When God and Politics Become Weapons: How Religion and Partisanship Are Tearing Nigeria Apart

By George Omagbemi Sylvester | Published by SaharaWeeklyNG.com

“Instead of joining hands against poverty, insecurity and corruption, we sharpen knives on each other and the country pays the price.”

Nigeria is a nation of staggering possibilities and stubborn contradictions. We boast a youthful population, vast natural resources and a diaspora that outshines our reputation abroad. Yet at home we fritter away those assets on what should be the least important of all contests, who prays where and who sits on which party stool. Religion and partisan politics (two forces that could bind a plural society) have instead been weaponised, turning colleagues into enemies, constituencies into battlefields and public life into a theatre of suspicion. The result is predictable: a state weaker, a society poorer and citizens dead or displaced in numbers that shame our claim to civilisation.

Religion in Nigeria is not a neutral private comfort; it is a civic force with mass reach. Roughly half the population identifies as Muslim and half as Christian, a demography that should encourage humility, compromise and inclusive institutions. Instead, the balance has been treated as a truncheon to be wielded in elections, appointments and policy fights. When political actors make faith a litmus test for office or weaponise clergy prophecies to mobilise followers, they tear at the fragile fabric of citizenship and convert theological difference into permanent political danger. Pew’s recent work shows how religion remains central to identity in Nigeria and that fact matters for how power is contested.

The violence that follows is not theoretical. Over the past decade the country has witnessed waves of communal and sectarian brutality whose proximate causes range from climate-driven land pressures to criminal banditry, yet their lines are often drawn in religious or ethnic ink. Farmer–herder clashes, concentrated in the Middle Belt, have killed thousands and spread fear across farming communities. By 2021, more than 15,000 deaths had been linked to these clashes; local outbreaks since then, including mass attacks in Benue and other states, have shown the crisis is escalating. When disputes over grazing corridors and farmland are narrated as religious persecution, innocent farmers and herders alike are pushed into cycles of revenge.

Terrorist insurgency adds a gnawing dimension. Boko Haram and ISWAP not only killed tens of thousands and displaced millions in the northeast – they also turned religion into a cover for brutal politics. The consequences are not confined to the northeast; they ripple into national politics, inform security policy and feed identity-based suspicion across the federation. Civilians pay the heaviest price: thousands dead, millions uprooted and whole local economies hollowed out. The humanitarian cost is matched by an economic toll: insecurity destroys farms, distracts investment and raises the fiscal burden for a government already addicted to borrowing.

Politics has itself become a theatre of religious signalling. The 2023 presidential campaign, for example, exposed how fragile the country’s equilibrium is when parties abandon long-standing practices of balance for short-term electoral gain. The Muslim–Muslim ticket controversy (whether you call it tactical realpolitik or cynical disregard for plural representation) sharpened sectarian anxieties and showed how quickly trust can dissipate if inclusiveness is not defended as a principle. When political entrepreneurs calculate that religion will win them votes, they sell the nation out for partisan advantage.

This is not mere moralising: it is practical. When citizens see appointments, licences, policing, or access to relief routed through faith-based networks, trust in state institutions collapses. Governance then survives on patronage, not performance. Public resources are diverted to cronies and co-religionists; laws meant to protect the vulnerable are mangled by selective enforcement; and civic identity (the idea that every Nigerian is first a citizen) is subordinated to narrower loyalties. The consequence is political fragmentation at a time the state most requires unity to confront existential threats: poverty, inflation, climate shocks and violent non-state actors.

We can (and must) do better. The remedy begins with a hard embrace of secular citizenship: not anti-religion, but neutral public institutions that treat faith as a private domain while guaranteeing equal protection for all. This means transparent appointments, rigorous anti-corruption enforcement and the depoliticisation of security agencies. It means enforcing anti-violence laws impartially and prosecuting those who inflame religious passions for personal gain. It also means strengthening local conflict-resolution mechanisms: where grazing corridors or land rights cause friction, the state must mediate fairly and invest in alternatives (ranching, irrigation and effective land registration) instead of amplifying blame. Research from scholars like Jibrin Ibrahim has repeatedly shown that high religiosity in Nigeria coexists with weak civic practices and that addressing the structural drivers of conflict is essential for reconciliation.

Religious leaders, too, have a duty. This is not a call to silencing the pulpit; it is an appeal for courage. Wole Soyinka’s insistence that human liberty must come before sectarian barricades (and his famous rebuke that religion must not be allowed to prevent rational national thinking) is not literary flourish; it is ethical strategy. Clerics and imams must preach restraint and publicly rebuke those who weaponise faith. Where religious leaders use congregations to amplify division, they forfeit moral authority and become accomplices to national decay.

Finally, ordinary citizens must reclaim civic courage. Unity is not uniformity. It is the will to disagree without dehumanising. It is the daily practice of treating a neighbour who prays differently as deserving of decency, equal opportunity and security. Civil society, universities, the media and the private sector must amplify narratives of shared destiny over slogans of exclusion. International partners can help, but the solution must be homegrown: layered, patient and relentless.

Nigeria’s enemies are not each other; they are hunger, poor governance, climate shocks and violent actors who exploit our divisions. To fight them effectively we must stop seeing religion and party membership as identity armour and start seeing them as private commitments that do not disqualify one from the public good. If we do not, the nation will continue to fracture, not along neat ideological lines, but in human terms: widows, orphans, ruined farms and shuttered schools. That is an indictment we cannot afford.

We owe future generations a country where difference does not mean danger. The work is ugly and difficult (reforming institutions, enforcing law and recalibrating moral leadership) but it is the only honest path forward. As Soyinka warned, the moral imagination of a people determines the life they will lead. Let us choose a Nigeria that puts humanity first, and religion and politics in their proper, constructive place.