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

Digital

Sustainability

13 October 2025

5 min read

Big Tech is gaslighting us into waste

After being nudged to ditch yet another working device, I’ve had enough

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A flat screen on a desk displays a colourful pattern.

BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash,

I wasn’t supposed to write this article. Actually, I was going to about a month ago. But I decided against it because I had a good experience with a Big Tech company, but today I changed mind. Let me start from the beginning.

Back in 2018, I bought a Samsung flatscreen TV for a flat I was renting in Southfields, if you don’t know South London well, that’s basically Wimbledon. I had just moved back to London. I remember I was excited about it because I hadn’t bought a TV for any of the other places I had lived in. I remember doing all the research. I wanted a Samsung because I am not an Apple person. I couldn’t afford the latest Samsung flatscreen, so I got a mid-range one. It was just as good as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality for the price I paid.

When I moved back home during the pandemic, it became the kitchen TV and is still going strong. This Samsung TV is fantastic. The picture is crisp. If I am streaming a show in HD, it gets even better, noticeably better. Compared to the new, bigger TV, in the front room, it’s like night and day. Imagine my surprise when, some of the apps I regularly use on my good old kitchen TV stopped working. The TV works perfectly, but the apps no longer support my TV. In other words, Samsung and the app providers want me to buy a new TV when my TV is not broken. How can I throw away or upgrade a TV that isn’t broken?

Now you might be thinking it’s not necessarily a deep concern to hold. But this has happened to me before. My tablet, yup, another Samsung product, works perfectly well. It does what I want it to do. I bought it in 2020. I have no need, reason or desire to upgrade or buy another tablet. I was absolutely fine. That is until earlier this year, when Samsung rolled out a software update. My phone was updated automatically. The user interface changed, security is better and Gemini, Google’s version of ChatGPT, has been integrated into my search engine. The update was so transformative, that I questioned why my tablet also hadn’t updated automatically. I kept refreshing the updates screen, hoping it would come through, but nothing happened. So, as any self-respecting millennial would, I googled it.

What did I find? Samsung is no longer providing updates for my tablet. It is five years old, how does that even make sense? Again, I find myself with a working product, no scratches, no malfunctions, no problems whatsoever. A product I love but I am again being forced to eventually ‘throw it’ because Samsung have stopped providing software updates for it.

In sharp contrast to Samsung's sudden obsolescence in my life, I was left delighted after, yet another tech fail instead led to a positive outcome. Last month, the screen on my Fitbit suddenly stopped working. My steps and sleep were still being captured and recorded in the app, I just couldn’t see anything, including tell the time. As you would expect, I thought, ‘Here we go again, another Big Tech company forcing me to buy another product’. I had determined I wasn’t buying a new Fitbit. Instead, I decided I would contact Google. In the Fitbit app, you can get Google to call you back. So, I did and immediately, I found myself speaking to a lovely gentleman in San Francisco. Within five minutes, we concluded that there was a genuine fault. I sent my broken Fitbit off and two days later I received a refurbished replacement. After this experience, I felt okay again about Big Tech. I was in a good place, no need to write this article. Until today.

This afternoon, as I opened Microsoft Word. There was an announcement. From 14th October 2025, Microsoft will no longer support Office 2019. I am actually shaking my head in disappointment as I type this. Why is this a big deal? When I bought my PC in 2020, I made a deliberate choice to buy the packaged version of Microsoft Office and make a one-off payment. I did not want to entertain or engage in Microsoft’s attempt to turn a packaged good product, Office, into a subscription product Microsoft 365, to extract more money from me in the long run. But here I am again, being forced to do away with a perfectly good, working product by another Big Tech company all in the name of profit.

These things annoy me because I am being coerced into making choices that go against my value system. I would not describe myself as overtly climate conscious, but I am against waste. I do not subscribe to the idea of a culture that creates and fosters a society driven by consumerism at the behest of profit. Whilst Microsoft, isn’t asking me to throw away a physical product, its actions are causing me to think it is okay to do away with a perfectly decent product for no good reason. The only reason why Samsung and Microsoft are forcing me to change my working products, products that I am happy with is, so that they make more money. I am loyal to them. I have nowhere else to go. They provide a good service we have all encountered, the gradual, then sudden decline of our phone batteries around about the 18-month mark. Another example of unnecessary waste.

It all feels a little disheartening. We can no longer take these brands’ values at face value. Excellence and quality no longer mean superiority and long lasting. Instead, they mean ‘excellent until we release a new version next year when you ought to buy again or else we will stop supporting you’. No wonder we are all slightly suspicious of Big Tech, we don’t believe they represent what they say represent. We no longer trust that their ‘yes means yes and their no means no’.

Sadly, in politics the climate discussion has been reduced to a debate around the viability of achieving net-zero in x many years. But what would happen if we broadened out the conversation, and we looked a little bit deeper into the areas of genuine waste. Areas where our consumerist profit driven approach is forcing us to waste rather than steward the world’s limited resources. What would it look like if governments held corporations accountable for practices that force consumers to buy more than they need? Not to stifle innovation or growth but to stop waste. I don’t want to throw away my phone, tablet or TV but sadly Samsung is forcing me to. That just can’t be right.

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