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

Comment

Ethics

Politics

War & peace

23 June 2025

5 min read

We must invest in defence, fast - it’s the only moral thing to do

The responsible use of force today precludes pacifism

Emerson Csorba

Emerson Csorba works in deep tech, following experience in geopolitics and energy.

Amid a bombed alley, a victim is helped to walk by a rescue worker

Aftermath of a Russian drone attack, Odesa, Ukraine.

Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In May 2016, I was hiking the Southwest Coast Path in a group, trudging through dense forest between Lyme Regis and Weymouth, when a distinctly unsettling event occurred. As we moved along a narrow trail, a buzzing sound began—we assumed we had disturbed a bee’s nest. We quickened my pace, but the buzzing continued. Eventually, we emerged from the woods and looked up. The sound had not come from bees, but from a drone that had been following us.

I will never forget that sound; the eerie sense of something pursuing you, but unseen. In a recent BBC special on the war in Ukraine, a journalist documents the now-pervasive use of drones, the journalist and Ukrainian soldiers hiding under the cover of forest as a Russian drone scans the area, before escaping to their car in which an AI voice says ‘Detection: multiple drones, multiple pilots, high signal strength’ as they journey overground. This is the new era of covert warfare, where the enemy strikes without being easily identified. You hear the hum, but the source is elusive.

In the coming years, this kind of psychological warfare will make its way into Western cities. Terrorist attacks will shift from in-person confrontations—like the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury—towards remote, anonymous assaults: drones drifting from overseas into coastal cities to target civilians, or swarms carrying out mass attacks in dense downtown cores. The aim will be psychological trauma at scale. Civilians will grow hesitant to leave home, hyper-sensitive to the buzz of anonymous drones in their own areas. Iran recently declared that no US, British, or French base is safe from retaliation in the emerging Israel–Iran war. It is not difficult to imagine Western cities soon being viewed as legitimate targets.

We are entering a time of intensified conflict, with national security becoming the dominant framework for policymaking. The watchword of UK government policy is ‘security,’ and—writing now from Montréal—the recent Canadian election was framed around which party and leader could best protect Canadians from external threat. In this context, even domains once governed by cooperation are transformed into zero-sum contests, because national security framing by its nature shifts focus from reciprocity to limitation of the other.

Free trade, for example - fundamentally the mutually beneficial exchange of goods and services as part of the creation of value - becomes, in a security-focused world, a question of containment. Trade, in a security-focused world, is turned on its head, free trade becoming trade wars. Fairness (in which the pie is grown and shared across multiple people) is replaced by interest, whether the interest of countries or communities and individuals within them seeking to protect themselves. As US–China competition escalates, we can expect human relations—among both states and citizens—to become even more zero-sum.

In such an environment, do morals still matter? When the enemy grows more ruthless and more innovative in an era of national security, must we match them in kind? Or is it still possible to uphold principles while defending ourselves?

Restraint and humility are still critical virtues—but must not be mistaken for weakness.

In a recent Times column, Juliet Samuel suggested that gestures of non-aggression—such as Finland’s 2015 destruction of its one million landmine stockpile—now appear dangerously naïve. Ukraine, for its part, has rightly disregarded the Ottawa and Oslo (banning cluster munitions) conventions. Its survival depends on ingenuity, rapid technological development (for instance through the work of funds such as D3), and collaboration with its allies to prototype and deploy advanced systems.

Reinhold Niebuhr, in Moral Man and Immoral Society, contends that to be moral, one must possess the capacity for force—‘power must be challenged by power.’ That power, however, must be exercised with responsibility, humility, and moral purpose. Nigel Biggar, my former doctoral supervisor and a key figure in the Niebuhr tradition of Christian realism, argues in In Defence of War that war can be justified on balance when it meets the criteria of jus ad bellum: just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, proportionality, and reasonable prospect of success.

War, in this reading, can express a ‘kind harshness’—a form of judgment exercised in defence of victims. Like Niebuhr, Biggar grounds his argument in Augustinian realism: the world is fundamentally good, yet broken. Because evil persists, the moral use of force becomes necessary to uphold what is right. I believe this to be true, and directly applicable to the national security-focused world in which we find ourselves.

What does this mean then for Western countries as national security reasserts itself as the central organising principle of governance?

It means significant and urgent investment in defence and deep technology, including for instance emerging capabilities like cognitive warfare and neuroadaptive systems (wearables that enhance soldiers’ performance in live combat), counter-drone systems for urban, rural, and maritime environments, and next-generation electronic warfare and geospatial intelligence.

If drone attacks intensify at sea—such as those carried out by the Houthis to disrupt global shipping routes—counter-drone systems will be vital to ensure safe passage. In a world of manipulated narratives and disinformation, geospatial intelligence will serve as a source of truth, helping establish what is actually happening on the ground. And as agentic AI grows increasingly capable of manipulating users—through sycophancy, persuasion, and other techniques—oversight technologies like Yoshua Bengio’s new LawZero project will be essential for maintaining objectivity and integrity.

The responsible use of force today precludes pacifism, averting violence altogether. It means maintaining—and advancing—the capability for overwhelming force, so it is ready if needed. Morality in an era of national security demands investment in defence technologies at speed, to stay several steps ahead of adversaries. A ‘whole-of-society’ approach, as recommended in the recent UK Strategic Defence Review, means preparing citizens with such a mindset. Restraint and humility are still critical virtues—but must not be mistaken for weakness. Western nations must be prepared to act swiftly, decisively, and with the deterrent power that peace requires.

This is the world we are entering: one in which governments and civilians alike must be ready for unexpected threats. The hum of a drone overhead is more than a sound—it is instead a warning, reminding not only Ukrainians but those currently in peaceful situations, to prepare ourselves for potential conflicts to come. The appropriate response is not retreat, but the responsible and moral exercise of power: a necessary duty if we are to preserve peace, freedom, and justice in a world increasingly intent on contesting them.

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