The Year of Outstanding Divine Favour: Nigerian Christianity, Coping Culture, and the Politics of…

Something has gone quietly wrong with us as a people, and we do not talk about it honestly enough. I am not talking about bad governance, though that is very much part of it. I am talking about what happens to a people after decades of sustained failure from every institution that should hold their lives together.

What happens is not revolution. What happens is adaptation.

We Learned to Cope. That Is the Problem.

We learn to cope, and in learning to cope, we remove every urgency to fix the actual problem.

Government cannot provide power, so we buy generators. Government cannot guarantee security, so we hire private guards and build estate walls. Government cannot fix the roads, so the Community Development Association collects levies and fills potholes. You take a relative to a government hospital and you bring your own generator to power the ICU equipment.

You do not protest. You just bring the generator. And somehow, life goes on.

Sociologists call this coping privatisation. When the state serially fails, citizens do not revolt. They individually solve what the state is supposed to solve collectively. The dangerous thing is that it works just enough to keep you alive and just busy enough to keep you from asking the harder questions.

The system does not need you angry. It needs you coping.

The Bandwidth Problem

Then a child gets kidnapped. Social media erupts for two days. The governor makes one appearance. Security agencies say nothing. By day three, your timeline has moved on.

This is not wickedness. Sustained trauma over many years produces psychological numbing as a survival mechanism. You cannot grieve every tragedy at the same intensity as the first one. Your emotional bandwidth simply runs out.

But that is precisely what a broken system depends on.

A Word From Inside the House

This is the part that burdens me most, and I want to be careful here.

I am a Christian, a Foursquare boy, and I want to speak from inside that house rather than throw stones from outside it. Religion, particularly Christianity, has been the last functioning hope infrastructure for ordinary Nigerians. There are Nigerian churches running schools in underserved communities, clinics, agricultural cooperatives. Catholic health infrastructure has saved lives that government hospitals abandoned. Some expressions of Nigerian Christianity are doing genuinely serious work.

But there is a strand, loud and dominant, that I have to name.

I can recite my church's annual themes for the last thirty years. From "Year of New Things" to "Outstanding Divine Favour" to "Unprecedented Divine Favour" to "Surpassing All Round Favour." As a child I genuinely loved these themes. As an adult I have to ask a harder question: after thirty years of themes, conferences, conventions, and crusades, what is the measurable collective evidence of transformed lives in our communities?

At least fifty percent of the people I grew up with in church have relocated abroad. Are we prepared to sit with what that means?

I am not saying God has not been faithful to individuals. I am asking whether the version of the gospel we have been preaching has equipped people to transform their communities, or merely to endure them while waiting for personal breakthrough.

There is a serious theological tradition that argues authentic Christian witness must translate into social and political transformation. I believe this. But I also know that my believing it does not make it the only legitimate reading of scripture.

Structurally Pacified

The people in Nigeria with the education, the networks, the voice, and the capacity to demand and drive change are often the same people too busy coping privately and too hopeful after the last convention to sustain organised outrage.

We are not naive. We are structurally pacified. And sometimes the pacification wears a spiritual vocabulary.

I do not write this with despair. I write it because I believe we are better than what we have settled for. But getting there requires us to stop outsourcing our thinking to annual themes and start asking our leaders, our pastors, and ourselves some genuinely uncomfortable questions.

The generator is not a solution. It is evidence of a failure we have agreed to absorb quietly.

We deserve better than that.