There is something wonderfully revealing about the Nigerian Presidency’s response to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference: when confronted with an uncomfortable diagnosis, it has chosen to quarrel with the physician rather than examine the patient. The bishops met President Bola Tinubu, presented their assessment of Nigeria’s economic distress, insecurity and democratic anxieties, and apparently did precisely what citizens ought to expect of religious leaders with a conscience: they told power what they thought power needed to hear. The Presidency’s subsequent irritation is therefore less a rebuttal than a demonstration of why the bishops felt obliged to speak. Let us dispense first with the most tiresome proposition: that the bishops’ assessment is merely “one perspective.”
Of course it is a perspective. So is the Presidency’s. So is the Central Bank’s. So is the National Bureau of Statistics’. So is the testimony of the trader who cannot afford her weekly groceries, the pensioner waiting for payment, and the family calculating whether school fees can coexist with dinner. Nobody has canonized the bishops’ memorandum. But neither has the Presidency been ordained custodian of empirical truth. The Catholic bishops are not claiming infallibility. They are exercising judgment. And their judgment is hardly eccentric. Earlier this year, the CBCN itself identified poor leadership and a defective understanding of politics as major causes of Nigeria’s worsening economy, insecurity and poverty. Other Christian leaders have subsequently raised comparable concerns about insecurity, education and the deterioration of living conditions.
That hardly resembles a conspiracy of episcopal hallucination. The Presidency’s more interesting complaint is that Cardinal John Onaiyekan discussed the private meeting on television. Here, there is a legitimate question of discretion. Confidentiality is valuable. If the meeting was expressly confidential, the cardinal should have respected that understanding. But the Presidency cannot have it both ways. It cannot treat a private conversation as confidential when criticism emerges and simultaneously use the contents of that conversation to publicly rebut the critics. Once the government itself begins litigating the substance of the encounter in public, the sanctity of the Villa’s diplomatic curtains becomes rather less convincing.
More fundamentally, a meeting with the President is not a vow of omertà. The bishops were not summoned to negotiate a classified military operation. They were religious leaders speaking about the condition of the nation to the nation’s elected president. Their moral authority derives precisely from their ability to speak publicly about what they believe is wrong. The Presidency’s argument that Tinubu does not need bishops to tell him what is happening is particularly curious. Nobody suggested that the President possesses no intelligence, newspapers, advisers, statistics or telephones. Of course he does.
The problem is not information. It is interpretation. A president may receive ten newspapers every morning and still fail to understand the experience of the citizen buying food at 40 per cent higher prices. He may receive impeccable security briefings and still underestimate the terror of a parent whose child has been kidnapped. He may possess every macroeconomic indicator available to the state and still misunderstand what “recovery” feels like in a household where income has not recovered. Government statistics measure conditions. Churches encounter people. The bishops therefore supply something bureaucratic intelligence cannot: moral testimony from the pews.
And here lies the Presidency’s most unfortunate rhetorical mistake. The bishops did not say Tinubu was unaware of Nigeria’s problems. They said Nigerians were suffering. Those are not the same proposition.
The President’s response—that the country has emerged from a “dark tunnel” and that economic foundations for recovery have been laid—may be defensible. The administration can legitimately point to fiscal improvements, more regular salary and pension payments in states, NELFUND and other policies. Indeed, the State House has publicly highlighted NELFUND, security efforts and the federal government’s support for education and healthcare.
But a government is not entitled to convert evidence of improvement into evidence of sufficient improvement. That is the elementary distinction the Presidency seems determined not to understand. If inflation slows from catastrophic to merely brutal, the statistic has improved. The citizen is not necessarily flourishing. If government finances stabilise while household purchasing power collapses, both statements can be true. If security operations achieve successes while kidnappings and killings continue, both propositions can coexist. A country can be recovering statistically and suffering socially. That is not contradiction. It is economics. The most revealing part of the presidential response is perhaps the attempt to politicize Onaiyekan by invoking the Catholic Church’s alleged sympathy for Peter Obi in 2023. This is spectacularly weak.
If a bishop criticises the government, the appropriate response is not to rummage through his presumed electoral preferences. Refute his facts. If the bishops are wrong about insecurity, show where. If they are wrong about economic hardship, produce the evidence. If they are wrong about democratic deterioration, demonstrate it. If their recommendations are constitutionally misplaced—as with mission schools—explain the constitutional allocation of powers. That is debate. “Perhaps they supported Obi” is not rebuttal. It is political gossip wearing a necktie. Nor does the claim that other Christian organizations disagree rescue the Presidency. Truth is not established by headcount among clerical bodies. If ten bishops say the house is burning and eleven pastors say it is merely warm, the fire brigade does not conduct a referendum. The President is right about one thing: governing Nigeria is harder than shepherding a parish. Precisely. That is why government must be held to a higher, not lower, standard of accountability. The Catholic bishops have no power to arrest a kidnapper, stabilize the naira, collect taxes or secure a highway. The government does.
And when the government tells suffering Nigerians to seek assistance from churches—as critics have complained—it risks making the ultimate inversion: the institution constitutionally charged with solving public problems lectures the institution that has been feeding, educating, sheltering and burying the victims to do more. That is not statesmanship. It is subcontracting failure. The Presidency should therefore stop behaving as though criticism is an act of treason against the administration’s economic narrative. A democracy worthy of the name does not require bishops to applaud the government before breakfast and whisper their objections after Mass. The bishops spoke. The President answered. Excellent. Now let the argument proceed where it belongs: on the evidence, in the streets, in the economy, in the security statistics and, above all, in the lived experience of Nigerians. Power does not become wiser by silencing its critics. It merely becomes more surprised when the critics turn out to have been right.