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.

Review

Addiction

Community

Culture

Film & TV

13 May 2025

4 min read

This City is Ours – truth and lies about the global drugs trade

The drug-dealing family drama reflects the impact of the drugs world.

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

Family saga.

BBC.

I asked a thoughtful Scouser and cinephile “What do you think of This City is Ours? – the crime drama TV series set in Liverpool. I wondered if he would hate all the talk of drugs, the power games, the violence and that the series about a global trade is located in our city.

“Well, it’s true.”

As a priest in Liverpool, I have taken the funerals of drug dealers and users, including one where the family quoted me Jesus’ saying, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” I have known too many people caught up first in the heroin trade of the 1980s and then more recently with cocaine.

I agreed that the series is truthful, and on many levels. Those involved in the criminal world of illegal drugs are still people.

I remember Peter (not his real name) who I knew when he was a young lad in the youth club I helped with. He was sitting in our kitchen with a mug of tea. He had bruises all over his face because of a drugs debt he hadn’t paid. One of my daughters came in to get something out of the fridge, and Peter apologised to her for the state of his face, explained it was because of being involved in drugs, and advised her strongly against it. He then asked after her interests and what she enjoyed and was ‘made up’ – happy - when she spoke of liking art. My daughter never forgot that conversation. She learned that people in the drugs trade were still people and could be kind, and that the illegal drugs world was to be avoided. People are both made in the image of God, capable of love and concern, and also flawed and able to be drawn into a trade that affects people so badly across the world.

So, the eight episodes of the first series of This City Is Ours show that the global criminal world of illegal drugs is brutal, violent and full of jeopardy. There are chilling deaths, executions, and vengeance. All truthful to that world. There are power struggles and a vicious family succession battle too. But there are also scenes of the same family at the dinner table, of the longing for a baby with a girlfriend who is very much loved. One moment a character is a hard-hearted killer and the next moment a tender partner. That is so truthful to the different compartments that people can live in: someone can be a loving son who cares for their mother and a ruthless power-hungry toxic gangster.

The consequences of that unnecessary “necessary” action are tragic.

A further truth that I see at every funeral is the ripple effect on partners, siblings, parents, the wider family, and friends, and outward across the community. Every episode of the show features family members: some in the gang, some outside the gang, some wanting a cut of the lucrative proceeds, others desperate to get out from this dangerous, chilling world. What we do can massively affect others close to us. So often family and friends, and a community, must live with the consequences of actions taken in a criminal underworld they are often excluded from and fearful of. Even young children can be affected and dragged into a battle for power.

So, there are truths, but what about the lies? Here’s two stand outs:

“Are we safe?” “Yes, babe.”

We know they are not safe. Definitely not. There’s a target on your back, and often on the family’s back as well.

And the second:

“It was necessary”. Or “f***ing necessary”.

No, it wasn’t. He didn’t have to become engaged in a succession struggle for power, money, and control. He didn’t have to kill someone he looked up to, respected, even loved. The consequences of that unnecessary “necessary” action are tragic.

Then there is the third lie about loyalty and trust. That false sense of being in a gang that will look after you and look out for you, that will secure your future and give you a sense of being someone who counts. From early on, this series shows that people are expendable, can be shot and tossed over a cliff, and that person you looked up to may be an informant to the police. That is maybe how they have stayed out of prison.

A fourth lie the series so truthfully nails is the notion that it is easy to walk away once you have seen through the attractions of money, of Spanish villas, of designer gear, of fragile power. It very often isn’t. You may desperately want a worthwhile life that brings good not bad, peace not killings, a freedom from looking over your shoulder and from a troubled conscience. But there may be money demanded by your supplier, there may be enemies you have made along the way. I have known people successfully move away from it all but that has often only been after a spell in prison, and with a sound alternative - whether a job to keep, a daughter to look after, or a move away.

Wisdom is a much-valued quality throughout history. Five of the Bible’s 66 books are often called Wisdom books and Jesus called Christians to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” This City is Ours is beautifully shot, expertly scripted, brilliantly acted, and it truthfully lifts the lid on the world of the drug-dealing criminal underworld and on some of the lies peddled in that world. And I did explain in the funeral service that when Jesus said “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword” he was not recommending that way of life but warning against it.