The Queue That Outlived Four Governments

There is a filling station on a major road in almost every Nigerian city where the queue has, at one point or another, stretched past the church, past the mosque, past the primary school, and around the corner into a street it has no business reaching. Children have done their homework on car bonnets in that queue. Marriages have been proposed in that queue. A man once told me he had buried his father, attended the funeral, returned home, and rejoined the same queue he left three days earlier, as though the queue itself were a relative he could not avoid.

Ask anyone in that queue what they are waiting for and they will tell you fuel. Ask them what they are really waiting for and, if they are honest, they will tell you something closer to a miracle. Not divine intervention exactly. A more familiar Nigerian miracle: the arrival of a leader, a policy, a coup, an election, a prophecy, anything, that will finally make the waiting stop. We do not call it faith when we do it to politicians. We should. It has all the theological features of faith: an object we cannot control, an outcome we cannot verify, and a willingness to keep believing after every previous disappointment.

This is the article where I tell you, as gently and as firmly as I know how, that the miracle is not coming. Not because Nigeria is beyond redemption. Because redemption was never going to arrive in the form we kept expecting it in.

Baba Is Coming: A Nigerian Liturgy

Every election season produces the same sermon, preached without a pulpit, believed without a creed. Baba is coming. This time it is different. This time the man understands suffering, or used to be poor, or has a doctorate, or speaks the right dialect at the right rally, or has simply not yet had the opportunity to disappoint us the way the last three disappointed us. We sing this liturgy every four years with the sincerity of people who have never once stopped to ask why the miracle keeps failing to show up.

I am not being cynical about elections. Voting matters. Leadership matters more than this article will have room to argue. But there is a difference between choosing a leader responsibly and outsourcing your entire moral agency to whoever wins, then blaming that person for every pothole, every naira of inflation, and every hour of darkness for the next four years, while you yourself do nothing in the meantime but wait and complain, as though citizenship were a spectator sport.

Here is a fact that ought to embarrass the messiah politics we keep practicing. In 2026, petrol in Nigeria became cheaper at many stations than it had been in more than a year, not because any government finally kept a promise, but because a private refinery built by a Nigerian businessman began undercutting the depot prices that had strangled the market for a decade. The Dangote Refinery did not appear because the National Assembly repented. It appeared because one man, whatever his flaws, decided he would rather build something than wait for the state to. Whatever you think of billionaires, sit with that for a moment. The most visible economic relief ordinary Nigerians have felt in years did not come from the government we keep praying will save us. It came from someone who got up and worked.

I am not asking you to worship Aliko Dangote. I am asking you to notice that the pattern of Nigerian deliverance has almost never been a benevolent ruler descending to fix things. It has been ordinary and extraordinary citizens doing the next right thing while the state was busy elsewhere. That pattern is older than Nigeria. It is, in fact, biblical.

When Israel Asked for a King

Read 1 Samuel 8 slowly, the way you would read a letter from someone who knows you too well. The elders of Israel come to the prophet Samuel and ask him to appoint a king over them, “like all the nations.” Samuel, hurt by the request, takes it to God, and God’s response is not what most sermons on this passage remember.

“And the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.’” — 1 Samuel 8:7 (ESV)

God then instructs Samuel to warn the people exactly what a king will do. He will take their sons for his armies. He will take their daughters for his kitchens. He will take the best of their fields and vineyards and give them to his officials. He will tax a tenth of their grain and their flocks. And in the day that king oppresses them, God says, they will cry out because of the king they themselves chose, and God will not answer them on that day.

This is not a passage about the danger of bad kings. It is a passage about the danger of wanting a king at all, of wanting someone else to carry what God had actually equipped an entire covenant community to carry together. Israel did not lack the resources to govern itself under God. It lacked the patience to keep doing the slow, communal, unglamorous work of covenant faithfulness, and so it asked for a shortcut with a crown on it. Nigeria has been asking for that same shortcut since 1999, dressed up in a different vocabulary. We call it “the next administration.” God, through Samuel, called it rejection.

The Shepherds Who Fed Themselves

I will not pretend leadership is innocent in this story. Scripture never lets leaders off that easily either.

“Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy, and say to them, even to the shepherds, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” — Ezekiel 34:2 (KJV)

Ezekiel’s indictment of Israel’s shepherds reads like it was written after a briefing on the Nigerian budget cycle. The shepherds eat the fat, clothe themselves with the wool, and slaughter the fattened sheep, but they do not feed the flock. The weak are not strengthened. The sick are not healed. The injured are not bound up. The strays are not brought back. Instead, Ezekiel says, the shepherds ruled the sheep “with force and with cruelty.” This is a searing description of extractive leadership, the kind that treats a nation’s people as a resource to be harvested rather than a flock to be tended. Anyone who has watched a state governor commission the same borehole three times before three different elections knows exactly what Ezekiel is describing.

But notice something easy to miss in Ezekiel 34. God’s judgment does not end with the shepherds. By the end of the chapter, God promises to personally search for the sheep, rescue them, and become their shepherd himself, precisely because the human shepherds failed. That is not a permission slip for the sheep to do nothing. It is a promise that when human leadership collapses, divine leadership does not, and the flock’s response to that promise is never passivity in Scripture. It is always obedience, gathering, and rebuilding.

Achebe Was Half Right

Chinua Achebe was not writing theology when he published The Trouble with Nigeria in 1983, but he was closer to it than he realised. His diagnosis was leadership, and he was not wrong. Nigeria’s post-independence history, from the coups of the 1960s through the oil boom mismanagement of the 1970s to the structural adjustment years of the 1980s and the present era of subsidy politics and naira devaluation, is in large part a chronicle of leaders who mistook the presidency for an inheritance rather than a stewardship.

Where I part ways gently with Achebe is not in his diagnosis but in his prescription, or rather in the prescription many Nigerians have taken from him. If the trouble is leadership, the logic goes, then the solution is simply better leaders, and our only job is to keep voting until we find one. Scripture agrees that leadership matters immensely. It never agrees that leadership is the whole story.

“What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” — James 2:14, 17 (ESV)

James is writing about personal faith, but the principle transfers with unsettling precision to national faith. A citizenry that prays for Nigeria on Sunday and does nothing for Nigeria the other six days, that reports every pothole to God in prayer but never to the local government chairman in writing, that complains about corruption but pays the bribe at the checkpoint because it is faster, has a faith without works. And faith without works, James says plainly, is dead. Not weak. Dead.

Consider Nehemiah, a man who had every reason to wait for someone else to fix Jerusalem. He was not even in Jerusalem. He was a cupbearer in a Persian palace, comfortable, employed, safe. When news reached him that the wall of his ancestral city lay in ruins and its gates were burned, he wept, fasted, and prayed for days. Then, notably, he did not stop there. He asked the king for permission, gathered materials, travelled to a ruined city, and organised the rebuilding himself, family by family, gate by gate.

“Then said I unto them, Ye see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire: come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach.” — Nehemiah 2:17 (KJV)

Read Nehemiah chapter three and you find something remarkable: an entire chapter listing, by name and by family, which section of the wall each household repaired. The priests repaired the section near the sheep gate. The goldsmiths repaired another section. A ruler’s daughters repaired part of the wall themselves. Nobody waited for a king to fix Jerusalem. A community organised itself, household by household, and rebuilt what generations of neglect had destroyed. That is what deliverance actually looks like in Scripture far more often than a rescuing monarch. It looks like ordinary people repairing the section of wall in front of their own house.

The Miracle Is Not Coming, You Are

Here is where I ask you to stop reading this as commentary on Nigeria in general and start reading it as a letter addressed to you specifically.

You are not waiting for the next election to save Nigeria. You are the wall repair Nigeria is waiting for. Your section might be the classroom where you refuse to accept a bribe for a grade. It might be the small business you run without cutting the corner everyone tells you is normal. It might be the local church you serve faithfully instead of chasing the bigger platform. It might be the vote you cast after actually reading a manifesto instead of following whoever your ethnic or religious bloc endorsed. It might be the young Nigerian abroad who sends money home not only for consumption but for building something. It might be staying when leaving would be so much easier, and if you have already left, it might be refusing to let distance become an excuse for disengagement.

None of this excuses bad leadership. Ezekiel’s fury at Israel’s shepherds still stands, and Nigeria’s leaders still owe an account they have not yet given. But Israel’s mistake in 1 Samuel 8 was not that they wanted good government. It was that they wanted a substitute for their own covenant responsibility, a human king who would carry what God had asked them to carry together. Nigeria has spent more than two decades asking every new administration to be that king. Every single one has disappointed us in exactly the way God warned Samuel it would.

The trouble with Nigeria, Achebe said, is a failure of leadership. He was half right. The other half of the trouble with Nigeria is a citizenry that keeps waiting for a shepherd to arrive on a white horse instead of picking up a trowel and repairing the section of the wall in front of its own house. Nobody is coming to save you. Not because God has abandoned Nigeria, but because God’s pattern, from Samuel’s Israel to Nehemiah’s Jerusalem, has always been to work through a people who stop waiting and start rebuilding. The wall will not repair itself, and neither, history keeps insisting, will the nation. Pick up whatever tool is in your hand. Your section is waiting.

References

Biblical References

  • 1 Samuel 8:7 (ESV) — Used to establish that Israel’s demand for a king was, at its root, a rejection of covenant responsibility in favour of a human substitute, framing the article’s central argument about messiah politics.
  • Ezekiel 34:2 (KJV) — Used to indict extractive Nigerian leadership through the prophet’s condemnation of shepherds who feed themselves rather than the flock.
  • James 2:14, 17 (ESV) — Used to argue that civic faith without civic works is dead, applying the epistle’s argument about personal faith to national responsibility.
  • Nehemiah 2:17 (KJV) — Used to introduce Nehemiah’s decision to act rather than wait, as a model of citizen-initiated rebuilding.
  • Nehemiah 3 (referenced, not directly quoted) — Used to illustrate the household by household, communal model of rebuilding as the biblical pattern of deliverance.

Other Sources

  • Achebe, C. (1983). The trouble with Nigeria. Fourth Dimension Publishing.
  • Afrobarometer. (2024, December 18). Majority of Nigerians have considered emigration in search of opportunity, new Afrobarometer survey finds [Press release]. https://www.afrobarometer.org/articles/majority-of-nigerians-have-considered-emigration-in-search-of-opportunity-new-afrobarometer-survey-finds/
  • Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre. (2026, February 10). Nigeria retains low score in 2025 Corruption Index as global ranking slips. PRNigeria News. https://prnigeria.com/2026/02/10/nigeria-corruption-index/
  • Transparency International. (2026, February 10). Corruption Perceptions Index 2025. Transparency.org. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
  • Vanguard. (2026, July 9). Competition intensifies in Nigeria’s downstream market as petrol holds firm, diesel prices rise. Vanguard News. https://www.vanguardngr.com/2026/07/competition-intensifies-in-nigerias-downstream-market-as-petrol-holds-firm-diesel-prices-rise/