The Confluence Nobody Talks About
There is a question I keep circling back to, and it is this: is there a connection between the quality of spiritual leadership and political leadership in Nigeria that explains, at least in part, why we remain stuck? Not just a vague resemblance, but a real, structural confluence where the failures of both feed off each other and keep the country in a loop.
On one side, you have political leaders who are transparently obsessed with self-enrichment, disconnected from the people they claim to serve, living their best lives while the average Nigerian struggles for basics like electricity and security. On the other side, you have religious leaders who consistently reframe problems that require human action, planning, and accountability as spiritual battles to be fought on our knees. Put these two together and you get a society that neither demands accountability from its rulers nor mobilizes to solve its own problems. That is the confluence. And I think it is worth examining honestly.
The same logic of “wait on God” and “wait on a big man” runs through both the altar and the ballot. One teaches you to pray and wait; the other teaches you to be patient and loyal. Neither teaches you to act.
God Gave Us the Resources. What Did We Do With Them?
Consider what Nigeria actually has. The country holds vast reserves of crude oil, natural gas, gold (an estimated 600,000 tonnes worth over £34 billion), lithium (potentially the fifth-largest reserves in the world), cobalt (around 700,000 metric tonnes), nickel, rare earth elements, tin, and columbite. It is the largest oil producer in Africa and the sixth-largest global exporter. By any measure, Nigeria was dealt a strong hand.
And yet, despite oil revenues per capita increasing from US$33 in 1965 to US$325 in 2000, the poverty rate surged from 26% to nearly 70% over the same period. The mining sector accounts for only 0.3% of GDP because the oil boom made everyone forget everything else existed. This is not a country that was given little. This is a country that was given much and squandered it.
The Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30 is hard to read without thinking of Nigeria. The master entrusts his servants with resources according to their ability: five talents, two talents, one talent. The first two invest and multiply. The third buries his in the ground and returns it untouched, full of excuses. The master’s verdict is blunt: “You wicked, lazy servant.” The parable is fundamentally about stewardship and accountability. God entrusts resources and expects faithful management of them. Nigeria, by any honest reading, falls squarely into the category of the servant who received five talents and buried them.
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” (Matthew 25:29)
But here is the critical nuance: the parable cuts upward, at the stewards entrusted with much, not at the masses. The person praying for electricity in Surulere is not the one who buried the talent. The people controlling the talent are a specific class of political and economic elites. The indictment belongs to those who were given stewardship and chose to enrich themselves instead.
Prayer Without Action Is Not Faith. It Is Abdication.
Now, I want to be careful here, because this is where the argument can go sideways. I am not saying prayer is the problem. Scripture commands petition. Philippians 4:6 says, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” The Lord’s Prayer itself includes “give us this day our daily bread.” Asking God for provision and protection is not unbiblical. It is expected.
What is unbiblical is prayer used as a substitute for responsibility. The bury-and-pray move. And this is where Nehemiah 4:9 becomes the corrective lens: “We prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat.” Both. Petition accompanied by action. Nehemiah did not pray and then sit down to wait for the walls to build themselves. He prayed, posted guards, and got to work. That is the biblical model: stewardship alongside supplication, not one replacing the other.
When we pray for God to give us electricity, to make our leaders provide security, to fix our roads, we are essentially asking God to do what He already gave us the resources and the intelligence to do ourselves. Does that not conflict with the very word we claim to follow? God created Nigeria with oil, gold, cobalt, lithium, fertile land, and a massive, energetic population. The resources are the answer to the prayer. We just refuse to steward them.
Petition is meant to accompany stewardship, not replace it. When prayer becomes a substitute for action, it stops being faith and starts being negligence dressed in spiritual language.
And a quick aside worth noting: “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible. It comes from Aesop’s fables, later popularized by Algernon Sidney and Benjamin Franklin. A lot of Nigerians cite it as scripture. It is not. But the irony is that the actual scriptures, like the Parable of the Talents and Nehemiah 4:9, make an even stronger case for the same principle.
The Resource Curse: When Abundance Corrodes Stewardship
The paradox of Nigeria’s wealth is not just a theological problem. It is a well-documented economic phenomenon. Scholars call it the “resource curse” or the “paradox of plenty.” Terry Lynn Karl’s The Paradox of Plenty (1997) and Michael Ross’s The Oil Curse both describe how countries rich in natural resources often perform worse economically than those with fewer resources. Nigeria is a textbook case.
The Guardian reported in 2021 that Nigeria, despite being the largest oil producer in Africa and holding the tenth-largest proven oil reserves in the world, has seen its oil wealth become “more of a curse than a blessing,” with weak institutions and poor governance leading the country to fail to realize its full potential. The oil boom did not just fail to develop Nigeria; it actively corroded the institutions that might have developed it. It deepened corruption, hollowed out agriculture and manufacturing, and created a rentier state where political power became the primary route to wealth.
Richard Joseph gave this dynamic a precise academic name in 1987: prebendalism. In Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria, he argued that state power in Nigeria “is usually viewed by Nigerians as an array of prebends, the appropriation of which provides access to the state treasury and to control over remunerative licenses and contracts.” Public office is not a platform for service. It is a feeding trough. Joseph even anticipated the resource dimension back in 1978 in Affluence and Underdevelopment, arguing that the oil boom deepened Nigeria’s developmental challenges rather than driving growth.
The abundance is not squandered despite good stewardship being possible. The abundance is part of what corrodes the stewardship. The five-talent servant had the most to misuse.
This actually strengthens the Parable of the Talents reading. The servant who received the most had the greatest opportunity and the greatest temptation. Nigeria’s leaders were entrusted with extraordinary resources and chose to bury them in Swiss bank accounts instead of investing them in the nation.
The Transactional God: How Lack Reshapes Faith
Here is the part that troubles me most. When you live in a country where the basics of life are not guaranteed, where electricity is a luxury, where security is a prayer request, where clean water is not a given, your relationship with God inevitably shifts. It becomes transactional. You go to God not for communion but for survival. Not for intimacy but for intervention. And I think this is a tragedy, because it robs people of the deeper, relational faith that scripture actually describes.
Most countries do not have to pray for electricity. They do not hold vigils for stable governance. They do not fast for security. These are problems of infrastructure and political will, not spiritual warfare. But when your leaders fail you so completely that basic needs become unmet, you have no choice but to spiritualize what should be a civic demand. The lack itself reshapes the faith.
Femi Adeleye, a Nigerian evangelical, made this argument powerfully in Preachers of a Different Gospel (2011). He argued that the prosperity gospel “has left the church in a state of impotence, totally unable to address many of the societal and structural issues in Africa today.” His distinction between “the gospel of the cross” and “the gospel of champagne” captures exactly the transactional-versus-relational problem. Adeleye also argued that the prosperity gospel found fertile soil in Africa precisely because of the poverty. Poor people looking for any means to relieve their suffering follow preachers who promise divine shortcuts, and the cycle deepens. The lack creates the demand for a transactional God, and the transactional God prevents the civic action that would address the lack.
When there is huge material lack, it becomes exponentially harder to have an interpersonal, relational faith with God. The relationship gets hijacked by desperation, and desperation makes you vulnerable to anyone who promises a shortcut.
The Confluence Is Documented
The connection I sensed between the quality of spiritual and political leadership is not just intuition. Ebenezer Obadare argued it explicitly in Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (2018). He charted the turbulent course of democracy in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic and argued that the rise of Pentecostalism “is a force focused on appropriating state power, transforming the dynamics of the country and acting to demobilize civil society.” The blurred boundaries between the theocratic class and political officeholders create a system where a faith that teaches you to pray and wait actively suppresses the civic pressure that would hold leaders accountable.
This is the confluence, named and evidenced. The political class benefits from a population that spiritualizes its grievances instead of organizing around them. The religious class benefits from a population so materially desperate that it will pay for miracles. And the ordinary Nigerian is caught between two systems that both profit from their passivity.
Ogbu Kalu’s African Pentecostalism: An Introduction and Paul Gifford’s work on African Pentecostalism provide further academic grounding for this dynamic. The scholarship is clear: this is not a coincidence. It is a system.
A faith that teaches you to pray and wait can suppress the very civic pressure that would hold leaders accountable. The same logic runs through both the altar and the ballot.
So Where Does This Leave Us?
I am not anti-prayer. I am not anti-faith. I am against the weaponization of faith to excuse the failure of stewardship. I am against a theology that tells people to fast for electricity when the problem is that someone stole the budget for the power plant. I am against a political class that hides behind “God’s timing” while looting the treasury.
The Bible is clear. We are stewards, not spectators. We were given talents, and we will be held accountable for what we did with them. Nehemiah prayed and posted a guard. He did not choose one over the other. The model is faith and action, petition and stewardship, prayer and work. Nigeria has the resources. Nigeria has the people. What Nigeria lacks is leadership, both political and spiritual, that takes stewardship seriously.
Until that changes, we will keep praying for things God already gave us the power to build.