Article

Comment

Community

Development

27 February 2023

5 min read

Religion and prosperity: how Nigeria’s diaspora is changing the West

Superlatives may describe Nigeria, but it is vital to understand what drives its people, especially those abroad.

Chris Wadibia

Chris Wadibia is an academic advising on faith-based challenges. His research includes political Pentecostalism, global Christianity, and development.

Mushin Market in Lagos.

Omoeko Media, via Wikimedia Commons

Superpower superlatives

Nigeria is the economic and human capital giant of Africa. Nigeria has almost 100 million more people than Ethiopia, the country with the continent’s second largest population. Nigeria’s 2021 GDP of $440bn led the continent for the eighth consecutive year. Helped, no doubt by its oil production, the second biggest in Africa. Since gaining independence in 1960, the Nigerian economy has suffered from incessant fluctuations but its population has experienced consistent growth. As of today, Nigeria’s population of 211 million is about two-thirds the population of the United States’ 332 million. All living on sovereign territory one and a half times the size of Texas.

The oil curse

Spotlighting these statistics uncovers another side of Nigeria's place in ‘Giant of Africa’ discourses. With over 300 distinctive ethnic groups, it has one of Africa's highest levels of population density. Ethnic competition for control of state economic resources, mainly oil revenues, has evolved into a leading theme influencing Nigeria's postcolonial development. Nigeria first discovered its oil-harvesting potential in 1956. However, the oil curse, and the high-level corruption that characterises it, would not fully commandeer Nigerian governance until the concluding decades of the 20th century. Some have argued that the curse of corruption grew in these decades into a chief impediment preventing national development. Nigeria is equally blessed and cursed, and this curse affects how it behaves internally.

Transnationalism

High potential Nigeria is hobbled by a curse that also has significant effects internationally. Thanks to Nigeria's large diaspora, these effects impact the UK. It is therefore important to understand who this diaspora is and what it believes. Many have written about the relationship between corruption, transnationalismm, and capital flight in Nigeria; however, another, less researched case of trans-nationalisation has unfolded in recent Nigerian history that has relevance for global economics. Since the 1980s, many thousands of Nigerian Christians have emigrated abroad to the UK, USA, and beyond, regularly citing economic, political, and religious factors as influences behind their decision to leave.

This emigration takes with it a practice that has reshaped not only Nigeria but the destination countries. It has led to the dawning reality among people researching global Christianity that Christendom's geographical locus of power, in terms of total number of Christians and theological influence, is shifting away from the West to the Global South. The faith of the immigrants drives their emigration and results in a variety of economic and social impacts in their destination countries. So, it is vital to understand their faith and its practices. More than any other Christian denomination in Nigeria, the confluence of Christian spirituality, migration, and economics heavily informs the religiosity of Pentecostals, whose churches frequently send them out as missionaries in service of a highly ambitious vision to evangelise the entire non-Christian world.

What drives the diaspora?

Nigerian Pentecostals relocate to the UK emigrate with two main interests: evangelising Britons and building personal wealth. In recent decades, the prosperity gospel has emerged as the defining doctrine of Nigerian Pentecostalism, the country's most politically and economically dynamic denomination. The prosperity gospel lionizes wealth and its linchpin theological premise argues that God wants Christians to enjoy this-worldly lives characterised by material blessings and holistic success. Believers in the prosperity gospel understand material wealth as an important component of their spiritual inheritance and ardently strive to secure material prosperity for themselves and families.

The materially intoxicating nature of prosperity gospel sensibilities have spilled over into other denominations in Nigerian Christendom to the extent that many Nigerian Christians today believe that God wants them to enjoy a life marked by wealth and health. Correlations between belief in prosperity theology and increased individual wealth remain difficult to prove indisputably, but the prosperity gospel's way of inculcating in believers the desirability of material wealth certainly makes them more comfortable working to acquire it, whether in the UK or the USA or elsewhere.

Go global

With upwards of 1.3bn people of Black and African descent living worldwide, Nigerians account for over one out of every six Black and African individuals globally. The instilling of prosperity gospel-friendly values in the minds of globally mobile Nigerian Christians conditions the latter to contribute to the local economies of their new home countries.

Go West

Nigerian-Americans have grown into one of America's wealthiest migrant groups. For decades the typical Nigerian-American child has grown up aspiring to become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or businessperson, and today Nigerians can be found in senior positions in America's highest-grossing industries. Increasingly, this dynamic applies to the UK.

Nigerians in the UK

Nigeria, once a British colony, enjoys membership in the commonwealth; this geopolitical affiliation makes it easier for Nigerians to relocate to the UK and secure British citizenship. Aware of what they perceive as the ongoing secularisation of the West, many of these Nigerian Christians move to the UK inspired by a vision to re-evangelise the motherland, and this vision has given rise to the emergence of what is sometimes called ‘reverse mission.’

A succession of military dictatorships from 1966 to 1999 compelled many Nigerians to flee Nigeria to the UK in search of a better life. As a result, approximately 250,000 Nigerians live in the UK. Nigerians have evolved into one of the UK's largest and most influential African migrant communities. A disproportionate level of popular and scholarly attention devoted to the presence of Nigerians in the UK focuses on how Nigerian elites continue to buy expensive properties in London and the appreciable number of Nigerian students enrolled at UK universities. However, the landscape of Nigerians living in the UK contains additional dimensions in need of analysis and one of the most under-discussed of these dimensions concerns the influence of Nigerian Christian values on UK economic life.

Economic influencers

Based in north London Brent Cross' district, Jesus House is one of the UK's largest and most popular Nigerian Pentecostal churches. Like many other churches in the UK, Jesus House has joined the Warm Welcome Campaign in an effort to provide warm spaces to members of its community suffering from excessive exposure to cold winter temperatures. Yet, long after winter passes, this warmth will continue playing a valuable role by helping thaw the keys opening the ostensibly frozen doors to the next generation of UK prosperity.

Like in the USA, Nigerians in the UK envision for themselves lives marked by material prosperity. This vision regularly inspires them to pursue lucrative jobs and engage in entrepreneurship. For many UK-based Nigerians, prosperity gospel sensibilities, reverse mission interests, and the aim to build a better life intersect in ways that have constructive, wide-reaching social and economic consequences for the UK.

Sure, the prosperity gospel has its critics and its problems, but viewed positively, it can provide a source of economic energy for countries like the UK.

Inspired by Christian devotion and the belief that despite transient seasons of difficulty, prosperity is a sign of divine favour, Nigerian Christians contribute to the UK economy every day in consistent, substantive, and innovative ways. In a time when homes across the UK remain far colder than they should be, the prosperity-friendly piety of the UK's many Nigerian Christians offers a source of Christian warmth that deserves to be recognised more widely than it is.

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Community

Culture

Education

27 October 2025

5 min read

Artificial Intelligence needs these school lessons to avoid a Frankenstein fail

To learn and to learn to care are inseparable

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A cyborg like figure opens the door to a classroom.

AI in the classroom.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Recent worries expressed by Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, over the welfare of his chatbot bounced around my brain as I dropped my girls off for their first days at a new primary school last month. Maybe I felt an unconscious parallel. Maybe setting my daughters adrift in the swirling energy of a schoolyard containing ten times as many pupils as their previous one gave me a twinge of sympathy for a mogul launching his billion-dollar creation into the id-infused wilds of the internet. But perhaps it was more the feeling of disjuncture, the intuition that whatever information this bot would glean from trawling the web,it was fundamentally different from what my daughters would receive from that school, an education.

We often struggle to remember what it is to be educated, mistaking what can be assessed in a written or oral exam for knowledge. However, as Hannah Arendt observed over a half century ago, education is not primarily about accumulating a grab bag of information and skills, but rather about being nurtured into a love for the world, to have one’s desire to learn about, appreciate, and care for that world cultivated by people whom one respects and admires. As I was reminded, watching the hundreds of pupils and parents waiting for the morning bell, that sort of education only happens in places, be it at school or in the home, where children themselves feel loved and valued.

Our attachments are inextricably linked to learning. That’s why most of us can rattle off a list of our favourite teachers and describe moments when a subject took life as we suddenly saw it through their eyes. It’s why we can call to mind the gratitude we felt when a tutor coached us through a maths problem, lab project, or piano piece which we thought we would never master. Rather than being the pouring of facts into the empty bucket of our minds, our educations are each a unique story of connection, care, failure, and growth.

I cannot add 8+5 without recalling my first-grade teacher, the impossibly ancient Mrs Coleman, gazing benevolently over her half-moon glasses, correcting me that it was 13, not 12. When I stride across the stage of my village pantomime this December, I know memories of a pint-sized me hamming it up in my third-grade teacher’s self-penned play will flit in and out of mind. I cannot write an essay without the voice of Professor Coburn, my exacting university metaphysics instructor, asking me if I am really saying what is truthful, or am resorting to fuzzy language to paper over my lack of understanding. I have been shaped by my teachers. I find myself repaying the debts accrued to them in the way I care for students now. To learn and to learn to care are inseparable.

But what if they weren’t? AI seems to open the vista where intelligences can simply appear, trained not by humans, but by recursive algorithms, churning through billions of calculations on rows of servers located in isolated data centres. Yes, those calculations are mostly still done on human produced data, though the insatiable need for more has eaten through most everything freely available on the web and in whatever pirated databases of books and media these companies have been able to locate, but learning from human products is not the same as learning from human beings. The situation seems wholly original, wholly unimaginable.

Except it was imagined in a book written over two hundred years ago which, as Guillermo del Toro’s recent attempt to capture that vision reminds us, remains incredibly relevant today. Filmmakers, and from trailers I suspect Del Toro is no different here, tend to treat the story of Frankenstein as one of glamorous transgression: Dr Frankenstein as Faust, heroically testing the limits of human knowledge and human decency. But Mary Shelley’s protagonist is an altogether more pathetic character, one who creates in an extended bout of obsessive experimentation and then spends the rest of the book running from any obligation to care for the creature he has made.

It is the creature who is the true hero of the novel and he is a tragic one precisely because his intelligence, skills, and abilities are acquired outside the realm of human connection. When happenstance allows him to furtively observe lessons given within a loving, but impoverished family, he imagines himself into that circle of growing love and knowledge. It is when he is disabused of this notion, when the family discovers him and is disgusted, when he learns that he is doomed to know, but not be known, that he turns into a monster bent on revenge. As the Milton-quoting monster reminds Frankenstein, even Adam, though born fully grown, was nurtured by his maker. Since even this was denied creature, what choice does he have but to take the role of Satan and tear down the world that birthed him?

Are our modern maestros of AI Dr Frankensteins? Not yet. For all the talk of sentient-like responses by LLMs, avoiding talking about distressing topics for example, the best explanation of such behaviour is that they simply are mimicking their training sets which are full of humans expressing discomfort about those same topics. However, if these companies are really as serious about developing a fully sentient AGI, about achieving the so-called singularity, as much of the buzz around them suggests, then the chief difference between them and Frankenstein is one of ability rather than ambition. If eventually they are able to realise their goals and intelligences emerge, full of information, but unnurtured and unloved, how will they behave? Is there any reason to think that they will be more Adam than Satan when we are their creators?

At the end of Shelley’s novel, an unreconstructed Frankenstein tells his tale to a polar explorer in a ship just coming free from the pack ice. The explorer is facing the choice of plunging onward in the pursuit of knowledge, glory, and, possibly, death, or heeding the call of human connections, his sister’s love, his crew’s desire to see their families. Frankenstein urges him on, appeals to all his ambitions, hoping to drown out the call of home. He fails. The ship turns homeward. Knowledge shorn of attachment, ambition that ignores obligation, these, Shelley tells us, are not worth pursuing. Will we listen to her warning?

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