By Vitus Ozoke
There is a lie that has stalked Nigeria since independence – that our greatest enemy is religious division. It is a myth carefully designed, polished, and perpetuated by those who benefit from chaos: the political elite. Religion has been made the convenient scapegoat for every outbreak of violence, every act of terror, every national fracture.
But look closely, and the real puppeteers emerge – the politicians who weaponise and exploit faith to mask their failures and feed their ambitions. For decades, the Nigerian political class has fed the nation a dangerous illusion: that Muslims and Christians are each other’s enemies. It is a purposeful falsehood – one that keeps the people divided while the ruling political elite loot in peace.
The truth is that Nigeria’s Muslim and Christian populations have coexisted for centuries, with deep cultural and economic interdependence. Nigerians across faiths share common values – resilience, hospitality, and a strong drive for survival. The average Nigerian, Muslim or Christian, does not wake up in the morning thinking about jihad or crusades. They wake up thinking about survival – how to buy garri, how to keep their generator running, how to escape the nightmare of joblessness and insecurity, how to pay rising rent, and how to stay alive in a country where life is cheap and leadership is a burden.
This pragmatic coexistence contradicts the narrative of endemic religious hatred. When a trader in Kano greets a customer in Enugu, or a driver in Ibadan picks up a passenger from Sokoto, there’s no religious animosity in that transaction. There’s only hunger and hustle – the shared misery of a people betrayed by their leaders.
Yet, in this misery, religion has become the last refuge. With no functioning government to offer hope, faith becomes the anaesthetic that dulls the pain. Churches and mosques have taken the place of what the government should have been. They have become the de facto social welfare agencies, providing a safety net in a failed state – feeding the poor, promising miracles, offering hope where government has fallen short. The pulpit now feeds the poor that the government forgot, and the imam comforts the broken that the system destroyed. It is this structural vacuum and desperation that politicians exploit under the guise of charity, effectively buying loyalty through pious performance in a spiritual dependency that has made the people pliable and easily manipulated by politicians who know how to speak the language of faith when elections draw near.
The result is a nation where faith has been turned into a political currency – traded by elites and consumed by the desperate.
Nigeria’s post-independence history demonstrates a consistent pattern: politicians instrumentalise religion to achieve political legitimacy. Every election season, the shameless masquerades emerge from their gated woods, and we see the same grotesque theatre: politicians in agbada and babanriga, suddenly rediscover faith, crossing from mosque on Friday to church on Sunday with staged humility, quoting scripture they neither believe nor understand, and pretending piety they do not possess. They distribute prayer mats and hymn books, not to honour God but to mobilize votes and marginalize their opponents. They turn faith into a campaign strategy, preaching peace in public while funding chaos and violence in secret. When the ballots close, they return to their barricaded villas, leaving the people to quarrel and kill themselves over adulterated doctrines while they divide the treasury and preside over policies that perpetuate inequality and economic stagnation, the true engines of unrest.
The financiers behind religious violence in Nigeria are not imams or pastors. They are rarely true religious extremists in the theological sense. They are not men of God – they are men of power. They are politicians, opportunists, and power brokers who fund sectarian violence as a diversionary tactic. They understand the formula: divide the poor by faith, control them through fear. Stoke the flames of difference and watch the masses burn themselves while you harvest votes and contracts.
The preachers who incite division do so not out of theology but out of economics. Every mob, every riot, every sectarian flame, has a politician behind it who profits from chaos. It is not faith that fuels Nigeria’s bloodshed; it is politics dressed in the robe of faith. The blood of Nigerians shed in the name of religion is not holy blood – it is political blood. It is the blood of manipulation, not belief. It is this manipulation of faith that transforms legitimate social grievances into religious conflicts.
And now, even the world has joined the deception. When President Donald Trump thundered about sending American troops to Nigeria to stop the “killing of Christians,” he did more than ignite diplomatic outrage – he exposed how deeply the world misunderstands Nigeria’s tragedy. His threat, cloaked in moral outrage, plays perfectly into the same false script Nigerian politicians have used for decades: that the country’s crisis is a holy war. It is not. The bloodshed in Nigeria is not about Christians versus Muslims; it is about citizens versus a failed state – hardworking citizens versus a heartlessly corrupt political class.
So, by misinterpreting our suffering as a religious conflict, Trump and Washington have now joined the chorus of those who weaponize faith while ignoring the real culprit – a political elite that has turned Nigeria into a slaughterhouse of poverty, corruption, and neglect.
Let me state this clearly: Nigeria does not need American boots on its soil. It needs leaders in its government with a modicum of conscience. Donald Trump’s sudden moral outrage over “Christian persecution” in Nigeria is not driven by any genuine empathy – it is strategic ignorance disguised in bogus diplomacy. Truth be told, Donald Trump does not give a flying fig about “shithole” Nigeria or its Christian population.
Sending troops to Nigeria would not end the killings; it would only embolden those who profit from division.
Until Nigeria addresses its leadership problem, religion will continue to serve as a mask for evil. We must unmask it. The day we stop letting politicians manipulate our faith for personal gain is the day Nigeria begins to heal. When a hungry Muslim and a hungry Christian finally realize that their shared hunger comes from the same source – the ruling elite – the spell will be broken. When impoverished Christians and destitute Muslims see that their true enemy is the same – a system designed to keep them poor, divided, and desperate – then and only then will our mosques and churches join in the same cry for deliverance and freedom, stop being battlegrounds, and become what they were meant to be: sanctuaries of conscience.
For the umpteenth time, Nigeria’s problem has never been religion. It has always been egregiously bad leadership. Religion, in the hands of the political elite, has been transformed into both a shield and a sword – a cover for corruption and a weapon for division. Nigeria’s salvation will not come from a pulpit or a minaret, not from a pastor’s sermon or an imam’s prayer; instead, it will come from its people’s awakening. Nigeria must first confront its governance crisis. Reforms must address corruption, institutional weakness, and elite impunity. The focus must shift from religious tolerance – which assumes inevitable hostility – to social justice, which removes the material conditions that enable elite manipulation. The answer, therefore, is not in silencing faith but in reforming politics.
•Dr. Ozoke is a lawyer, human rights activist, and public affairs analyst based in the United States.
