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

Change

Community

Development

11 October 2023

6 min read

Tackling homelessness needs much more than promises and policies

While homelessness generates statistics and strategies around the world, Jane Cacouris asks what really is home.

Jane Cacouris

Jane Cacouris is a writer and consultant working in international development on environment, poverty and livelihood issues.

A mother sits with a toddler standing in front of her. The father appears from the side lying on his back reaching an arm out.

A family play in a Rio favela.

“Mummy, are we homeless?” asked our six-year-old as we pulled away in the taxi. We had just eaten a final meal - a KFC family bucket of fried chicken - sitting on a sarong on the floor of our empty apartment in Rio de Janeiro, our home for almost four years.

The question left me momentarily winded. Homeless. A word that instantly conjured up feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, of sands shifting under our feet. Technically, yes, we were. My husband had just left his job in Brazil, and we had two months with nowhere to live before we relocated back to the UK. With no permanent base anywhere in the world, we were about to use the time to travel in South America as a family. Whilst I did feel somewhat insecure, my husband in contrast found it freeing; the first time in his life that he didn’t carry a set of house keys in his pocket. We had nowhere to live, but we were free to go wherever we wanted. And this is where the analogy of us actually being homeless broke down. We had a freedom of choice in a way that the vast majority of people who experience homelessness do not.

World Homeless Day on the 10th October was marked with the recent release of a landmark UN report on global homelessness. The UN define homelessness as:

“where a person or household lacks habitable space with security of tenure, rights, and ability to enjoy social relations, including safety. [It] is a manifestation of extreme poverty and a failure of multiple systems and human rights.”

According to UN-Habitat, a staggering 1.6 billion people in the world are estimated to be in inadequate housing and over 150 million have no housing at all.

Global homelessness has been rising for the past decade, with temporary homelessness being increasingly caused by conflict and climate-induced displacement. However, according to the UN report, Covid-19 exacerbated the issue, deepening existing inequalities and causing already marginalised people to be even more vulnerable.

In developing countries, the informal economy – self-made microentrepreneurs who sell everything from popcorn to shoe polishing - usually sustains the poor urban majority. But with many informal jobs vanishing during lockdowns, and with few assets and limited social safety nets, many urban dwellers were rapidly plunged further into poverty. Women and children suffering from domestic and gender-based violence had to remain in unsafe environments, with abuse escalating during lockdowns and curfews. Issues that encouraged migration and homelessness.

There are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts.

The extent of homelessness worldwide is notoriously difficult to quantify accurately, partly due to what is known as hidden homelessness. The hidden and isolated nature of children and adolescents living on the street, for example, makes statistics difficult to gather. A 2023 UNICEF report of street children in Dhaka estimated that the number of children living on the street just in Bangladesh could be in the millions. And according to UN sources there are approximately 150 million children living and working on the streets worldwide. Almost impossible to imagine, and so the number sometimes doesn’t compute with our hearts. The true horror of the isolation of child homelessness only truly hit me a few years ago…

The residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed.

Living at the top of a high-rise block in the middle of an urban neighbourhood in Rio, we were kept awake for a number of nights in a row. It started as a disturbance – children yelling in the street outside that would continue from the early hours until dawn. But as the days went on, the disturbance at night became more acute. One morning as I stepped out of our apartment in the morning, bleary-eyed and irritated, I was confronted by a small group of sleeping children lying huddled together in a row on the pavement next to a tree. Several pairs of bare filthy feet were sticking out of a blanket they were sharing. I looked down at them as I passed – they varied in age from about eight to twelve years old. The youngest was probably younger than my son at the time. He had knotted black curly hair and a streaked face. The next night we heard gun shots and then an eery silence. Another sleepless night, this time from worrying about the children, and then we discovered that the residents in our block had finally had enough of the noise and called the police. They arrived in the middle of the night with their guns and shot at the children who dispersed. The children never came back.

The government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track.

Although homelessness is an overwhelmingly larger problem in poor countries, it also affects affluent nations, including the United Kingdom. This year the Kerslake Commission, an expert panel set up to scrutinise how rough sleeping is being addressed across England, pointed out that data on rough sleeping in London last year showed a 16 per cent increase in numbers of people sleeping rough. And that almost half (48 per cent) were sleeping rough for the first time. It concluded that the government pledge to end rough sleeping in England by the end of 2024 is woefully off track. According to Crisis, the homelessness system in England is at breaking point and the Homelessness Monitor 2023 reported that the cost-of-living crisis, rising rents and a lack of affordable housing are making it harder for councils to provide homeless people with effective support.

It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.

So, the problem of homelessness really is global. And what is the answer? Yes, governments must act; social safety nets and public policies to help alleviate poverty are critical. But even the richest countries with the most advanced governments have never been able to fully tackle this issue. Homelessness and poverty were rife in Biblical times. As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, “‘You will always have the poor with you”. And Jesus himself understands homelessness in a way many of us don’t; he started life in a stable, born to parents who were sleeping rough. He became a baby on the run to flee King Herod, homeless and seeking asylum in Egypt. When Jesus was older, after he was baptised by John the Baptist, he became homeless again, living life on the the road and in the open. In Luke, he says: “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

He emphasised that his followers leave the trappings of “home” to follow him.

I used to volunteer at a Christian charity, Casa de Maria e Marta, in a favela (slum) community in Rio, known for gang violence and drug trafficking. A larger-than-life Brazilian lady, Edimea, has run the charity for over twenty years. Almost a hundred children come to the charity each day, which provides three meals as well as extra tuition and care for the children. All of those who attend are either living in inadequate housing or are homeless. One day I asked Edimea whether she still sees the children after they leave her charity at age twelve. She laughed and said yes of course, they still come back to eat! And then she said,

“I do an assessment before I take a new child in, to understand what they know, and work out how we can best help them. And I always say to them – we take beautiful children, and so we are taking you, because you are beautiful inside and out. They come back because they don’t forget those words.”

Like Jesus, Edimea shows endless concern and love for those on the margins. She can’t solve all the practical problems she comes across or offer a permanent roof over a head, but she does provide a place where everyone feels a sense of safety and belonging. Perhaps home means more than the UN’s definition. It is about where you feel valued and understood… where you feel loved… and where you want to come back to.