It should not take a church council to tell Nigeria’s government what every market woman in Port Harcourt already knows: that the country is hurting, and hurting badly. Yet here we are. The Spiritual Advisory Council of Christ Church, Port Harcourt, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian leaders speaking with one voice, has had to say plainly what elected officials seem unable or unwilling to admit: insecurity and economic hardship have pushed Nigerians to a breaking point.
That a religious body, not the National Assembly or the Presidency, is issuing the clearest diagnosis of the nation’s condition at the end of the 10th meeting of the SAC of Christ Church, should embarrass everyone in government. Clergy are not policy experts. Their mandate is spiritual, not administrative. But when moral leaders are the ones naming the crisis with more honesty than the people paid to fix it, the failure is not theirs; it belongs to a political class that has grown comfortable with silence.
The council’s sharpest line was not about insecurity at all. It was about optics: the “increasingly unrestrained ostentatious display of affluence” by public servants and politicians. This is the wound Nigerians feel every day. It is one thing to struggle with rising transport and food costs. It is another to struggle while watching convoys, mansions and foreign junkets paraded by the same officials asking citizens to endure “sacrifice.” Hardship is easier to accept when it is shared. It becomes unbearable, and politically dangerous, when it is not. Accountability and modest public service are not moral luxuries; they are the minimum price of asking a suffering population for patience.
Then there is the sentence that should stop every policymaker cold: “It has rarely been this difficult in our nation and for her citizens during peacetime.” Nigeria is not at war. There is no invading army, no blockade, no famine of natural origin. And yet millions are living through conditions that mirror wartime deprivation, asking themselves not how to thrive, but how to eat, move and stay safe. That is not an economic statistic. It is a governance failure, and it deserves to be named as one.
The SAC did not simply complain. It called for the federal and state governments to ensure that recently announced measures on transport and food costs are implemented “genuinely and evenly,” a pointed reminder that Nigeria’s problem is rarely a lack of policy announcements. It is the gap between announcement and delivery, between promise and the plate on a family’s table.
The government does not need another communiqué to know what is wrong. It needs the will to close that gap, visibly, accountably, and now. Because when the church has to do the government’s job of stating the obvious, the obvious becomes even harder to ignore.
