Dear Nigerian Preachers, Your Pulpit is Not a Podcast Booth

Nigeria is no stranger to controversial and often inane rhetoric from its preachers. In 2020, whilst the entire country shuddered under the weight of an inscrutable pandemic whose full impacts were yet unknown, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, the founder and head pastor of Christ Embassy, took to the pulpit to echo some rabid conspiracy  about the 5G technology and its relationship with the  pandemic. In that same year, Bishop David Oyedepo, of the Living Faith Church, received intense backlash for calling the Covid-19 lockdown an attempt to shut down the church of God, insisting that churches remain open, despite scientific evidence that large public gatherings were perhaps the greatest exacerbating factor in the spread of the virus. The late T.B. Joshua and Rev. Father Ejike Mbaka have also stirred controversy in the past for making loaded politically charged prophecies—some of which never came to pass. Such as when Joshua predicted that Hilary Clinton would win the US Election in 2016, or when he asserted that the Covid-19 pandemic would “end by March 27, 2020.”

The past week however recorded a groundswell of controversial comments by Nigerian pastors, which have been dutifully echoed by their members. Pastor Poju Oyemade of The Covenant Nation, departed from his typical reticence, demanding that Nigerians show more appreciation for being Nigerian. “People are being programmed on social media to hate their country,” he said, leaning on a lectern, as he delivered a sermon. It’s unclear if his comments were intended to inspire his congregation or berate Nigerians (only he can speak to that), his commentary was however as head-scratching as it was inane. He excoriated medical personnel for not appreciating the relatively affordable cost of medical training in Nigeria compared to the US. “In Nigeria, a person would graduate as a medical doctor and spend five hundred thousand throughout. In America, you’ll graduate from John Hopkins or Harvard and you’ll spend two thousand dollars. Are you okay?” 

His commentary echoed the lack of concern for facts or statistical accuracy that seems to be a recurring theme with Nigerian preachers. The figure cited, presumably, as the total cost for a 7-year medical degree program in Nigeria—five hundred thousand Naira—was simply pulled out of thin air. That aside, he casually ignored the fact that the Nigerian educational system is steeped in dereliction. Faculties across universities in the country are understaffed, underfunded, and without the infrastructure required to deliver a decent quality of education. The healthcare system is similarly broken. Doctors strike every other month over the infrastructural decay that increasingly blights the healthcare system and the age-old problem of owed salaries and welfare benefits. Medical professionals continue to leave the country in droves on account of the government’s indifference to the decay in the health sector. 

The general theme of Oyemade’s polemic revolved around lamenting about tenuous concerns whilst steering clear of the real issues—the type of inane rhetoric one would hear at a beer parlor or in a conspiracy-addled podcast. “This is Nigeria, the land of opportunities,” he intoned, “leave all these people saying ‘Nigeria happened to them,” what are you talking about?” The degree of brazen ignorance and insensitivity in this statement is astounding. Mocking and dismissing people who have been throttled by the precarious economic situation in a country where even large multinational corporations are struggling to remain solvent, where inflation is constantly on the rise, where unemployment numbers continue to balloon, is simply unthinkable. 

As if to put his cluelessness on full display, he cited the fact that Nigerian Americans are among the best-educated and best-earning demographic in the United States. Doesn’t that defeat his entire argument? If Nigerians who migrate to better-organized countries have a reputation for thriving, doesn’t that prove that the problems lie with the dysfunctional systems in the country and that Nigeria is indeed holding its citizens back?

Not to be outdone, Pastor Emmanuel Iren of the Celebration Church International, who has seen his fair share of controversy over the years, stirred public outrage with his incandescent comments about sexual assault. “In this ministry, 9 out of 10 cases where the women came and said they were sexually assaulted ended up false.” His entire message appears to have been carefully contrived to undermine victims of sexual assault. Even in the moments where he appeared to advocate for consent, he did so in a cynical tone, framing sexual assault as a possible stumbling block to otherwise righteous men as opposed to an existential threat to women—again, the type of rhetoric one might hear on a manosphere-core podcast. 

The throughline between these incidents is that Nigerian pastors seem to be gleefully unaware of the weight and purpose of their office. Preachers—religious leaders in general—play an outsized role in shaping public discourse and the ideological orientation of society. It’s a position imbued with veritable significance, especially in Nigerian society where religious leaders are viewed as infallible by their followers. 

Given the weight of their office and the immense influence they wield, one would expect these preachers to put their position to good use by standing up to the despotic leaders in the country, just as Jesus sharply criticized the Pharisees and Sadducees for their hypocrisy. Instead, they seem content with bloviating pointlessly in the wake of an endless cycle of deplorable governance. Christians are being massacred in droves by “unknown gunmen”—most notably in Benue, Plateau and Kaduna. And yet, these clerics, who would otherwise be vocal about trivial matters, have been conspicuously silent. Jesus summarized Christian doctrine into a single word—love. Love for God, for oneself, and not least for one’s neighbor. To hew according to this doctrine is to be loud in the face of injustice and to consider the import of one’s words before speaking.