Ninety-six per cent of Nigerians tell researchers that religion is very important in their lives. That is among the highest figures ever recorded anywhere on earth.
Ninety-five per cent of Nigerian Pentecostals — and ninety-three per cent of other Nigerian Christians — also agree with this statement: God will grant material prosperity to all believers who have enough faith. That is the highest Pentecostal figure Pew recorded across the ten countries it surveyed.
And most Nigerians are poor.
Two different instruments say so. The National Bureau of Statistics, measuring multidimensional poverty in 2022, found 133 million Nigerians — 63 per cent — deprived across health, education, living standards and work. The World Bank, measuring consumption poverty four years later, reported this April that household incomes have not grown fast enough to offset inflation and that poverty has yet to begin declining.
Last month's inflation figures tell the same story from another angle. Headline inflation eased to 15.43 per cent. Food inflation rose to 20.31 per cent — the fifth consecutive monthly increase. In other words: the economy is stabilising, and the specific thing poor people spend most of their money on is not.
So let us ask a question, and let us be precise about which question it is.
This is not an article about whether God exists
I am not going to tell you what to believe. That is not my business, and anyone who tells you they have settled it is selling you something.
This is an article about an institution. It is about buildings, budgets, court records and audited accounts. It is about a set of organisations that collect money from some of the poorest people on earth and, in the overwhelming majority of cases, publish nothing about where it goes.
You can believe every word of the Bible and still ask for a receipt. In fact, if you believe every word of it, you should be the first to ask.
What your church does not show you
Start by clearing up a misconception. Nigerian churches are not blanket tax-exempt, and never have been. The exemption has always been conditional. Under the law as it stood for decades, it covered ecclesiastical activity and expressly did not cover profits "derived from a trade or business" — and the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, in force since January, keeps that distinction. A church-owned bakery, printing press, hotel, event centre or rental property is taxable like anybody else's.
Beyond that, a registered religious body must deduct and remit PAYE on its staff salaries — including its pastors' salaries — withhold tax on payments to contractors, pay 7.5 per cent VAT on what it buys, and file annual returns.
Now ask yourself a simple question. When did you last see any of it?
Not a testimony. Not a projected figure on a screen during a building appeal. A statement of accounts showing income, expenditure, assets and liabilities — the kind every listed company in Nigeria publishes as a matter of routine.
The regulators who did look
Here is the part that should embarrass all of us. The most rigorous published audits of major Nigerian-founded churches that I could find were conducted by foreign regulators.
In December 2022, the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom sanctioned Loveworld Limited, the UK licensee of the television arm of Christ Embassy. The finding concerned a broadcast that solicited donations by linking giving to promised improvements in "health, wealth and success," aired donor testimonials, invoked sowing and reaping, and encouraged viewers to give regardless of whether they could afford it.
Ofcom held that this "went beyond proclamations of faith and religious teachings and practice" and improperly exploited the susceptibilities of viewers. Fine: £15,000, plus a direction to broadcast the findings.
Be precise about what that is and is not. Ofcom judged one broadcast by one licensee against two published rules. It did not rule on seed-faith doctrine as a category, and it has no power to. But within its jurisdiction, a state regulator examined these particular appeals against a written standard and found that they improperly exploited vulnerable viewers. That is not a blogger's opinion. It is an adjudication, and it is on the public record.
The same broadcaster was fined £125,000 in March 2021 over claims that the pandemic was planned by a "deep state" and that vaccines delivered nanochips; £25,000 in October 2021 for further material Ofcom called "unevidenced, materially misleading and potentially harmful"; and £200,000 in June this year over claims about polio and HPV vaccine safety. That last one is two months old and is the largest of the four.
Separately, the UK Charity Commission ran a statutory inquiry into Christ Embassy's registered UK charity, reporting in November 2019. Its findings were of mismanagement — trustees who failed to exercise reasonable care, inadequate financial controls, late filings, unmanaged conflicts of interest. Of £1,281,666 in grants to an affiliated television ministry, the Commission recorded "a lack of records and receipts to account for grants made." Six bank accounts holding £615,420 were frozen. HMRC disallowed over £1.4m of expenditure; £250,000 was paid on account.
I want to be scrupulous here, because several Nigerian outlets were not. The Charity Commission did not find fraud. It is a civil regulator; it does not indict. It made no finding of personal wrongdoing against any named individual — its report anonymises trustees — and no criminal charge followed. Headlines that reported an "indictment for fraud" were simply wrong, and if you shared one, you shared something false.
But notice what the accurate version still says. When a body with statutory power to compel documents finally opened the books of one Nigerian-founded ministry, what it found was that large sums had moved without receipts.
A second British inquiry, into Kingsway International Christian Centre, found that between 2009 and 2010 trustees placed £5 million with a former trustee for foreign-exchange trading, on terms promising roughly fifty-five per cent a year. They took no independent professional advice. They lost £3.9 million. The Commission concluded the decision-making trustees "did not exercise sufficient care." Again, and this matters: the church's founder was not identified as one of them, and no finding was made against him.
Then there are the bodies
On 12 September 2014, a guesthouse at the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos collapsed. One hundred and sixteen people died, most of them South African visitors.
A ten-month coroner's inquest under Chief Magistrate Oyetade Komolafe returned a verdict of criminal negligence. The building had no approved plan and no permit. The coroner expressly rejected the claim that a hovering aircraft had caused it.
What followed is the part worth understanding properly. Lagos State declined to prosecute the church for criminal negligence, despite the coroner's recommendation. The church's trustees were charged with a single count — building without approval. The 110 counts of involuntary manslaughter were laid against the two engineers and their firms.
The defence closed its case in December 2019. Judgment was set for January 2020.
Eleven years after 116 people died, no judgment has ever been publicly reported. Nobody has been convicted of anything.
In December 2016, the roof of the Reigners Bible Church International came down in Uyo during a consecration service attended by the Governor of Akwa Ibom. The death toll remains disputed: the state said 27, rescue officials said around 60.
A judicial commission of inquiry found "unprofessionalism and negligence" and concluded that the founder's "adamant posture of unbridled impunity" had led to the incident, citing construction without state approval and undue interference with contractors.
The Akwa Ibom State Government's white paper then rejected that finding and cleared him, holding that he had relied on the professionals he engaged. He has never been charged with any offence, and that fact belongs in the same breath as the finding.
In May 2022, thirty-one people including children were crushed to death at a church "Shop for Free" charity distribution in Port Harcourt. A probe was ordered. No organiser is publicly known to have been charged.
The convictions that did land
Some cases do reach a verdict, and they are worth knowing, because they answer anyone who says none of this is ever proven.
Chukwuemeka Ezeugo, who called himself Reverend King, was convicted in 2007 of murdering a member of his congregation by setting her on fire. The Supreme Court of Nigeria unanimously affirmed his death sentence in February 2016; one justice remarked that the facts "could have been lifted from a horror film."
In January 2024, a Lagos sexual offences court sentenced Feyi Daniels of I Reign Christian Ministry to life imprisonment for rape. The judge described him as a liar with no regard for the truth.
Last month, an Enugu court convicted a self-styled prophet of taking ₦136.4 million from his own church members between 2023 and 2025, through a fake lottery-win investment scheme and what the EFCC described as "miracle stickers."
His sentence was one year's imprisonment, with the option of a ₦500,000 fine. I include that detail deliberately. One year, or five hundred thousand naira, for taking one hundred and thirty-six million from the people who trusted him. If you want a single number that explains why this keeps happening, it is that one.
The children
This is the part I found hardest to write.
In April 2026, the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child found Nigeria in violation of the African Children's Charter over witchcraft accusations against children. The decision documented children aged three to fourteen, across nine states, subjected to assault, abandonment and in some cases death after being accused — by family members, by community actors, and, in the Committee's own words, by religious figures. In affected areas, up to eighty-one per cent of children living on the street had faced such an accusation.
Nigeria was given 180 days to prohibit the practice expressly, train police and judiciary, and investigate and prosecute.
Akwa Ibom has had a law against this since 2008 — up to ten years' imprisonment for branding a child a witch. A decade on, journalists reported that not one perpetrator had been successfully prosecuted.
Then, on 20 July this year, a Cross River court sentenced a 51-year-old man who styled himself an apostle to death by hanging for murdering his sixteen-year-old daughter, who had Down syndrome, after accusing her of witchcraft.
Her name was Deborah Bassey. She is the reason this article is not merely an argument about accounting.
What happened when someone asked for the books
In 2020 Nigeria's Companies and Allied Matters Act was amended. Section 839 allowed regulators to suspend the trustees of an association where there was reason to believe in misconduct or mismanagement — and, on the plain wording of the section, only on the order of a court, on a petition by the Commission or by one-fifth of the members.
The reaction was immediate and enormous. One prominent bishop told his congregation that government "has no power to appoint people over churches" and that anyone involved in the law was "taking poison." Christian bodies called it obnoxious, unacceptable, ungodly.
Much of that reaction described a power the section did not contain. It routed everything through a judge.
In April 2023 the Federal High Court struck down nine sections as unconstitutional. Let me be exact, because the easy version of this story is wrong: the suit was brought not by any church but by a private lawyer, Emmanuel Ekpenyong, on freedom-of-religion and freedom-of-association grounds. Of the nine sections, some concerned dormant bank accounts and one established an administrative proceedings committee.
But four of them — sections 845 to 848 — were the bookkeeping provisions. File a statement of affairs. Keep accounting records that explain your transactions. Preserve them for six years. Attach audited statements of account to your annual return.
Those four are gone, for now. The Corporate Affairs Commission has appealed and the appeal is still pending, so nothing is finally settled.
Here is the observation I will stand behind. In the three years since those provisions fell, no Nigerian church body has campaigned to bring them back. Not one has said: we opposed section 839, but we want 845 to 848 restored, because we have nothing to hide and we would rather the law required us to prove it.
That silence is not evidence of a crime. It is evidence of a preference.
Now let me tell you what I cannot prove
An article like this is only worth reading if it tells you where its own case is weak. So:
I cannot prove that prosperity giving makes households poorer. It is asserted constantly, including by people I agree with. There is no peer-reviewed study establishing it in Africa. The best-known randomised trial on evangelism and household economics — conducted in the Philippines, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics — found participants ended up with higher income, not lower. If you want to argue the opposite, argue it from evidence, and accept that the evidence does not yet exist.
The most-repeated fact about Nigerian pastoral wealth is invented. The claim that five Nigerian pastors rank among the world's ten richest, attributed to Forbes and the World Council of Churches, is fabricated. Forbes has confirmed it has not published a pastoral wealth valuation in over a decade. The WCC's communications director called it fake news outright, saying the Council has never produced such a report. If you have shared that graphic, you shared a lie — and doing so makes the honest version of this argument harder to make.
Most claims about private jets are undocumented. Figures circulate endlessly; almost none rest on an aircraft registry or a filed account. And even where a jet demonstrably exists, it is frequently unclear whether it belongs to the pastor or to the denomination — which is a materially different accusation.
Churches do things the Nigerian state does not. Hospitals, schools, boreholes, food, funerals, a network that catches people when nothing else does. Afrobarometer found that sixty per cent of Nigerians trust religious leaders — against the seventy-three per cent who believe most or all police are corrupt, and the sixty-four per cent who say the same of their own legislators. People do not give because they are fools. They give because the church turns up, and the government does not.
That is the strongest argument against everything written above, and it deserves to be stated at full strength.
But here is what survives all of it
None of those defences requires secrecy.
A church that runs a hospital can publish what the hospital cost. A ministry that builds a university can explain why its cheapest programme runs to more than ₦1.7 million a year, when the national minimum wage is ₦70,000 a month — ₦840,000 a year — meaning the cheapest course on offer costs more than two full years of a minimum-wage worker's entire gross income, before that worker has eaten anything.
You are not required to choose between faith and arithmetic. That is a false choice, and it was built by people who benefit from you believing it.
Five questions, this Sunday
Not a boycott. Not a renunciation. Five questions, asked politely, of an institution you already fund.
1. May I see the most recent statement of accounts?
2. What was total income last year, and what were the three largest categories of expenditure?
3. Who are the registered trustees, and are any of them related to one another?
4. Is any property used by the ministry held in an individual's personal name?
5. Which businesses does the ministry own, and does it file company income tax on them?
Every one of those maps onto something Nigerian law already contemplates. None is hostile. None requires you to doubt God.
Watch what happens when you ask.
A church with clean books will answer — possibly with relief that somebody finally cared. A church that tells you questioning is a spirit of rebellion, that Touch Not My Anointed settles the matter, that your doubt is the reason your breakthrough has not come — that church has given you an answer without giving you a document.
Maybe there is a God in heaven. I am not the person to settle that, and this article never tried to.
But the institutions collecting in His name are here, on earth, in Nigeria, subject to Nigerian law and Nigerian courts and the ordinary rules of evidence. They are testable. And the one test they consistently decline is the simplest anyone ever devised.
Show us the books.
Sources: Pew Research Center, "How People Around the World View Religion's Role in Their Countries" (2019) and "Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals" (2006); National Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria Multidimensional Poverty Index Survey Results 2022, and Consumer Price Index, July 2026; World Bank Nigeria Development Update, April 2026; Afrobarometer Dispatch No. 900 (2024); Ofcom sanction decisions against Loveworld Limited (2020, March 2021, October 2021, December 2022, June 2026); UK Charity Commission statutory inquiries into Christ Embassy (2019) and Kingsway International Christian Centre (2016); the Lagos coroner's inquest into the SCOAN guesthouse collapse (2015) and subsequent Lagos High Court proceedings; the Akwa Ibom judicial commission of inquiry into the Reigners Bible Church collapse and the State Government white paper (2018); ACERWC Communication No. 0017/Com/001/2021 (2026); National Minimum Wage (Amendment) Act 2024; Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 and Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1076/2020; Bryan, Choi and Karlan, "Randomizing Religion," Quarterly Journal of Economics (2021). Individuals are described only by reference to published regulatory findings, court records, or their own public statements. Where an allegation has not been tested in court, this article says so.
