On a Sunday morning on Oba Akran Avenue in Ikeja, the site visitors is worse than it’s on a Monday.
Cars are parked in three rows alongside the street 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 all people 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 had 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 significantly than the declare itself would have.
The largest employer amongst corporations listed on the Nigerian Exchange in 2025 was Dangote Cement with 21,418 workers, 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 relatively than audited, however even at its weakest it locations one religious organisation in the identical employment band as the most important industrial firm on the change. That is just not a narrative about church buildings being huge. It is a narrative about Nigerian corporations being small.
America reveals 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 giant in absolute phrases and marginal in relative phrases; the Nigerian one is modest in absolute phrases and looms giant 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 immediately and equipped 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 determination 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 unit, with Hardel and Enic (over 4,000 staff) and Ugo Foam on Akilo Road (over 6,000 staff) 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 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 house can not comprise different distinguished corporations throughout Nigeria, which many readers of this piece are conscious of, that at the moment are both closed, dormant or moribund. A barn that’s swept clear and freshly painted continues 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 had been usually the one establishments with a predictable weekly influx.
When the barn empties, the shrine fills. But the site visitors is uneven: in America and Britain, deconsecrated church buildings turn out to be breweries and workshops, whereas in Nigeria manufacturing unit flooring turn out to be auditoria, and the specialised material 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 true 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 relatively than at a market worth, as a result of no person buys a sermon at one.
A church’s contribution to measured GDP is due to this fact roughly what it pays its workers. Illustratively, 18,000 workers 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 12 months, roughly $24 million, and that’s primarily 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 overseas 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 wherever.
A wage invoice can not develop sooner 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, whilst output grew by 3.24% year-on-year. MAN’s 10.2% contribution goal for 2026 now appears to be like more and more tough to realize, 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 companies, which accounted for 53.1% of GDP, towards business’s 21.1%. Nigeria trades, farms and rents excess of 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% workers, 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 hard and fast 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 assessment is just not due till 2027.
Religious our bodies are usually not pure consumption both. They are amongst Nigeria’s most important non-public suppliers of tertiary schooling, by way of 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 most important church-owned single property on this planet and was estimated in 2023 to deal with about 200,000 residents with its personal roads, faculties, clinics, safety and energy, supplying privately what the state didn’t ship. The objection is just not that none of that is manufacturing. It is that just about none of it’s tradable: it earns no overseas 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 earnings derived from commerce or enterprise. Churches’ industrial 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 basic guidelines. In essence, the sanctuary is exempt; the bookshop hooked up to it’s not. Enforcing that evenly is now the take a look at.
What ought to be performed? Firstly, defend 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 is just not. Secondly, deal with the 2006 tariff collapse as a standing lesson, since an obligation minimize with no matching fall in native prices transfers an business overseas relatively 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 worth reliability, not put in megawatts. Fourthly, publish employer-level employment statistics by way of a nationwide employer register, which might settle the church buildings declare and remodel labour coverage.
Fifthly, invite collected religious capital into manufacturing by way of 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 dimensions 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 is just not the issue; these worshippers are sheltering contained in the establishments that also operate.
The downside is a discount Nigeria accepted quietly, through which buildings that used to pay wages now home individuals praying for wages, and through 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.
