploma heals no affected person till its information is used to deal with the sick. A level in agriculture places no meals on anyone’s desk till somebody applies it to the farm. What, then, ought to we anticipate from the training you’ve gotten acquired?
Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan estimates that 86 million Nigerians don’t have any entry to electrical energy. We are all Nigerians. We know that even amongst these counted as having electrical energy, many can not depend upon it. Some rely themselves lucky to obtain 4 hours out of twenty-four. Imagine a younger lady who has an order to stitch fifty faculty uniforms. She has the talents, the machine and the shoppers, however can not end as a result of there is no such thing as a electrical energy. There is an issue ready to be solved and an enterprise ready to be constructed. Imagine ten of you establishing ten such enterprises, every using 5 different folks. That could be fifty new jobs. A thousand graduates may create 5 thousand. And if these enterprises clear up issues in electrical energy, meals, healthcare or training, your prosperity may also contribute to the prosperity of others.
Faced with wants of this measurement, Scripture directs our consideration to what’s already accessible to us. I’ve all the time discovered God’s encounter with Moses very instructive. When Moses fearful about what lay forward, God requested him: “What is that in your hand?” Moses had a workers. The widow had a little bit oil. The disciples had 5 loaves and two fish. In the parable of the abilities, everybody acquired one thing. Class of 2026, what do you’ve gotten in your fingers? You have an training. You have youth. You have friendships and networks. You have concepts. And you might be getting into the world at a time when know-how has tremendously elevated what one particular person can do with these items.
We should additionally acknowledge what’s in the fingers of the folks we hope to serve. Years of working amongst abnormal folks have taught me that the poor will not be empty-handed. They have labour, information, relationships, land, expertise, concepts and ambitions. We have usually spoken about poverty as if the poor have been merely folks to whom one thing have to be given. We should study to construct programs in which individuals can produce, personal, earn and take part. The ethical function and the financial function needn’t be enemies.
Most instances, the sources we want are already earlier than us. Imagine a person looking out his complete home for his spectacles whereas they sit on his head. He searches in all places, but the very factor he wants is already there. Much like Santiago, the younger shepherd in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, one of the world’s most generally translated novels. He travelled far in search of treasure, solely to find it the place his journey started. How usually can we search the world for options whereas overlooking the talents of the folks standing earlier than us? Imagine constructing a staircase for somebody who makes use of a wheelchair, after which questioning why that particular person can not enter the constructing. The failure started with the design. The similar is true of establishments meant to serve the poor. We should see their circumstances, their talents and what they will change into. Only then can we construct establishments that assist them flourish.
We have seen what occurs when folks acknowledge alternatives that others overlook. When Nigeria ready to introduce cell telephones in 2001, main Western telecommunications corporations examined the market however declined to speculate. They couldn’t see how sufficient abnormal Nigerians would pay for the service. African corporations noticed what they’d missed. They invested, constructed networks and opened the market. Nigeria had about 450,000 phone strains earlier than the revolution. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, by the top of 2025, we had virtually 180 million lively phone subscriptions. The sector has grown to contribute extra to our nationwide economic system than crude petroleum and pure gasoline. What some of the world’s greatest corporations couldn’t see turned one of Nigeria’s nice industries. The folks have been already there. The demand was already there. Someone noticed it, believed in it, invested and constructed.
The missionaries provide us an instance of what it means to see want, consider in folks and construct. They noticed a toddler sitting in a village classroom and believed that little one may change into a physician, trainer, priest or chief. Because they believed, they constructed faculties. They noticed the sick and believed their lives have been price saving. Because they believed, they constructed hospitals. I’ve spent parts of my life reflecting on what the missionaries achieved in this nation. They didn’t seek for communities already crammed with faculties and hospitals. They went the place there was most to construct. Your technology now possesses instruments they may by no means have imagined. Where then ought to the most effective builders go? Surely, the place there’s nonetheless essentially the most to construct. Nigeria is ready.
This custom of constructing establishments across the wants of the poor goes again centuries. In 1462, Franciscan friars established the Monte di Pietà, or Mountain of Piety, in Perugia, Italy. It was the world’s pioneering microfinance financial institution and the muse of what we all know right this moment as the event finance trade. It lent to poor widows, labourers and artisans whom standard lenders missed. While some moneylenders charged fifty per cent, establishments of this sort may lend at about 5 per cent. By the eighteenth century, historic accounts file roughly seven hundred Monti di Pietà throughout Italy. The Catholic Church noticed the productive talents of the poor and constructed the establishments to serve them.
Five centuries later, in 1956, inside my very own lifetime, one other Catholic priest, Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, impressed by Catholic social educating, together with Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, helped 5 former college students set up a small industrial cooperative in northern Spain. Students such as you. That enterprise turned Mondragon, the world’s largest worker-cooperative federation. The London School of Economics has described it as the most important firm headquartered in the Basque Country. According to Mondragon’s personal data, it’s the Basque Country’s largest employer and Spain’s fifth-largest personal employer. In 2025, it recorded over €11 billion in gross sales, greater than 71,000 staff and almost €619 million in earnings. A priest and 5 college students laid the foundations of an enterprise that now employs greater than seventy thousand folks. What may you construct?
This brings me again to Veritas Enterprise, which I co-chair with Professor Bart Nnaji. Just because the social educating expressed in Quadragesimo Anno helped encourage Mondragon, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas has impressed us to deliver universities, synthetic intelligence, enterprise and capital collectively to assist finish vitality poverty, main healthcare poverty and excessive financial poverty throughout Africa. We are in search of to construct establishments by way of which the talents of thousands and thousands of Africans can discover productive expression. If a priest and 5 college students may start what turned one of Spain’s largest enterprises, think about what our universities and younger folks may construct throughout Africa. Perhaps the foundations of one of Africa’s biggest enterprises are ready to be laid by somebody sitting earlier than me right this moment.
So, allow us to cease whining, specializing in workplace holders and their foibles and ask how we will all assist to resume the face of the earth. Leadership is about concepts not workplace holding. Each set of politicians might proceed to depart us worse than they met us. Yet, the worth of our training lies in dealing with the challenges that lie forward and seizing the second. Leave your self open for use by God. Respond to inspiration and observe your desires.
We all have come to take flying as a routine. Yet, what number of of us recall how it began? We received right here by way of the dream of two brothers who imagined what the world had not thought was potential. Wilbur Wright was born close to Millville, Indiana, whereas Orville was born in Dayton, Ohio. Their ideas about flying appeared like insanity. Yet, on December seventeenth, 1903, they determined to check their desires. Their first try and fly lasted solely 12 seconds and lined 120 ft. They made 4 flights that day. The fourth lasted 59 seconds and lined 852 ft. Their plane was later broken, however the dream didn’t die. In July this yr, a aircraft flew from Melbourne to Toulouse for twenty-four hrs. 24 minutes continuous. Let us use right this moment’s tragedies and difficulties to dream for a greater tomorrow. The distance between what human beings can think about and what they will construct retains shrinking. Your technology has arrived at one other such second.
Life usually presents us alternatives to change into heroes or heroines. Remember the story of George Floyd in 2020, after a retailer reported that he had used a suspected counterfeit $20 invoice? His arrest and subsequent homicide may need handed like many different instances besides {that a} 17-year-old lady known as Darnella Frazier occurred to be among the many passersby. Her recorded video modified the course of historical past. She later acquired a particular quotation from the Pulitzer Prize Board. She had a phone in her hand and made a selection about how you can use it. Again, what do you’ve gotten in your fingers?
Class of 2026, discover one downside round you that your training may also help clear up. Understand it. Convene a circle of individuals who share your concern. Begin fixing it. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, which helped launch corporations akin to Airbnb, affords entrepreneurs a easy instruction: “Make something people want.” Show that your answer works. Show that individuals worth it. Capital could have a cause to observe. You could make a dwelling fixing issues. You can construct wealth doing so. And you possibly can serve the widespread good. Imagine a younger lady who begins by cooking lunch for 5 clients in her neighbourhood. The meals is sweet. Soon twenty folks need to purchase from her. She wants a much bigger pot, one other pair of fingers and a bigger kitchen. She has demonstrated demand {that a} lender or investor can perceive. The extra folks she serves, the stronger her enterprise can change into. Begin with what you’ve gotten. Solve an issue effectively. Let the worth you create appeal to the sources you should develop.
There is an concept known as cathedral pondering. The nice cathedrals of Europe generally took generations to construct. Those who laid their foundations knew that they could by no means dwell to see the roofs accomplished. Yet they started, trusting others to complete the work. This is a component of the long-term imaginative and prescient that has marked the Catholic custom. We too should construct Nigeria with future generations in thoughts. Some of the establishments you determine might outlive you. Some of the bushes you plant might bear fruit for kids but unborn. What will your technology depart behind?
Class of 2026, as you march out together with your backpack in pursuit of happiness, guarantee it consists of the next: integrity, endurance, honesty, belief, love, sacrifice and take care of others. An limitless future lies earlier than you. It could also be a tough street to journey, however you’ve gotten the sources that these earlier than you didn’t have. Use them effectively. Remember, you reside solely as soon as.
In life, not each closed door is locked. When you might be lonely, discuss to God. Whatever wealth comes your manner, keep humble. If there’s one factor I would really like you to hold away from right here right this moment, it’s this: what you name happiness will form what you like. What you like will form what you construct. What your technology builds will form Nigeria.
Courtesy of AI, this can be the most effective time in historical past to construct. The instruments are in your fingers. Build your lives. Build your households. Build enterprises. Build establishments. Build know-how that serves human dignity. Help us construct Nigeria. One day, Nigeria will bear the marks of what your technology beloved sufficient to construct. Congratulations, Augustine University. Congratulations, Class of 2026. The Lord bless you.
• Excerpt from the convocation lecture delivered by the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukar, CON, on the Augustine University in Epe, Lagos lately
