TD The Nigerian state under Bola Ahmed Tinubu does not merely steal the treasury; it desecrates whatever it cannot persuade. When it encounters an institution whose moral authority it cannot conquer through legitimate performance, it simply manufactures a counterfeit version, hires actors to wear the uniforms, and orders the state propaganda apparatus to broadcast the farce.
In July 2022, when the APC desperately needed to whitewash the national outrage over its same-faith presidential ticket, Nigerians witnessed an unforgettable piece of political street theater: men in ill-fitting cassocks and wrinkled vestments scuttling through the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja. They were the infamous “unknown bishops”—mechanics, roadside artisans, and transactional hustlers hired off the streets to pose as high-ranking Christian clerics for cameras.
Four years later, the comedy has ceased to be funny. It has hardened into a routine tool of statecraft.
On Wednesday, the regime unveiled the latest installment in its long-running religious minstrel show. Gathering under the grandiloquent moniker of the “Charismatic Bishops Conference of Nigeria” (CBCN)—a cheap, deliberate acronym theft designed to mimic the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria (CBCN)—a gathering of self-styled prelates led by one “Archbishop” Leonard Bature Kawas announced their total endorsement of Bola Tinubu for the 2027 presidency.
Sitting before government television cameras, flank-to-flank with the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume, and the Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, the conveners declared that they represented “950 canonical bishops” in Nigeria and branches across 52 nations. Their reason for backing the emperor? Not that food has become affordable. Not that mass abductions have stopped. Not that the naira has regained its dignity. No, they praised him because he “balanced diversity” by handing out appointments, and pleaded directly into the microphones that the Federal Government should remember to include clerics like them in political patronage and political appointments.
The shamelessness is staggering.
Let the truth be spoken plainly without theological courtesy: these men are not bishops. A bishopric is not a title you print on a colorful flyer in Wuse Zone 4 or award to yourself after registering a storefront ministry with the Corporate Affairs Commission. In genuine Christian tradition—whether Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, or orthodox charismatic formations—episcopal authority is anchored in historic apostolic succession, verified ecclesiastical councils, rigorous theological training, and above all, moral oversight over a genuine flock of believers.
What Nigeria witnessed in Abuja was not a synod; it was a market transaction. It was an assembly of independent preachers, storefront proprietors, and clerical mercenaries renting out robes to provide divine cover for a government that has visited unprecedented hardship upon their own congregations.
This is where the tragedy of the pulpit collides with the broader sociological destruction of the Nigerian soul.
The sheer desperation engineered by the Tinubu administration has turned the holy altar into an open commodities exchange. In an economy where honest labor no longer puts food on the table, where the middle class has been eradicated, and where running a small business is an invitation to bankruptcy, the church has not been spared the rot. The regime has weaponized hunger to such an extent that even men who claim to carry the Word of God are lining up to audition for crumbs from the presidential table.
While their ordinary congregants faint in church from malnutrition, walk miles because they cannot afford ₦1,200 per liter of petrol, and pool widow’s mites to pay ransom for members kidnapped on desolate highways, their “bishops” are in luxury air-conditioned banquet halls in Abuja singing hymns to the authors of their misery. They stood before the cameras and looked away from the mass graves, looked away from the mothers boiling leaves to feed children, and looked away from the young people fleeing the country in droves, all to announce: “We support him today, we support him tomorrow, and we support him for as long as he’s willing to be our president.”
Consider the spiritual depravity of that declaration. In the Old Testament, the prophets of God stood in the courts of predatory kings to speak unyielding truth to power. Nathan confronted David over his abuse of office. Elijah confronted Ahab over the murder of Naboth and the theft of his ancestral vineyard. John the Baptist confronted Herod at the cost of his own head.
Under the Tinubu syndicate, the “prophets” do not confront Ahab; they form a lobby group to negotiate their share of Naboth’s vineyard. They do not ask Pharaoh to let the people go; they ask Pharaoh to make sure religious leaders are included in the taskmaster appointments.
This clerical charade is not an isolated comedy; it is an organic chapter in the playbook of lamba.
It belongs to the exact same political operating system that conscripted 200 young university graduates into the APC New Media troll army, turning victims into salaried digital bouncers for their oppressors. It is the exact same system that co-opted once-fiery critics like Daniel Bwala, Festus Keyamo, and Femi Fani-Kayode, teaching the entire nation that conviction is merely a waiting room for personal settlement.
When legitimate religious bodies like the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) or the genuine Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria issue pastoral letters decrying rampant insecurity, currency manipulation, and executive recklessness, the syndicate does not engage the criticism. Engaging the criticism would require empirical governance, and empirical governance is impossible for a regime built on illusions.
Instead, the syndicate builds a parallel universe. If the authentic youth are angry, hire 200 youths on Twitter to declare that hardship is a blessing. If the real press asks hard questions, buy the commentators or flood the channels with mercenaries. And if the authentic church refuses to bow to Baal, invent your own bishops. Sew purple capes, purchase gold-plated pectoral crosses, gather them under an acronym that confuses the careless reader, and announce to the world that the Christian community has endorsed the emperor.
This is the syndicate mindset that must be dismantled if Nigeria is ever to breathe again.
When Papa Doc Duvalier seized power in Haiti, he understood that to subjugate a people completely, you must first break their moral and spiritual compass. He co-opted religious symbols, neutralized authentic clerical resistance, and installed pliable, compromised spiritual proxies to tell the Haitian peasant that the dictator’s terror was ordained by heaven. The result was not merely political oppression; it was a psychological devastation that left Haiti a hollowed-out ghost of a nation long after the Duvaliers fled.
Nigeria is walking the exact same road. When the highest political office in the land treats the altar as a campaign megaphone, when pastors trade the prophetic mantle for petrol subsidy crumbs, and when the sacred vestments of church history are reduced to cheap carnival costumes for political endorsements, the spiritual and moral consensus of the nation is completely shredded.
The task of de-Tinubuization will not merely be an economic audit or a constitutional purge of cronies from the Central Bank and NNPC. It will require a relentless cultural and spiritual sanitization.
It will require genuine churches to cast out the merchandisers from the temple. It will require citizens to look past the theatrical purple cassocks and recognize hired sycophancy for what it is: an act of public betrayal dressed in liturgical robes.
To the so-called “Charismatic Bishops” who stood in Abuja to bless the ruin of Nigeria: history and heaven have already taken your measure. You may collect your honoraria, you may pocket your logistics envelopes, and you may pose with high government officials for tonight’s prime-time propaganda bulletins. But when you return to your pulpits on Sunday, look into the hollow, hungry eyes of the congregation sitting before you. You did not endorse a leader; you traded the blood, the sweat, and the stolen future of your own people for thirty pieces of political silver.
The robes cannot cover the shame. And when this empire of lamba inevitably crashes under the weight of its own deceit, the fake bishops will find that neither the syndicate nor the cassock can protect them from the harsh, unyielding judgment of truth.
iOccupyNigeria; @iOccupyNigeria
