Answerable to whom?

On Saturday 7 January 2017, news spread that Pastor Enoch Adeboye had retired as General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God.¹ He had named Pastor Joshua Obayemi to run the church in Nigeria and kept the worldwide role,² he did it to comply with a governance code from the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRC) that set a term of 20 years for the heads of not-for-profit organisations, churches and mosques included.²

In Issue 5, “How long and How many?”, I wrote about the polio boycott in northern Nigeria, which religious leaders helped start in 2003 and helped end in 2004.³ The Polio case is one of many examples that shows just how much influence religion has on Nigeria ,looking at that case as well as more recent happenings, has left me with a question, which is who religious authority in Nigeria answers to. I believe that religious bodies should be free in what they teach (and the general public allowed to freely critique harmful doctrine).While being bound, like any other organisation, by ordinary law and by duties to their own members. The FRC episode shows how far Nigeria is from that.

The code took effect on the 17 of October 2016, and for not-for-profit bodies it worked on a “comply or justify non-compliance” basis,⁴ so a church could have kept its leader and explained why. It also said that nothing in it was meant to touch the spiritual leadership of founders, general overseers, imams, or bishops.⁵ Within two days of Adeboye’s announcement the federal government had suspended it, and President Buhari had sacked Jim Obazee, the FRC’s executive secretary.⁶ The code would have reached the Sultan of Sokoto too, who had led the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs since 2006, if not for the initiative’s abrupt suspension.⁶ When the FRC tried their hands at a similar policy with the drafting of a new national code in 2018, it said nothing about churches or mosques.⁷

The principle behind the code was sound but the execution was poor. An accounting regulator had no business setting term limits for pastors and imams, but the line the code drew, between doctrine and the running of an institution, is the right one. The same pattern returned with a law the National Assembly itself passed. Section 839 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020 let the Corporate Affairs Commission suspend the trustees of any incorporated association, a church included, and install its own managers.⁸ The Christian Association of Nigeria called the Act “ungodly”,⁸ and in March 2023 the Federal High Court declared the relevant parts of section 839 inapplicable to CAN and the churches, citing the right to worship.⁹ The trouble with section 839 was the power it gave an official over any organisation, and the ruling lifted that power from churches while leaving it over everyone else.

I’m not arguing for the state supervision of doctrine. The Constitution clearly forbids any government in Nigeria from adopting a state religion and protects every person’s freedom to practise and propagate one.¹⁰ No sensible person wants a civil servant approving sermons. Doctrine belongs to believers. Offerings, property, staff, and buildings are matters of public governance, and Nigeria has no settled, neutral framework for them.

There are two patterns of failure, and in both the state uses discretion where it should apply the same law to everyone. The first is under-enforcement, this is where a church, a mosque, or a crowd acting in religion’s name causes harm that ordinary law should catch. In 2014 a guesthouse at T. B. Joshua’s Synagogue Church of All Nations in Lagos collapsed and killed 116 people, and the coroner said the church should be prosecuted because the building had no planning permission.¹¹ In March 2021, six and a half years later, the trial had still not reached final written addresses.¹² In 2022 a mob in Sokoto killed Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a student accused of blasphemy, and the two people charged were discharged after the police prosecutor stopped coming to court.¹³ Akwa Ibom made it a crime in 2008 to brand a child a witch, a practice an official told Al Jazeera was “often prompted by a pastor’s declaration”, and ten years later nobody had been successfully prosecuted under the law.¹⁴

The second is over-enforcement, where the state turns blasphemy charges on dissenters. A Kano Sharia court sentenced the cleric Abduljabbar Kabara to death for blasphemy in 2022,¹⁵ and the same year the Kano State High Court jailed Mubarak Bala, a humanist, for 24 years over Facebook posts, a sentence the Court of Appeal later cut to five.¹⁶

Religious bodies still hold public trust, and they can reach people the state cannot. Chatham House, citing a 2017 Afrobarometer survey, reports that 64 per cent of Nigerians surveyed trusted religious leaders some or a lot.¹⁷ That trust is what the polio campaign drew on once the boycott ended. Muslim and Christian clerics in the north have since carried vaccination messages into their sermons,¹⁸ and the Chatham House researchers whose work I used in Issue 5 concluded in 2021 that religious leaders “can be powerful advocates and partners” in citizen-led accountability, including the monitoring of budgets.¹⁷

In Chatham House’s own 2018 survey, 12 per cent of respondents accepted a legislator diverting public money to himself, but one in five accepted it when the money went to his religious community, and the authors note that politicians use donations to religious projects to buy respectability.¹⁷ In the 2017 figures, 20 per cent thought most or all religious leaders were corrupt.¹⁷ A cleric whose mosque was built with a governor’s money is badly placed to preach against that governor’s budget. A pastor who will not show his congregation the accounts cannot credibly ask a council chairman to publish his. Every collapse and every struck-out charge spends some of the trust the polio campaign relied on.

Section 845 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act already requires incorporated associations to file a statement of their affairs with the Corporate Affairs Commission twice a year,¹⁹ and the 2023 ruling, as reported, did not include section 845 among the provisions it barred the commission from enforcing against churches.⁹ Members should have a right to inspect those filings and attend the meetings where trustees are chosen, with protection for whistleblowers. Any statutory power for a regulator to remove trustees should require a court order and neutral criteria, and should apply to every association alike. The law on building approval, homicide, and child protection should be enforced whatever the defendant’s faith, and the state assemblies that keep blasphemy offences should repeal them, though in the northern states with Sharia penal codes the political cost will be high.

The obvious objection is that a regulator in Nigeria can be captured, and the recent record backs that up. The FRC code was suspended within two days of Adeboye’s announcement; section 839 was struck down only after it had handed the CAC unilateral power over trustees; and the proposed NGO bill would create a licensing power that could be used to reward friendly congregations and punish hostile ones. So the answer cannot be to trust a regulator. Rather It should be a small independent registrar that receives and publishes filings and keeps a public register of trustees and property, with credible allegations referred to the police or to court. Removal should need a court order, on grounds set out in the statute: fraud, misappropriation, persistent failure to file after notice and a chance to cure, or a breach of the association’s own constitution established by a court. The statute should say plainly that the regulator has no business with doctrine, liturgy, ordination or preaching, and associations should be able to challenge any action that goes beyond those limits. Filing, member inspection and whistleblower protection should be the ordinary obligations.

Keep this in mind, a church or mosque that publishes its own books has the credibility to ask a governor to publish his.

Notes

1. “RCCG and the FRC-induced storm in churches,” TheCable, accessed 4 November 2026. ↑
2. “FG Suspends Corporate Governance Code,” Channels Television, accessed 4 November 2026. The church later said the plan for a national overseer was under way before the code: Ugochukwu Ugwuanyi, “RCCG Says Adeboye’s Decision To Appoint National Overseer Irreversible,” THEWILL, 13 January 2017. ↑ ↑
3. A. S. Jegede, “What Led to the Nigerian Boycott of the Polio Vaccination Campaign?,” PLoS Medicine 4, no. 3 (2007): e73. The three states were Kano, Zamfara, and Kaduna. The paper gives both February and July 2004 for the agreement that ended the boycott. ↑
4. Templars, “Key Highlights of FRCN’s Newly Released National Code of Corporate Governance 2016,” client alert, October 2016. ↑
5. “‘This law is not for general overseers’ and other things you should know about the FRC code,” TheCable, accessed 4 November 2026. ↑
6. Tobi Soniyi, James Emejo, and Obinna Chima, “He Flew Too Close to the Sun and Melted, Obazee Sacked,” ThisDay, 10 January 2017. ↑ ↑
7. Ndubuisi Francis, “New Code of Corporate Governance Silent on Religious Bodies, CSOs,” ThisDay, 16 July 2018. ↑
8. “CAN rejects new company law, seeks review,” The Guardian (Nigeria), accessed 4 November 2026. ↑ ↑
9. Unini Chioma, “CAC Has No Power To Determine Leadership Of Religious Organizations — Court,” The Nigeria Lawyer, 22 March 2023, reporting the judgment of Justice Inyang Ekwo of the Federal High Court, Abuja, in suit FHC/ABJ/CS/84/2022, brought by the Registered Trustees of the Christian Association of Nigeria. ↑ ↑
10. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), sections 10 and 38(1). ↑
11. “T.B Joshua fails to appear for building collapse trial,” The Guardian (Nigeria), accessed 4 November 2026. ↑
12. “Workload Of Cases Forces Court To Adjourn Case Against Synagogue Church,” National Wire, 11 March 2021; Lukman Olabiyi, report on the adjournment of the Synagogue trial, The Sun (Nigeria), accessed 5 November 2026. The engineers faced 110 counts of involuntary manslaughter. ↑
13. Ahmed Oluwasanjo, “Police charged killers of Deborah Samuel but failed to appear, court documents reveal,” Peoples Gazette, 18 May 2023; “Four years after Deborah’s killing, group demands renewed investigation, prosecution,” The Guardian (Nigeria), accessed 4 November 2026. ↑
14. Marc Ellison, “How Nigeria’s fear of child ‘witchcraft’ ruins young lives,” Al Jazeera, 14 November 2018. The 2008 law set a custodial sentence of up to 10 years. ↑
15. Bankole Abe, “Blasphemy: Kano Islamic cleric Abduljabbar sentenced to death by hanging,” The ICIR, 15 December 2022. ↑
16. US Commission on International Religious Freedom, “Mubarak Bala,” accessed 4 November 2026; Humanists International, “Mubarak Bala,” accessed 4 November 2026. The two disagree on his release date: USCIRF gives 7 January 2025 and Humanists International 19 August 2024. ↑
17. Leena Koni Hoffmann and Raj Navanit Patel, “Collective action on corruption in Nigeria: The role of religion,” briefing paper, Chatham House, March 2021, pp. 9–11, 15, and 17. The 2018 survey covered Adamawa, Benue, Enugu, Lagos, Rivers, and Sokoto States and the FCT. The trust and corruption figures are the authors’ citation of Afrobarometer’s 2017 survey. ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
18. Global Polio Eradication Initiative, “Religious leaders fuelling demand for polio vaccines and health services in Nigeria,” accessed 4 November 2026. ↑
19. Companies and Allied Matters Act 2020, section 845; Nigeria Network of NGOs, “Nigeria Network of NGOs urges nonprofit organizations to file Bi-Annual Statement of Affairs,” 27 July 2023. The statements are due by 15 July and 15 January. ↑

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