On Saturday, May 18, 2025, the Governor of Borno State, Babagana Zulum, addressed citizens in a state-wide broadcast. His message was not about new strategies for rebuilding the war-torn state. It was not about education, healthcare, or employment. It was not even about holding the federal government accountable for the shambolic ways it has prosecuted the war against Boko Haram so far. He asked the citizens of Borno State to fast and pray on Monday, May 19. He asked them to kneel before God. To bow their heads. To speak in tongues. Maybe. He asked citizens already exhausted by prayer to pray some more.

Don’t get me wrong. Prayer is good. Fasting is one of the noblest acts of faith. But governance is not a religious rite, nor is it what the much-loved Fela Anikulapo Kuti called “In Spiritum Heavinus” in his 1978 song, ‘Suffering and Smiling’. It is not a prayer point. And when rulers like Zulum offer prayer as policy, they are not seeking divine intervention; they are running from responsibility.

In the 1980s, as sophomore students at the University of Jos, we were often told the story of how European missionaries arrived on African shores. They asked our forebears to close their eyes and pray. When our forebears opened them, the missionaries had confiscated the land and seized control of the lives of our forebears, kith and kin. 

It is a well-worn tale credited to the late Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu. But it tells the truth about our rulers. They surrender their power of action to the rituals of piety. They confuse the governance chamber with the pulpit. They convert governance into prophecy. And when policies fail, they turn to rosaries and tasbih rather than roll up their sleeves for hard work. Zulum, a professor of engineering and one of the country’s more educated governors, should know better. The citizens of Borno State do not lack faith. They lack security. They lack roofs over their heads. They lack clean water, access to schools, hospitals, and jobs. The last thing they need is another “Prayer Day”.

But he is not alone in this moral cowardice. In April 2024, Governor Abba Yusuf of Kano State organised statewide prayers to tackle insecurity. His predecessor, Ganduje, did the same in 2021, inviting Islamic clerics to recite verses to ward off bandits. In 2020, the then-President, Muhammadu Buhari, asked citizens to pray for our country’s “healing” as the economy tanked under inflation and mismanagement. Two years earlier, he declared June 28 a national day of fasting to ask God for peace during the herdsmen’s attacks on farmers. 

Not a single herdsman was arrested. Not one victim was compensated. In 2013, President Goodluck Jonathan asked citizens to fast and pray for divine intervention against Boko Haram. By 2014, over 200 girls were abducted from Chibok. In 2001, during one of the early spikes in fuel prices and the civil unrest that followed, President Olusegun Obasanjo gathered religious leaders in Abuja for national prayer. The price hike stayed. The anger festered.

It has become a cycle. Crises emerge. The state fails. The government calls for prayers. Nothing changes. This habit of replacing governance with supplication is unserious. It is dangerous. And it exposes a deep bankruptcy of ideas at the top. Borno State has been at the epicentre of Nigeria’s security crisis for over a decade. Boko Haram was born there. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. 

Thousands killed. Infrastructure destroyed. Children orphaned. Girls kidnapped. What the Borno needs is action, not amens. It needs well-equipped security forces. It needs police presence in rural communities. It needs functioning IDP camps with decent sanitation. It needs roads to transport food and medicine. It needs solar-powered schools and mobile health clinics. These are the duties of a state. Not just prayer rallies.

Zulum has a responsibility to secure lives and property. He is not the Chief Imam of the Government House. He is the elected Governor of Borno State, who is paid and protected by the citizens’ taxes. To call for prayer in the face of failure is not leadership. It is abdication. Of course, some will argue that prayer works. It brings comfort to a grieving people. That faith can move mountains. 

Yes, prayer works, but not as an excuse for laziness. Even the holy books, which say that “faith without works is dead”, also command action alongside devotion. What our rulers have perfected is not faith. It is the fatalism of the worst kind. They blame “spiritual forces” for bad roads. They say “God will provide” where budgets are looted. They speak of “the will of God” when children die in collapsed classrooms. They wash their hands like Pontius Pilate and ask the people to wait on the Lord. It is not just cynical. It is criminal. Governance is a secular calling. Religion may guide personal conduct, but it cannot replace statecraft. Rulers do not pray bullets away. They do not fast terrorism into remission. They do not tithe their way out of poverty.

They rule; they govern.

This growing trend of religious escapism among our rulers is a colonial hangover. It reveals a mental dependency that refuses to confront problems with modern tools. This is how my friend and kindred poet, Sodiq Alabi, captures it: “While our academics and intellectual debate decolonisation and decoloniality, we’ve got a professor governor declaring prayer days to combat insecurity in the state. This is part of the problem”. The sadder aspect of all of this is that it is easier for the governor to call citizens to pray than to call the Commissioner of Police to order. It is easier to fast than to fight corruption. It is easier to weep at vigils than to work at midnight.

Governance is hard work. It requires a plan. It requires a team. It requires metrics. It requires courage. Zulum has, in many quarters, earned a reputation as one of the few northern governors possessed of both vigour and vision. His tenure has not been without moments of commendable courage: visiting desolate IDP camps in the dead of night, overseeing the reconstruction of shattered communities, daring to rebuke soldiers accused of preying on the very citizens they were sent to protect, and sending aid agencies taking advantage of the violence to make war profits packing. 

These gestures, rare in a region hollowed out by indifference, once set him apart. But now, he appears to be succumbing to the soporific comfort of ritualised faith; the kind that replaces action with incantation, and policy with piety. It is a tragic drift. For when men like Zulum begin to fold their hands in resignation and retreat into the shadows of spiritual escapism, then the last flickers of hope in governance risk being extinguished. 

It is precisely because he was once different that his recent retreat must be called out, not with cynicism, but with the urgency that leadership demands. If even Zulum, once regarded as a symbol of resolve, is beginning to lose faith in his own capacity to act, then it signals a far deeper malaise that suggests that our country is in itself adrift.

In other parts of the world, religion does not substitute for public policy. After the 9/11 attacks in the United States, there were prayers, yes. But there was also a restructuring of the Department of Homeland Security. There were inquiries, funding bills, arrests, security measures, and intelligence reforms. In Rwanda, after the genocide, President Paul Kagame didn’t merely ask citizens to fast. He introduced sweeping reforms in justice, education, and policing. He mobilised the diaspora. He invited investors. He rebuilt with fierce urgency. Our rulers cannot continue to do less and expect more. They cannot continue to avoid accountability by appealing to the divine. They must stop turning public failure into a sacred ritual.

The citizens of Borno are not spiritually dead. They are alive and have survived more than most Nigerians. They know God. They honour Him. But they also want to live. They want to see their governor build more schools. They want him to secure the roads. They want to return to their farms. They want their children to grow up without hearing gunshots at night. They did not elect a pastor. They elected a governor. Zulum should act like one. Calls for prayer will not stop the violence. They will not stop the hunger. They will not fix roofs or pave roads. 

They are the political equivalent of tossing a coin into a wishing well. Rulers must stop hiding behind the veil of piety. If Zulum has run out of ideas, he should say so. If he cannot face Abuja, he should admit it. If governance has overwhelmed him, he should not pretend that fasting will solve what failure has created. The time has come to strip the altar from the office. While the mosque stays sacred, the church also continues to live up to its sacred purposes. Both should do their work: Pray. The governor’s office is a place of policy, not praise and worship.

This is not an attack on religion. This is a plea for leadership. 

Our country is not lacking in faith. It is drowning in corruption, incompetence, and neglect. And citizens cannot keep pretending that God will come down to fix what our rulers have broken and hide in plain sight to fix. When prayers replace plans, people die, and the country goes into oblivion. When fasting becomes a substitute for foresight, the present bleeds hopelessness for the future. When rulers kneel in sanctimony and refuse to rise to their responsibilities, history will bring out its Koboko and whip them. 

This bears repeating: governance is not a prayer point. It is a job.

Zulum should do his job.