On a Sunday morning on Oba Akran Avenue in Ikeja, the visitors is worse than it’s on a Monday.
Cars are parked in three rows alongside the highway that was laid, widened and named for the commercial property it was meant to serve, and the younger males who direct them into the compounds put on reflective vests and name everyone Daddy or Mummy.
Through the gates, the place articulated lorries as soon as queued to gather completed items, the sound carries: a keyboard, a drummer warming up, a voice testing a microphone.
Several of those compounds have been factories inside dwelling reminiscence.
Some of the individuals now worshipping in them are sufficiently old to have utilized for jobs on the identical gate, within the years when the gate was hiring.
A declare circulates confidently in Nigerian dialog: that 4 of the nation’s 5 largest employers are church buildings. This column couldn’t confirm it, and neither can anyone else, as a result of Nigeria publishes no employer-level headcounts for religious our bodies or for many organisations exterior the listed company sector.
What might be checked is why it sounds believable to everybody who hears it, and that reply indicts Nigerian financial improvement extra severely than the declare itself would have.
The largest employer amongst corporations listed on the Nigerian Exchange in 2025 was Dangote Cement with 21,418 employees, adopted by First Holdco on 10,871 and United Bank for Africa on 10,821, in a rustic of about 230 million individuals. The Mail and Guardian reported in 2014 that Winners Chapel employed greater than 18,000 individuals in Nigeria alone.
That determine is twelve years previous and journalistic slightly than audited, however even at its weakest it locations one religious organisation in the identical employment band as the biggest industrial firm on the change. That shouldn’t be a narrative about church buildings being huge. It is a narrative about Nigerian companies being small.
America exhibits the distinction precisely. Walmart employs about 1.6 million individuals within the United States and 2.1 million worldwide, Amazon roughly 1.576 million worldwide, UPS about 460,000 and Target round 427,000. The whole American religious sector, some 184,591 organisations, employs round 1.5 million individuals on about $172 billion of annual income.
One American retailer due to this fact employs extra individuals than each religious organisation within the United States mixed. The American religious economy is massive in absolute phrases and marginal in relative phrases; the Nigerian one is modest in absolute phrases and looms massive as a result of so little else of scale presumably stands beside it.
Oba Akran Avenue in Ikeja is the place this turns into seen. Dunlop Nigeria operated from Plot 23 for forty-five years, with reported employment or jobs affected at closure of 1,000 individuals instantly and provided roughly 15% of nationwide tyre consumption earlier than ceasing manufacturing in April 2009.
The causes weren’t ethical: energy cuts, unreliable gasoline, rising prices, and a 2006 federal choice to chop the tyre import tariff from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. The Guardian has reported the Ikeja Dunlop premises amongst failed industrial websites taken over by church buildings, alongside Cocoa Industries Limited, Nigeria’s first cocoa-processing manufacturing facility, with Hardel and Enic (over 4,000 employees) and Ugo Foam on Akilo Road (over 6,000 employees) named in the identical reporting.
Nigeria’s industrial retreat spans sectors and generations. Michelin along with Dunlop deserted tyre manufacturing; Kaduna’s textile mills collapsed; the paper mills at Oku-Iboku, Jebba and Iwopin fell into extended decline. More just lately, P&G and GSK ended native manufacturing, whereas Mayor Biscuits, Iso Glass and Universal Rubber shut down.
Each closure represents greater than misplaced jobs: it erodes productive capability, industrial expertise and the home provide chains required to construct a diversified economy. This area can’t include different outstanding corporations throughout Nigeria, which many readers of this piece are conscious of, that are actually both closed, dormant or moribund. A barn that’s swept clear and freshly painted remains to be a barn with no yam in it.
Churches didn’t destroy Nigerian manufacturing. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) counted 767 corporations shut in 2023 alone, 335 extra distressed, capability utilisation at 56% and N350 billion (about $263 million) of unsold items in warehouses. Churches didn’t write the tariff schedule; they arrived on the public sale with money, as a result of in these neighbourhoods they have been typically the one establishments with a predictable weekly influx.
When the barn empties, the shrine fills. But the visitors is uneven: in America and Britain, deconsecrated church buildings grow to be breweries and workshops, whereas in Nigeria manufacturing facility flooring grow to be auditoria, and the specialised cloth that made a constructing a manufacturing web site is stripped out, dispersing the cluster of suppliers and mechanics round it.
The GDP mechanics are the place the actual argument sits. In the nationwide accounts, the output of non-profit establishments serving households, the class religious our bodies fall into, is valued at the price of manufacturing slightly than at a market value, as a result of no one buys a sermon at one.
A church’s contribution to measured GDP is due to this fact roughly what it pays its employees. Illustratively, 18,000 staff at a median ₦150,000 a month, above the ₦70,000 minimal wage (about $53) and effectively under the reported nationwide common determine that circulates on wage web sites of about ₦339,000, produce a wage invoice close to ₦32.4 billion a yr, roughly $24 million, and that’s basically the entire of the measured contribution.
A tyre plant does one thing completely different to the identical statistic. Its worth added is barely the beginning: it substitutes for imports and saves international change, pays firm earnings tax and worth added tax (VAT) on a taxable commerce, creates upstream demand for rubber, carbon black, metal twine and energy, helps distributors, fitters and haulage downstream, trains technicians, and can elevate output per employee over time, which is the one mechanism by which wages rise sustainably anyplace.
A wage invoice can’t develop quicker than the donations funding it in an explainable method. Both seem in GDP. Only one compounds.
The mixture image confirms the problem. Manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from 9.57% within the first quarter of 2026 to 7.72% within the second, at the same time as output grew by 3.24% year-on-year. MAN’s 10.2% contribution goal for 2026 now seems more and more troublesome to attain, whereas the Federal Government’s ambition of 20%-25% by 2030 stays a really distant prospect.
The rebased accounts put 2024 nominal GDP at ₦372.82 trillion, 35.4% above the earlier estimate. Yet the 2019 baseline reveals an economy dominated by providers, which accounted for 53.1% of GDP, in opposition to trade’s 21.1%. Nigeria trades, farms and rents way over it manufactures.
The labour market explains why church jobs are prized. The National Bureau of Statistics finds 85.6% of working Nigerians self-employed and solely 14.4% staff, with casual employment at about 93%: fewer than one in seven employed Nigerians is classed as an worker.
An establishment that points an appointment letter, pays on a set date and deducts pension is providing one thing genuinely scarce. The minimal wage has not moved since July 2024, labour has tabled calls for from ₦154,000 to ₦500,000, and the subsequent statutory overview shouldn’t be due till 2027.
Religious our bodies will not be pure consumption both. They are amongst Nigeria’s most vital personal suppliers of tertiary training, via Covenant, Redeemer’s, Babcock, Bowen, Madonna and Al-Hikmah, which is human capital formation, the enter Nigeria is shortest of.
The Redemption City, the headquarters of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, covers 2,500 hectares, described as the biggest church-owned single property on the planet and was estimated in 2023 to deal with about 200,000 residents with its personal roads, colleges, clinics, safety and energy, supplying privately what the state didn’t ship. The objection shouldn’t be that none of that is manufacturing. It is that nearly none of it’s tradable: it earns no international change and substitutes for no imports.
The Nigeria Tax Act 2025, efficient 1 January 2026, preserves income-tax exemption for qualifying public-character religious actions however excludes income derived from commerce or enterprise. Churches’ business ventures could due to this fact be taxable, whereas VAT obligations, together with self-accounting, the place directed by the tax authority, apply below the Act’s common guidelines. In essence, the sanctuary is exempt; the bookshop connected to it isn’t. Enforcing that evenly is now the take a look at.
What ought to be achieved? Firstly, shield industrial land by use classification, with a change-of-use levy pricing the loss the place conversion is allowed, as a result of downturns are cyclical and reclassification shouldn’t be. Secondly, deal with the 2006 tariff collapse as a standing lesson, since an obligation reduce and not using a matching fall in native prices transfers an trade overseas slightly than liberalising commerce.
Thirdly, contract agency electrical energy provide to the commercial estates at Ikeja, Agbara, Ikorodu, Aba and Kano and resolve the sector’s liquidity, as a result of producers value reliability, not put in megawatts. Fourthly, publish employer-level employment statistics via a nationwide employer register, which might settle the church buildings declare and rework labour coverage.
Fifthly, invite gathered religious capital into manufacturing via church-anchored industrial parks, single-digit SME funds and fairness participation, since establishments that may elevate ₦30 billion for an auditorium can elevate it for a plant. Sixthly, report the non-profit sector individually in satellite tv for pc accounts, so the scale of this phenomenon stops being a matter of folklore.
Hands that clap within the morning should nonetheless discover a hoe by midday. The congregation on Oba Akran shouldn’t be the issue; these worshippers are sheltering contained in the establishments that also operate.
The drawback is a cut price Nigeria accepted quietly, by which buildings that used to pay wages now home individuals praying for wages, and by which nothing seemed misplaced as a result of measured output didn’t fall. What was misplaced was the a part of the economy that compounds, earns {dollars} and raises productiveness. Recovering it’s a matter of tariffs, energy, land and credit score, which is to say a matter of choices.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA.
