Nigeria Needs More than Entertainment and Religion

By John Oguntiloye

A 1990-1991 study referenced by Wikipedia ranked Nigeria as the country with the highest church attendance in the world, at 89 per cent. You might argue that this data is definitely old. Well, I was able to find a more recent study on Catholic Church attendance in Nigeria. With  30 million members, the Catholic Church in Nigeria has a 94 per cent mass attendance. That makes Nigerian Catholics the most devout in the world. While no recent data was found for other denominations, we can assume that they have similar attendance rate. I should add that I could not find any data for Muslims but we can also assume that attendance in mosques will be in the same estimate as for churches. If this assumption is therefore true, what it means is that among other things, Nigerians have great admiration for religion.

I recently decided to study X (fka Twitter) trends for one week. I checked three times in a day. In the morning (10 am), in the afternoon (3 pm), and at night  (9 pm). My goal was to find out what Nigerians on X are mostly interested in. I’m aware that the problem with generalising with X trends is that certain demographics are not well represented on the platform. However, what I discovered was that the conversations Nigerians have on X are mostly centred on three institutions: religion, politics, and entertainment. Of all the three, the dominant and the most consistent was entertainment. Although a limited procedure, as already mentioned, what this could mean is that apart from religion, entertainment is another major institution that has a strong place in the hearts of Nigerians. There is no doubt that politics has a place, but only to the degree that it is impossible not to talk about it when you think about issues like insecurity or inflation. Hence, Nigerians do not have as much interest in politics as they have in religion and entertainment. Voting behaviour during elections validate this argument. In the last general elections, for instance, the total number of registered voters was 93.27 million. Out of this number, only 24.9 million people voted. This implies that 73 per cent of those who were eligible to vote did not. Unlike the Catholic Church, with a 94 per cent mass attendance, politics only had 27 per cent in the last election.

It is therefore safe to say that the two most influential and vibrant institutions in Nigeria are religion and entertainment. What this might mean is that the everyday Nigerian is most heavily influenced by either of these two institutions or by both at the same time. This has its implications and to lay it bare, I should establish that each of these two institutions has a different consciousness, philosophy, and ideology. Religion makes one conscious of God and the afterlife. In this regard, exemption is made for traditional religion given that it does not speak of any heaven where the faithful go, or a hell where people that do not believe would be consigned to an eternity of torture. Nevertheless, like other religions practised in Nigeria, traditional religion shares the consciousness of God (or gods) in everything.

The disposition of religion is not the same as entertainment. Unlike religion, entertainment promotes a life of enjoyment. Entertainment cares very little about metaphysical and existential issues. It promotes hedonism. The marked ideological differences between these two institutions raise the question of whether or not these two distinct institutions should or can mix. In other words, is it possible to be conscious of God, live in the world with the afterlife in mind and at the same time desire to enjoy yourself in this world? The answer to this may be controversial but what is certain is that religion and entertainment have mixed from an ideological and philosophical perspective so much so that one wonders if modern religious places in Nigeria are entertainment centres or if some Nigerian entertainers are religious preachers. But the real question is not whether or not religion and entertainment can mix. The real question is what have these two institutions contributed to the social ideology and philosophy of Nigerians?

One way to answer this question is to study the themes emphasised in religion and entertainment in Nigeria. I must admit that I have little knowledge about Islam, so my assumptions about religion are more about Christianity. That said, there are four noticeable central themes in Christian teachings in Nigeria – prosperity, love, relationships, and spiritual warfare. The ideology that drives the emphasis on prosperity can only be the desire for hedonism and this justifies the mixture of entertainment and religion. Other highlighted themes have their ideologies but the everyday Nigerian may be more invested in one of the themes than the others. However, their philosophy is largely driven by how their religion or denomination portrays any or all of the four themes.

If someone argues that these themes matter at this point in our evolution as a country, I will not disagree. However, I would argue that these four popular themes are not sufficient to cover what is supposed to be the ideological growth of a holistic individual in the modern world. Maybe the holistic development of the individual is not the sole responsibility of religion. But the unintended consequence of focusing on religion is that people become limited in their perspective. This is why Nigerians are consumers of science and technology but the philosophy that drives science and technology is absent in the country. The implication of this is having large swaths of the population who find spiritual answers where common sense, logic and rationality should suffice.

On the other hand, the major themes in entertainment include the display of wealth, love (with emphasis on sexuality), drug use, fraud, God and occasionally hard work. In a sense, one could argue that these motifs reflect what people want. But it should be said that the constant promotion of these themes has downstream consequences on the overall psychology of Nigerians. I once taught a group of secondary school girls whose ambition at the time was to become baby mamas of celebrities. You can correlate the increase in the promotion of smoking and substance use in music videos and movies with an increase in substance use in the country. Afrobeats songs are loud about money and some of the songs encourage girls to leave men that don’t give them money. Is it then a coincidence that Nigerian girls have unimaginable financial expectations from their boyfriends? While it is true that entertainment is the reflection of what is happening in society, it is also true that what is happening in entertainment in turn influences what happens in society. It is a symbiotic phenomenon.  

The bottom line, however, is that, like religion, the ideologies promoted in entertainment cannot develop a holistic individual in the modern world. Like religion, too, I do not think it is the duty of entertainment to develop a holistic individual and here lies the problem. The two most influential institutions in Nigeria cannot develop in people a modern outlook that is consistent with advancement and development. Unarguably, religion and entertainment are important and they have roles to play in public consciousness. But they should not be stretched beyond their utility. This is why if at all entertainment has something to contribute to developing our social ideology, it should be vetted by an institution like education. But how will this happen when entertainment as an institution is more influential than education? If religion has something to contribute to public health in the name of healing and deliverance or prosperity, health and economic institutions are supposed to vet it. This should be how we construct modern society. Different institutions are supposed to interact with each other to bring out the best in a state and ensure the well-being of its people. But in the Nigerian experience, the blend between religion and entertainment has contributed little to advancing us as a people.

63 per cent (133 million) of Nigerians are multidimensionally poor according to the National Bureau of Statistics (2022). Unemployment in Nigeria is criminally high. Major cities in Nigeria have infrastructural decay.  There is poor electricity. Life expectancy in Nigeria is 55 years. There has been persistent inflation. What response or solutions do religion and entertainment have to these problems? Religion and entertainment have proven incapable of developing the right outlook and consciousness capable of handling these problems. We need new ideologies and we need to build new institutions.

John is a biographer and content creator.