Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah
People of my era grew up with what in these days was known as, The Penny Catechism, slightly booklet that coated 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 e book 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 eternally. 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 similar to these, we should always console each other [1 Thes.4:18]. However, we’re nonetheless right here on earth, youngsters 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 typically say, they felt as in the event that they had been in heaven on their wedding ceremony day. Caught in the net of struggling, some folks say they really feel like they’re residing 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 loss of life, a lot occurs and rather a lot of it’s based mostly on the non-public decisions we make. An excellent life right here on earth or in attending to heaven all rely upon obedience to each the legal guidelines of God and civil legal guidelines. Many would argue that conserving the legal guidelines of God already makes residing 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’t 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 confer with as, the pursuit of happiness. Graduating from a prestigious Catholic college similar to yours, named after the best theologian ever to return out of Africa, we’d hope that you’ve been outfitted with essentially the most sound ethical instruments to navigate by 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 dad and mom and household, your academics, and all these whose laborious work has introduced you to today. Many of you arrived at this establishment a lot youthful and largely inexperienced and strangers to 1 one other. It is my hope that every one of you are actually higher human beings, extra mature, have made extra pals and are ready to face the following part of your life which begins proper now. Today, you’ll celebration, believing you are actually free from examinations. In many prestigious universities all over the world, college students have typically suffered self-inflicted bodily hurt and even misplaced their lives in the course of these submit graduate orgies. I enjoin you to relax, take heed 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 start out.
Some years again, in an handle similar to this to college students in an American college, the then first girl, Michelle Obama instructed the graduands a narrative about her youngsters. She stated she typically asks her youngsters what sports activities they like or dislike. She stated she would typically ask them to go and learn to play the sport they didn’t like. The lesson for the kids is: Life isn’t going to present you solely the stuff you need. You will meet folks you don’t like in college or one place of work or the opposite. The world won’t shift its furnishings to accommodate your wants. So, whilst you have the prospect, make new pals, be taught a brand new language, style new meals, in brief, attempt various things. Do not despise the meals, language, or tradition of your new hosts. Life will embrace you for those who speak in confidence to new concepts.
Until I got here to Lagos, the concept folks ate snail was revolting to me. Time handed, a sequence of visits to households and pals, provides 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 a couple of of our bishops from the north to the delicacy of snails! I’m relying on Archbishop Martins to assist me convert his two pals, President of Conference, Archbishop Ndagoso and Archbishop Kaigama, former President of Conference. Snail could also be a matter of style. There are different decisions in life that can’t merely be diminished 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 totally different elements of Nigeria amongst totally different folks, compelled to eat meals that they had by no means imagined, compelled to drink water from streams away from the consolation of their silver taps at residence. I’ve seen individuals who held others exterior their ethnicity in contempt flip round to settle amongst these folks. Today, by college life, away from the womb of household and ethnic consolation, many have ended up falling in love and marrying men and women of ethnic or spiritual teams they held in contempt. I’m hopeful that many of you could have made pals from different elements of Nigeria from totally different social strata apart from yours. Please preserve these friendships and increase 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 vital that you realize that one of these younger males or girls 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 turn into annoyed 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 high 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 one can safe admission right into a college, how one can get a first-class, how one can safe a job after you could have graduated with a first-class, you usually tend to be instructed, all of it relies upon. A younger era of Nigerians and their dad and mom are satisfied that nothing can come to you as a result of of benefit and that each alternative depends upon whom you realize not what you realize. From breaking the legislation with out penalties to residing out a jail sentence, every part will be negotiated. Enter a tradition of ethical relativism. A compass whose north adjustments based on who’s holding it can’t information anybody residence.
It is towards this background that the japa syndrome got here in as an answer. It grew to become a rave and a deluge. Young folks had 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 fact, 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 an element of our civilization. I used to be due to this fact 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 that they had learnt for the profit of their fellow residents. Some of you’ll go away Nigeria. Some will keep. Wherever you go, stay builders. But don’t conclude too rapidly that nothing will be constructed right here.
Class of 2026, this can be 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 eternally. Now is the time to replicate on the type of life you want to dwell, single or married, the kids you could have, the profession you’ll construct, the desires you’ll have. Pack the instrument package in your pursuit of happiness nicely. So, suppose nicely, pray nicely and select nicely. Your pursuit of happiness is a legit enterprise that you just can’t outsource to another person as a result of it’s the foundation for human flourishing and half of taking duty in your life.
The situations beneath which we take that duty 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 relies on its capacity to create appropriate situations 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 don’t seem to be the free present of some benevolent dictator irrespective of the dimensions of his military or supply of energy. This is why elections when nicely carried out, permit residents to resolve 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 situations 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 that they had come to the nation’s capital to money a cheque. He stated each paperwork had been promissory notes that may 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 highway, however the citizen should nonetheless stroll it. Of course, we can’t blame folks for failing to reach the place no highway was constructed.
What does this say to us? It is that the struggle 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 battle for attainment of the situations for the pursuit of happiness should 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 desire 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 proper decisions that may assure us happiness? Here, the Church provides us the ethical instruments with which to make these decisions.
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 give attention to the superficial and ephemeral definitions of happiness. The human pursuit of happiness in a human sense, typically leads us on an exhausting chase of will-o’-the-wisp. No sooner do we expect we’ve got discovered it than it slips by and we wish one thing else. Thus, to date, the very best 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 improper 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 provides path to our lives. What we love shapes our decisions and, over time, these decisions turn into what we construct. In different phrases, for the Christian believer, there isn’t 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 that 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 infinite questions that problem our lives. Building a superb society is a precondition for serving to residents pursue happiness by making the proper ethical decisions.
St. Augustine expresses this superbly in one other phrase: Pax omnium rerum tranquillitas ordinis. An excellent society based on St. Augustine relies on peace which he says is the tranquility of order. This tranquility creates the proper situations for {our relationships} and helps us handle tensions arising from conflicts. As such, peace isn’t seen as simply the absence of warfare.
St Paul warned of these instances when folks won’t put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to swimsuit their very own needs, they are going to collect round them a fantastic quantity of academics to say what their itching ears wish to hear [ 2 Tim:4:3]. These are the instances they are going to say the church is conservative, it’s historical, they are going to accuse the church leaders of not residing in the true world, incapacity 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 commonly blurred by the shortage of the right data 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 inspiration for what Pope Benedict XVI later known as the dictatorship of relativism which solely values one’s ego and needs, a sort of pay-as-you-go morality that sees ethical decisions 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 fact. To cope with these challenges, it is vital that younger folks open themselves as much as new concepts whereas additionally deepening their data of the religion. Pope Francis inspired us in Fratelli Tutti to develop new friendships. Now Pope Leo has positioned this duty immediately earlier than your era. 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’re being requested to form is altering with extraordinary pace as a result of of synthetic intelligence. I’ve tried to grasp what AI means in your era. Education, medication, 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 shall be constructed with it. Your era has arrived whereas the cement remains 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’re making ready to enter.
These adjustments are additionally placing new instruments in your fingers. The distance between an thought and what will 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 data, manufacturing and group. When I examine the instruments out there to you with these out there to my era at your age, the distinction is staggering. Scripture reminds us that to whom a lot is given, a lot is anticipated. What is expertise for, and what type 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 also be one of the explanations I accepted to be one of the leaders of Veritas Enterprise, the place we’re bringing universities, expertise, enterprise and capital collectively round sensible issues of poverty and growth. At the center 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 turn 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 are able to see and really feel typically can provide us happiness, however in the tip, 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 operating or kneeling in public. He betrays himself by looking for the dominion as an inheritance, maybe the identical approach he has acquired his wealth! Not all issues will be inherited. An excellent life nonetheless needs to be lived. His riches had been a assure of his happiness. When Jesus made the final word demand of him, to promote every part and provides the proceeds to the poor, he turned his again. Misused, riches will be an impediment to the pursuit of actual happiness.
Class of 2026, we even have to consider what we hope to inherit as a era. We all admit that these are troublesome instances however they’re additionally instances of promise. We are usually not on the lookout for completed merchandise to inherit. Nation constructing is about every era making its personal contributions. Only not too long ago 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 imagine the identical is true of a era. If corruption is what we construct, it reveals one thing about what we love. If we construct good faculties, functioning hospitals, dependable vitality, trustworthy companies and establishments in which atypical 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 biggest quantity of folks residing 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’t imagine {that a} religion which has fashioned so many tens of millions of us ought to go away so little proof in the situations beneath which so many of our folks dwell. Helping to eradicate excessive poverty should turn into half of that proof. We all know what these numbers seem like. It is the mama in the village who can’t attain respectable major 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 dad and mom can’t afford the following step. It is the younger man or lady with an thought, prepared 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 youngsters of major and junior secondary college age had been out of college. How many future docs, engineers, academics and entrepreneurs are amongst them? How many might by no means uncover their skills? Universities exist to enlarge data and assist societies remedy their issues. A medical diploma heals no affected person till its data 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 count on from the training you could have obtained?
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’t rely 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 college uniforms. She has the abilities, the machine and the shoppers, however can’t end as a result of there isn’t 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 can be fifty new jobs. A thousand graduates may create 5 thousand. And if these enterprises remedy issues in electrical energy, meals, healthcare or training, your prosperity will even contribute to the prosperity of others.
Faced with wants of this dimension, Scripture directs our consideration to what’s already out there to us. I’ve all the time discovered God’s encounter with Moses very instructive. When Moses frightened about what lay forward, God requested him: “What is that in your hand?” Moses had a workers. The widow had slightly oil. The disciples had 5 loaves and two fish. In the parable of the abilities, everybody obtained one thing. Class of 2026, what do you could have in your fingers? You have an training. You have youth. You have friendships and networks. You have concepts. And you’re coming into the world at a time when expertise has tremendously elevated what one particular person can do with this stuff.
We should additionally acknowledge what’s in the fingers of the folks we hope to serve. Years of working amongst atypical folks have taught me that the poor are usually not empty-handed. They have labour, data, relationships, land, expertise, concepts and ambitions. We have typically spoken about poverty as if the poor had been merely folks to whom one thing should be given. We should be taught to construct methods in which individuals can produce, personal, earn and take part. The ethical function and the financial function needn’t be enemies.
Most instances, the assets we’d like are already earlier than us. Imagine a person looking out his total 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 typically 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’t 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 skills and what they’ll turn 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 take a position. They couldn’t see how sufficient atypical Nigerians would pay for the service. African corporations noticed what that they had missed. They invested, constructed networks and opened the market. Nigeria had about 450,000 phone traces earlier than the revolution. According to the Nigerian Communications Commission, by the tip of 2025, we had nearly 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 largest corporations couldn’t see grew to become one of Nigeria’s nice industries. The folks had 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, imagine in folks and construct. They noticed a baby sitting in a village classroom and believed that little one may turn into a health care provider, instructor, priest or chief. Because they believed, they constructed faculties. They noticed the sick and believed their lives had 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 full of faculties and hospitals. They went the place there was most to construct. Your era now possesses instruments they might by no means have imagined. Where then ought to the very best 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 inspiration of what we all know in the present day as the event finance business. It lent to poor widows, labourers and artisans whom standard lenders neglected. 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 skills 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 grew to become Mondragon, the world’s largest worker-cooperative federation. The London School of Economics has described it as the biggest 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 practically €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 would possibly 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, major healthcare poverty and excessive financial poverty throughout Africa. We are looking for to construct establishments by which the talents of tens of millions of Africans can discover productive expression. If a priest and 5 college students may start what grew to become 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 in the present day.
So, allow us to cease whining, specializing in workplace holders and their foibles and ask how we are able to 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 going through 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 obtained right here by the dream of two brothers who imagined what the world had not thought was attainable. 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 coated 120 ft. They made 4 flights that day. The fourth lasted 59 seconds and coated 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 in the present day’s tragedies and difficulties to dream for a greater tomorrow. The distance between what human beings can think about and what they’ll construct retains shrinking. Your era has arrived at one other such second.
Life typically presents us alternatives to turn 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 circumstances 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 obtained a particular quotation from the Pulitzer Prize Board. She had a phone in her hand and made a alternative about how one can use it. Again, what do you could have in your fingers?
Class of 2026, discover one downside round you that your training will help remedy. 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 similar to Airbnb, provides entrepreneurs a easy instruction: “Make something people want.” Show that your resolution works. Show that folks worth it. Capital may have a cause to observe. You could make a residing 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 prospects in her neighbourhood. The meals is sweet. Soon twenty folks wish to purchase from her. She wants an even 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 turn into. Begin with what you could have. Solve an issue nicely. Let the worth you create appeal to the assets it is advisable to develop.
There is an thought known as cathedral considering. The nice cathedrals of Europe typically took generations to construct. Those who laid their foundations knew that they may by no means dwell to see the roofs accomplished. Yet they started, trusting others to complete the work. This is an element 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 identify might outlive you. Some of the bushes you plant might bear fruit for kids but unborn. What will your era go away behind?
Class of 2026, as you march out along with your backpack in pursuit of happiness, guarantee it consists of the next: integrity, persistence, honesty, belief, love, sacrifice and look after others. An infinite future lies earlier than you. It could also be a tough highway to journey, however you could have the assets that these earlier than you didn’t have. Use them nicely. Remember, you reside solely as soon as.
In life, not each closed door is locked. When you’re lonely, speak to God. Whatever wealth comes your approach, keep humble. If there’s one factor I would love you to hold away from right here in the present day, it’s this: what you name happiness will form what you like. What you like will form what you construct. What your era builds will form Nigeria.
Courtesy of AI, this can be the very best time in historical past to construct. The instruments are in your fingers. Build your lives. Build your households. Build enterprises. Build establishments. Build expertise that serves human dignity. Help us construct Nigeria. One day, Nigeria will bear the marks of what your era liked 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 not too long ago
