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

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Ethics

20 June 2025

6 min read

It's a dreadful thing when we regard the disabled, the dependent, and the different as disposable

A MND sufferer reflects on the historic vote to legalise assisted dying

Michael Wenham

Michael Wenham lives with a motor neurone disorder, Primary Lateral Sclerosis. He blogs at My Donkey Body.

A crowded House of Commons awaits a vote.

MPs await the result.

Parliament TV.

I can’t say I’m surprised, but I am disappointed. The euthanasia juggernaut has been gathering momentum throughout the western world. In this country it appeared as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, to be later rebranded as the richly endowed Dignity in Dying. It’s been beavering away for decades, with well publicised personal stories and legal cases which have been very effective in persuading general opinion that dying is frequently nasty and that we should have the right to choose when and how to die. That organisation resisted using the term ‘suicide’, which is what they advocate, realising that it opens up the accusation of devaluing life. So, I’m not surprised that MPs have, after an impassioned debate, by a narrow majority, eventually given way to the pressure.

A fortnight ago, I had my annual check-up at the motor neurone disorder clinic and subsequently received the GP letter.

“Date seen 02/06/2025… Diagnosis (this visit) Primary Lateral Sclerosis… Symptom onset 2000”.

I well remember the year 2000, my voice deteriorating, my balance starting to fail me, resulting finally a year later in the consultant’s verdict, “You have a motor neurone disorder.”

I knew what that meant as at the time Diane Pretty, backed and publicised by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, was fighting through the courts as far as the European Court of Human Rights for the right for her husband to take her to commit suicide in Switzerland in the Dignitas “clinic”. It was a frightening time to receive an MND diagnosis, and it still is today. The normal progression is both swift and relentless. However, the Motor Neurone Disease Association does say “in the majority of cases, death with MND is peaceful and dignified”.

At that time I could have been depressed; I could have known how much care I would need, how much it might eat into our savings; I could have feared the physical and emotional toll it would take on my wife; I could have been desperate about the future. Certainly I was vulnerable. Fortunately, I was of an optimistic nature and had plenty of reasons for living.

But it could easily have been otherwise. I might well have panicked and opted for a doctor to help me die, if the law debated in the Commons today was in effect. Then I wouldn’t have seen two sons getting married nor grandchildren being born and growing up. I would have missed out on twenty years of an increasingly restricted but paradoxically fulfilled life.

Of course you might argue that I’m ‘lucky’ to have, as became clear over the years, my exceptionally rare and slow form of MND, but I wasn’t to know that, as indeed none of us do despite our doctors’ best predictions. Indeed I am lucky to be alive.

However it was my experience that brought me face to face with the fact of my own mortality and the issue of assisted dying. There seemed to me to be four main drivers. First, the desire for autonomy; second, the insistence of independence; third, a sort of compassion, and fourth, finance. There were two further factors: fear of death and fear of being “a burden”.

Autonomy

It’s a modern western concept that humans are by nature autonomous beings, meaning that choice is an inalienable right. I once co-wrote a book with the title, I Choose Everything, based on a quote of Therèse of Lisieux. It was from a childhood incident, but it did not mean she reserved the right for total autonomy, but rather the opposite. As she later wrote, “I fear only one thing: to keep my own will; so take it, for ‘I choose all!’ that you (God) will!”

Absolute choice is not a virtue. Choosing where to drive your car is not a virtue as it can endanger other road users. There are many limitations on freedom or taboos that protect others in a society. Taking someone’s life directly or indirectly is a universal one. Individuals submitting to a higher authority holds a community and a nation together.

Independence

Another related modern heresy is the ideal of independence. How utterly fatuous this is! None of us is born independent. We’re born relational. All of our lives we are interdependent. Being cared for is not to be lacking in dignity. Being 100% dependent does not deprive someone of their human dignity. Even the most disabled person is a human being made in the image of God. It is a dreadful thing when a society regards the disabled, the dependent, the different, the mentally deficient and the declining as inferior and potentially disposable. Of course the advocates of the Bill would vehemently deny that they or it implied any such thing. Yet the history of the twentieth century bears witness to how subtly a society can be seduced by the pernicious philosophy of eugenics.

Compassion

It is a modern paradox that medical advances have contributed to the illusion that death is to be feared. Yes, death has always been the last enemy and, yes, we hope it will be peaceful. But we shall all die. Contrary to received wisdom, the compassionate response to that fact of life is not to “put someone out of their misery”; compassion (literally suffering with) means to be with them in their suffering. This is what good palliative care provides, making the end of life dignified, worth living and even pain free.

As former Prime Minister Gordon Brown pertinently asked, “When only a small fraction of the population are expected to choose assisted dying, would it not be better to focus all our energies on improving all-round hospice care to reach everyone in need of end-of-life support?”

Finance

Of course palliative care costs more than facilitating patients to take their own lives. According to the Daily Mail “Legalising assisted dying would save the taxpayer £10million in NHS costs in its first year, rising to £60million after a decade, according to grim new estimates published by the government.” The estimates are indeed grim, but also attractive to politicians straining to balance the national budget. Yet they raise the fundamental question: do we want to live in a society which values money over life?

Which is the most fundamental of all the issues: the sanctity of life has been a core principle central to all the Abrahamic faiths, which undergird our culture and way of life. In the words of Job on hearing of the death of all his children, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.” The start and end of life are not ours to determine. We lack the wisdom of God.

Apparently the majority of our parliamentarians have decided to place that prerogative into the hands of suggestible and distinctly fallible humans beings. We or our children shall, I fear, reap the whirlwind.

As an afterthought I have a number of friends who disagree with me, often after personal experience of watching a loved one die. I sympathise and I suppose that I must be glad for them that the MPs have represented their wishes. And I would never condemn them if they decided to choose the route of assisted dying for themselves. I hope they won’t have to.

Meanwhile I trust that, when the Bill comes to the upper house, their Lordships will fulfil their function of revising it wisely and effectively. They certainly have relevant expertise, for example in the field of palliative care - which is in danger of being squeezed following this bill.

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