Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s recent intervention on Nigeria’s worsening insecurity was the column I had intended to write last week, until the welcome release, on 10th July, of the abducted Oriire pupils rightly demanded immediate reflection. That episode carried urgent lessons for government, the security services and society as a whole. But Pastor Adeboye’s intervention still deserves to be revisited, not merely for what it said about President Bola Tinubu’s handling of insecurity, but for what the reactions to it revealed about our culture of authority, deference and public intellection.
Speaking at the US-Nigeria Faith Heroes Award Gala in Washington DC on 23 June 2026, the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God defended President Tinubu against claims that he had not done enough to address the security crisis. In Pastor Adeboye’s view, a commander-in-chief is not expected to personally take up arms or fight terrorists on the battlefield. Once he has given instructions to his subordinates, he has, in the pastor’s memorable phrase, ‘done his bit’.
The intervention was not without nuance. Pastor Adeboye acknowledged that terrorism and kidnapping had grown frighteningly worse, spreading from the North into parts of the South and creeping, as he put it, even closer to his own doorstep. He said he had privately advised President Tinubu to give Nigeria’s security chiefs a ninety-day ultimatum to eliminate the terrorists or resign. He also urged the government to go after the sponsors of terrorism, whom he described as known and wealthy people, including businessmen and politicians, who continue to move freely while violent actors devastate communities.
Those are serious points, and they deserve to be acknowledged. Yet Pastor Adeboye’s central defence of the President was, in my view, logically flawed. The responsibility of a commander-in-chief cannot be reduced to issuing instructions to service chiefs and then retreating into the comfort of procedural innocence. Leadership is not exhausted by delegation. The President’s duty is not merely to tell the security agencies to act, but to ensure that they act effectively; to demand results; to impose consequences where failure persists; to remove ineffective commanders where necessary; and ultimately to bear final responsibility for the success or failure of the government’s security strategy. That is precisely why he is called the commander-in-chief.
To be clear, no reasonable person expects President Tinubu to wear military fatigues and march into the forests in pursuit of terrorists. That is not the point. But Nigerians are entitled to expect that the man who presides over the armed forces should be answerable for the performance of those forces. If terrorists continue to overrun communities, kidnap citizens, kill farmers, terrorise travellers and mock the sovereignty of the state, the President cannot be absolved simply because he has issued instructions somewhere within the machinery of government. At the summit of power, responsibility does not end where delegation begins. It begins there.
This is why Pastor Adeboye’s analogy with the President of the United States, however well intended, does not quite hold. It is true that an American president does not personally fly military aircraft or lead troops into combat. But if a military operation fails catastrophically, if intelligence systems collapse, if commanders repeatedly underperform, or if a national security strategy proves ineffective, the political responsibility still returns to the Oval Office. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981, which lasted 444 days, became one of the defining burdens of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and contributed to the failure of his second-term bid. Carter did not personally pilot the aircraft in the failed rescue mission. Yet the crisis became inseparable from the public judgement of his leadership, precisely because executive power carries final political responsibility for the systems it commands. The logic of executive power is not that the leader personally performs every task. It is that the leader owns the consequences of the system he commands.
That is why this episode deserves more than outrage or applause. Pastor Adeboye’s intervention should be engaged respectfully, but also firmly. He remains one of Nigeria’s most consequential religious leaders, and his enormous moral stature should not place his public arguments beyond scrutiny. Indeed, because his words carry unusual weight, they deserve unusually serious examination. Reverence may be appropriate in matters of spiritual formation. It is not a substitute for public reasoning in matters of national security.
There are few institutions in Nigeria that command the moral authority, organisational reach and enduring public trust of the Christian Church. Across the country, faith communities educate millions of children, provide healthcare where governments have failed, mobilise volunteers in times of crisis, support widows and orphans, care for displaced families, and quietly sustain countless acts of compassion that never make newspaper headlines. Long before the language of social capital entered academic discourse, churches had already demonstrated its practical power, weaving dense networks of trust, reciprocity and mutual obligation that help communities withstand economic hardship, insecurity and personal tragedy. Much of this contribution is so familiar that it is rarely acknowledged. Yet any honest account of Nigeria’s development story would be incomplete without recognising the immense public good that faith organisations, and organised christianity in particular, continue to generate.
Indeed, some of the finest educational institutions in Nigeria today owe their origins to faith communities. Churches and other religious organisations have not merely preached moral values; they have invested in human capital, producing generations of graduates, professionals and public servants. Beyond Nigeria, the story is remarkably similar. Across Africa and much of the developing world, faith organisations remain among the largest providers of education, healthcare and humanitarian support, often stepping into spaces where state institutions have proved either absent or inadequate. Their developmental footprint is immense, even if it is sometimes overlooked in public discourse.
That remarkable influence, however, carries a profound responsibility. Faith institutions do not merely shape what people believe about God; they also shape how people think about authority, citizenship, disagreement and truth. The habits cultivated in religious communities often spill into civic life. A society that learns intellectual humility and principled disagreement in its places of worship is more likely to practise those virtues in politics. A society that mistakes reverence for submission exports that weakness into every sphere of national life.
This is why the reaction to Pastor Adeboye’s intervention matters almost as much as the intervention itself. Some critics responded with insults of astonishing ferocity, imputing motives and mocking his spiritual standing rather than engaging his argument. Others moved to the opposite extreme, treating public disagreement with one of Nigeria’s most respected Christian leaders as something bordering on sacrilege. Between abusive contempt and unquestioning deference, the nation’s intellectual culture retreated. But religious institutions must never become sanctuaries of silenced thought or graveyards of disused intellect, where citizens are taught, implicitly or otherwise, to bury the prime gift of their minds instead of spending it vigorously in the service of public good.Every society possesses its collective habit of questioning authority, weighing evidence and arriving at shared judgement. Democracies flourish not because leaders are infallible, whether political or religious, but because citizens are willing to examine every public claim on its merits. Respect for spiritual authority is a virtue; intellectual surrender is not.
This is the deeper issue raised by Pastor Adeboye’s intervention. It is not principally about one speech, one political opinion or even one pastor. It is about the kind of intellectual culture we are cultivating as a society. Every enduring institution teaches habits of mind. Families do. Schools do. Universities do. The media do. Religious institutions do perhaps more than any other. They do not merely shape what people believe; they shape how people learn to think, how they respond to authority, how they process disagreement and how they distinguish conviction from conformity.
If the dominant lesson absorbed by millions of worshippers is that the greater the spiritual authority, the less permissible disagreement becomes, society eventually imports that habit into every other sphere of public life. Politics becomes populated by untouchable leaders. Universities become reluctant to question celebrated scholars. Public institutions reward conformity over inquiry. Citizens gradually lose the confidence to interrogate ideas on their merits, preferring instead to ask who spoke them. That is how a society’s culture of public intellection begins to erode- not always through censorship or repression, but through the quiet internalisation of intellectual deference.
Ironically, I suspect, and I hope at any rate, that Pastor Adeboye himself would be uncomfortable with such unquestioning loyalty. Christian history is, after all, a history of vigorous theological debate. The Protestant Reformation was born from principled disagreement. The apostles challenged one another. Paul publicly confronted Peter. Truth has rarely advanced through silent acquiescence. It has advanced because men and women possessed both the humility to listen and the courage to disagree.
That, perhaps, is the lesson this moment offers Nigeria. A mature society should be capable of holding two ideas together at once: profound respect for its spiritual leaders and complete freedom to disagree with their public opinions. We diminish our faith and values when we respond with abuse. We diminish our civic life when we respond with intellectual surrender. Between those two extremes lies the harder path-the path of reasoned disagreement, civic maturity and honest conversation. It is that culture, more than any individual political controversy, that will determine whether Nigeria’s pervasive religiosity is translated into an engine of national flourishing or allowed to become an unintended obstacle to its intellectual and democratic development.