MY first significant encounter with Pastor ‘Tunde Bakare was on CDs and DVDs. It was 1994, and I was just about to turn eighteen and in my first year at the university. My friends and I in the Baptist Student Fellowship at the University of Ibadan would collect tapes of his sermons and his television programme, Moment of Truth, and dissect them in Bible study as though they were philosophical treatises. He, in a manner of speaking, gave a generation of us permission to believe that devotion and intellect were not warring tenants of a divided house but a positive-sum game- that faith and the life of the mind could be made to serve each other. Three decades on, that early conviction is precisely what this third volume of Strategic Intervention in Governance sets out to vindicate.
Few public figures would describe their life’s work as unfolding in three movements- priestly, prophetic, and princely- but that is exactly how Pastor Bakare accounts for himself. The formula recurs across the book, and it is as good a key as any to what is, in one sense, the record of one man’s thirty-year struggle with his country. Gathered here are thirty-six speeches, most of them the State of the Nation broadcasts Bakare has delivered from his Lagos pulpit at the turn of each year, arranged chronologically from 2019 to 2025. Read in sequence, they amount to something rarer than a sermon collection: a sustained,public reckoning with the Nigerian condition. Bakare speaks with the assurance of a man conscious of his calling. In the opening broadcast he reminds us that it was from this platform that he ‘forewarned the major stakeholders in the June 12, 1993 transition saga,’ that he stood as ‘God’s battle-axe’ against military dictatorship, and that he confronted the so-called Third Term Agenda of 2006. A reader who does not share his prophetic self-understanding may raise an eyebrow at the grander claims, and Bakare does not make it easy to separate the seer from the citizen. But even the sceptic will grant that here is a public voice that has been consistent and courageous across changes of government- and that consistency, laid out year upon year, is the book’s connective tissue.
The diagnosis at the heart of the volume is structural, not merely spiritual. Nigeria, Bakare insists, cannot pray its way out of a problem it refuses to restructure; without a genuine reordering of the federation, the country will keep spending vast energy to go nowhere. His sharpest analytical instrument is the metaphor of the ‘black box,’ borrowed from the political scientist David Easton- a political system whose outputs the citizen endures but whose inner workings, the party deals, the lobbies, the trade-offs and the sell-outs, stay sealed from view. To prise that box open is his abiding demand, and it is bound up with what he calls the Office of the Citizen: the conviction that in a functioning democracy it is the ordinary citizen, and not the office-holder, who occupies the highest station in the land. He can be bracingly blunt about the price of evasion; on the perennial dodging of the national question, he warns that ‘no amount of ringworm medicine can cure leprosy’- a line that earns a smile before it lands its point, which is that Nigeria’s afflictions are constitutional in nature and will not yield to cosmetic treatment.
For all this structural severity, Bakare is no prophet of unrelieved doom. The volume opens in a register of proclamation, with faith-filled declarations over a country he flatly refuses to give up on, and it is a characteristic pairing: the hard diagnosis on one page, the stubborn hope on the next. The Church, in his telling, is meant to be the nation’s conscience rather than a chaplain to power, and much of the book is an attempt to shame a compromised establishment back into that vocation.
If there is one audience Bakare returns to most insistently, it is the young. Borrowing Disraeli’s line that the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity, he refuses the tired script in which young Nigerians figure as powerless pawns, and presses them instead to convert their sheer numbers and their restlessness into organised, durable power. In one of the collection’s finest addresses, ‘Purpose as True Power,’ he tells a gathering of young men that real authority begins not in office but in self-knowledge- in knowing ‘who they are, whose they are, from whence they have come, why they are here.’ It is vintage Bakare: the register is homiletic, but the target is unmistakably civic.
What lifts this book above the familiar genre of inspirational oratory is Bakare’s willingness to climb down from the pulpit into the arena. These are not the safe abstractions of a preacher hedging his bets against every faction. The volume documents his own declaration to contest the 2023 presidency, and it reproduces his unsparing press statement against the APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket- precisely the sort of concrete, cost-bearing position that most clergy are careful to avoid. You can disagree with his politics; but it is impossible to accuse him of watching from the touchline. By the closing section, composed between 2023 and 2025, the tone shifts from the electoral to the elegiac- from the winning of power to the healing of a wounded nation. Here Bakare’s theme is truth-telling and reconciliation, and his plea for dialogue is unusually tender: Dialogue is not just a means to an end; it is an end in itself, fostering a world where differences are celebrated rather than feared, and where everyone has a voice.
I was particularly struck, as a conscious Christian long wary of the opportunists who exploit the pulpit for manipulation, by Pastor Bakare’s handling of the Scriptures. His hermeneutics are diligent and his exegesis incisive, a salutary corrective and a powerful rebuke to the charlatans who have abused the Holy Writ for selfish ends He uses Scripture, one might say, to energise rather than befuddle; to stir rather than lull; to raise, not kill, consciousness. And he does not confine himself to the Bible. Across these chapters he draws on an impressive breadth of sources. These include political philosophy, management and strategy, the arts and humanities, biography- worn lightly and deployed with purpose.
The volume is not without strain. Because these are speeches delivered across seven years, the reader meets certain refrains more than once.
There is, too, a tension the book never quite resolves: Bakare wants at once a robust prophetic church that sits in judgement over every government, and a patient citizenry willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions- and Nigeria’s history suggests these two impulses do not always keep step. But these are the quibbles one raises precisely because the argument is serious enough to deserve them.
Pastor Bakare is fond of quoting Charles Caleb Colton’s aphorism that vice, virtue and time are the three things that never stand still. It makes a fitting epigraph for the book, and a quiet indictment of the reader. You may set this volume down persuaded, or set it down provoked; what you cannot do, having truly read it, is stand still. That, in the end, is why it earns your money and your evenings. Buy it, grapple with it, and hand it on.