When people lose everything- job loss, illness, debt, divorce, fire, or any other turn of life- the first loss is material. The second loss is often what we do to them afterward: stigmatization.
This week, Apostle Chibuzor Gift Chinyere of Omega Power Ministries did something the Nigerian state has repeatedly failed to do: he looked at displaced citizens and saw skill, not stigma.
Two women. One a nurse, the other a teacher. Both fled hardship abroad only to return home and face a second kind of exile, the quiet erasure that comes with being labeled a “returnee.”
Mrs. Ogechukwu Jecita Okafor, a registered nurse who once worked in a South African hospital, has been handed instant employment at the OPM Free Specialist Hospital in Port Harcourt.
Mrs. Blessing Nwanna, a former teacher, joins the staff of the OPM Free School. Both women are currently housed at the church’s free estate, alongside dozens of other returnee families receiving accommodation, feeding, and scholarships for their children.
This is not a charity theatre. It is a strategy. A pot that falls is not thrown away; it is mended, and it holds water again. That is what de-stigmatization means in practice: not pity, but restoration. Not a handout, but a handshake back into society.
And that is precisely where the uncomfortable question begins. Why is a church doing the government’s job?
Nigerians returning from South Africa, many fleeing xenophobic violence, economic collapse, or simple desperation, do not need sermons.
They need fast documentation, school re-entry for their children, functioning bank accounts, business registration support, and employers willing to look past the label “returnee” to see the résumé underneath. These are not spiritual interventions.
They are administrative ones, and they belong squarely on the desks of the Federal Government, state ministries, and the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons.
Apostle Chinyere has now publicly appealed to the Federal Government, state governments, international development partners, and NGOs to join this effort. That appeal should embarrass, not flatter, the officials it targets.
When a church in Port Harcourt is outperforming state welfare architecture in employment placement, housing, and school enrollment for its own displaced citizens, the failure is not one of resources; Nigeria has ministries, budgets, and commissions built for exactly this. The failure is one of will.
Aid keeps people alive. Access lets them live. The differentiation matters, and it is one government policy has yet to internalize. Rivers State and the Federal Government cannot continue assigning resettlement to faith institutions and civil society while claiming credit for stability.
If OPM can identify a nurse and a teacher within days of their arrival and place them in relevant work, there is no excuse for a state apparatus with far greater reach to lag.
Leaders must model the tone this crisis demands. Policy must set the floor beneath returnees, not leave it to be built brick by brick by churches and charities.
Until then, citizens rebuilding their lives from nothing will keep depending on the goodwill of apostles rather than the obligation of the state, and that arrangement should trouble everyone who calls Nigeria home.
