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Between night vigils and night shifts 20 Jan 2025

Most Nigerian Christians would have spent the crossover night to 2025 in churches. Even non-traditional churchgoers would have transitioned to the new year praying. Across Christianity and Islam, Nigerians generally tend to be more “religious” and less “spiritual.” But religion is taken to be the “form” and spirituality the “substance”. This means they overlap, especially in terms of belief, even if different in terms of practice.

In a recent podcast, Peter Obi, the 2023 Labour Party presidential candidate, stirred up a religious hornet’s nest. He said he would rather, as a country, we dismantle the present structures of the public sector and the church, claiming they constitute easy ways for some Nigerians to make money. He then stated what he called his desire to move people from attending church night vigils to having night shifts at jobs, highlighting one of the ways he thinks Nigeria’s unemployment and productivity challenges can be addressed.

Indeed, Mr. Obi's remarks about converting church night vigils into job night shifts are consistent with his mantra of boosting economic production in Nigeria. Except for the religious implication of what should be taken as a political economy view, hardly would the need to increase economic production be taken as controversial, not in a country that is grappling with a historic level of poverty, which derives from anaemic economic growth.

However, Peter Obi may have oversimplified the Nigerian productivity challenge – or its solution. Certainly, church night vigils can co-exist with job night shifts. Research has established the positive influence of spirituality on productivity. In their June 2024 study, which showed spirituality and productivity are not mutually exclusive, Njideka Phina Onyekwelu & Obiageli Chinwe Nnabugwu recommend: “Organisations should emphasise to make their respective organisation spiritual and adopt spiritual environment, and also emphasise meaningful work and employee productivity.”

However, Nigeria's economic challenges are deeply rooted in structural issues, particularly the failure to develop and diversify key sectors of the economy. This has led to growing unemployment in the country, going by observable evidence which recent official data tends to contradict. In Nigeria, which has one of the youngest populations in the world, the demographic dividend has yet to materialise. A Q4 2020 data by the National Bureau of Statistics showed a Nigerian unemployment rate of 42.5% among 15 – 34-year-olds, with the total number of unemployed youth estimated to be over 30 million people.

Helpless under the crushing weight of bad economic and political governance, Nigerians are seeking hope in churches and other religious houses. Had the country’s manufacturing, mining, and (mechanised) agriculture – along with their value-chains been developed – and key public goods like electricity and security adequately made available, Nigerians would have been occupied by productive endeavours. Instead, the government has remained dependent on oil export revenues, neglecting key growth industries.

With a floundering economy and in the absence of well-organised and funded social safety nets, faith institutions are filling some voids in the socio-economic landscape. Churches provide spiritual support and help people build informal networks, secure resources, and maintain resilience in tough times. (But many church leaders are also preying on their hapless members, overburdening them with attendance of programmes that are partly designed to extract maximum “offering” collections and funds for their church expansion projects.)

The companies where Mr. Obi wants people to do night shifts hardly exist. Many successful Nigerian businesspeople, including Peter Obi, are thriving on trade. Rather than investing in manufacturing, they prefer trade businesses, importing foreign products that kill local industries and drive high demand for foreign exchange in the country. This is not an attempt to impugn Mr. Obi's well-recognised moral honesty. It is about stating that the Nigerian economy requires less rhetoric and more of the right investment decisions, which should be driven by insightful government policy.

Peter Obi served as the governor of Anambra State from 2007 to 2014. While his tenure was generally viewed as effective in improving public services and fiscal management, there is little evidence that he significantly transformed Anambra into a hub for manufacturing jobs. This may be due to the significant limitation placed on the Southeast as a whole by decrepit federal roads, the seeming federal government’s policy to stifle the development of port infrastructures to serve the region, and the general slow pace of industrial development in the country.

Nigeria's current political economy has contributed to a severe unemployment crisis. Without a strong manufacturing base, the country lacks the means to generate sufficient job opportunities to match its rapidly growing population. Lacking an industrial foundation, Nigeria cannot create high-value, sustainable jobs that could lift millions out of poverty. An additional concern is poor vocational training, which makes certain skills required in a competitive manufacturing industry absent in Nigeria.

Nevertheless, Peter Obi's call for prioritising production over consumption is a welcome development. Without wielding the political power to effect this vital change, the former vice presidential and former presidential candidate should put significant efforts into building elite consensus and partnerships between the public and private sectors for Nigeria’s industrial growth and transformation.

Mr. Obi should also avoid the temptation of overlooking existing frameworks for the needed industrial growth. One of such frameworks is the recent constitutional amendments empowering states to initiate electricity generation projects, develop rail networks, and manage local infrastructure in their jurisdictions. Taking advantage of the legal reform, Ekiti State has granted operational licenses to 14 electricity investors as it aims to increase its power generation capacity from 20-25 MW to 130 MW.

Peter Obi is well placed to advise that the governors – and his business friends – take advantage of policy initiatives that can begin to change the Nigerian industrial landscape.

Cheta Nwanze is Lead Partner at SBM Intelligence.