Non-achievers not qualified to criticise me: Duncan-Williams

Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams says people who cannot match his achievements in life are not qualified to criticise him.

The Presiding Bishop and General Overseer of the Christian Action Faith Ministries (CAFM) burst forth with that comment midway through his Sunday sermon when, according to him, certain members of his congregation hurled judgmental looks at him, as he narrated a story about how a rich Nigerian man depended on his (Duncan-Williams’) prayers to get round his insomnia.

‘You can look at me anyway you want to look at me and you can have that facial expression…with some of you I can look at your countenance and I know that you don’t agree with me but I will not apologise and stop preaching it. I’ll preach it. Your countenance [doesn’t] move me at all. You don’t know where I’ve come from. Please give me a break. You don’t have to agree with me. It is my opinion and I’m entitled to it’, he fired back at his alleged critics mottled among the congregation.

According to him, non-achievers and under-achievers are not qualified to criticise him.

‘…Until you’ve been where I am and you’ve done better than I, you are not qualified to criticise me so don’t overstep your boundaries’, he warned his critics.

‘Before you can sit down there and try to subject me to your logic and to your philosophy, ask yourself, what have you accomplished in life? I have 300 people on my payroll that I pay every month with IRS, SSNIT and other benefits just in this auditorium alone apart from other places; I oversee over 2,500 churches affiliated with Action Churches that are under my command. You, you haven’t accomplished anything. Just because you’ve been to some school, you can sit down there and you think you have the right to criticise somebody…please give me a break’, Archbishop Duncan-Williams thundered.

‘That’s the problem in society. Everybody thinks they can speak; I’ve been to school so I can read and write so I can just talk so you talk. Talk is cheap. Do something with your life. Affect people. Every day I feed over 220 drug addicts including 160 orphans, I feed them three times a day and I never complain. Over 250 people on scholarship roll and we pay scholarships every term without complain...and I carry all those responsibilities on my shoulders. And you, you don’t even have a child. You are not even married. You haven’t even paid the school fees of one child before and you have the audacity to contend with horsemen when you can’t even fight with footmen’.