On a Sunday morning on Oba Akran Avenue in Ikeja, the traffic is worse than it is on a Monday.
Cars are parked in three rows along the road that was laid, widened and named for the industrial estate it was meant to serve, and the young men who direct them into the compounds wear reflective vests and call everybody Daddy or Mummy.
Through the gates, where articulated lorries once queued to collect finished goods, the sound carries: a keyboard, a drummer warming up, a voice testing a microphone.
Several of these compounds were factories inside living memory.
Some of the people now worshipping in them are old enough to have applied for jobs at the same gate, in the years when the gate was hiring.
A claim circulates confidently in Nigerian conversation: that four of the country’s five largest employers are churches. This column could not verify it, and neither can anybody else, because Nigeria publishes no employer-level headcounts for religious bodies or for most organisations outside the listed corporate sector.
What can be checked is why it sounds plausible to everyone who hears it, and that answer indicts Nigerian economic development more seriously than the claim itself would have.
The largest employer among companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange in 2025 was Dangote Cement with 21,418 staff, followed by First Holdco on 10,871 and United Bank for Africa on 10,821, in a country of about 230 million people. The Mail and Guardian reported in 2014 that Winners Chapel employed more than 18,000 people in Nigeria alone.
That figure is twelve years old and journalistic rather than audited, but even at its weakest it places one religious organisation in the same employment band as the largest industrial company on the exchange. That is not a story about churches being enormous. It is a story about Nigerian firms being small.
America shows the contrast exactly. Walmart employs about 1.6 million people in the United States and 2.1 million worldwide, Amazon roughly 1.576 million worldwide, UPS about 460,000 and Target around 427,000. The entire American religious sector, some 184,591 organisations, employs around 1.5 million people on about $172 billion of annual revenue.
One American retailer therefore employs more people than every religious organisation in the United States combined. The American religious economy is large in absolute terms and marginal in relative terms; the Nigerian one is modest in absolute terms and looms large because so little else of scale possibly stands beside it.
Oba Akran Avenue in Ikeja is where this becomes visible. Dunlop Nigeria operated from Plot 23 for forty-five years, with reported employment or jobs affected at closure of 1,000 people directly and supplied roughly 15% of national tyre consumption before ceasing production in April 2009.
The reasons were not moral: power cuts, unreliable gas, rising costs, and a 2006 federal decision to cut the tyre import tariff from 40 per cent to 10 per cent. The Guardian has reported the Ikeja Dunlop premises among failed industrial sites taken over by churches, alongside Cocoa Industries Limited, Nigeria’s first cocoa-processing factory, with Hardel and Enic (over 4,000 workers) and Ugo Foam on Akilo Road (over 6,000 workers) named in the same reporting.
Nigeria’s industrial retreat spans sectors and generations. Michelin in addition to Dunlop abandoned tyre manufacturing; Kaduna’s textile mills collapsed; the paper mills at Oku-Iboku, Jebba and Iwopin fell into prolonged decline. More recently, P&G and GSK ended local manufacturing, while Mayor Biscuits, Iso Glass and Universal Rubber shut down.
Each closure represents more than lost jobs: it erodes productive capacity, industrial skills and the domestic supply chains required to build a diversified economy. This space cannot contain other prominent companies across Nigeria, which many readers of this piece are aware of, that are now either closed, dormant or moribund. A barn that is swept clean and freshly painted is still a barn with no yam in it.
Churches did not destroy Nigerian manufacturing. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) counted 767 companies shut in 2023 alone, 335 more distressed, capacity utilisation at 56% and N350 billion (about $263 million) of unsold goods in warehouses. Churches did not write the tariff schedule; they arrived at the auction with cash, because in those neighbourhoods they were often the only institutions with a predictable weekly inflow.
When the barn empties, the shrine fills. But the traffic is asymmetric: in America and Britain, deconsecrated churches become breweries and workshops, while in Nigeria factory floors become auditoria, and the specialised fabric that made a building a production site is stripped out, dispersing the cluster of suppliers and mechanics around it.
The GDP mechanics are where the real argument sits. In the national accounts, the output of non-profit institutions serving households, the category religious bodies fall into, is valued at the cost of production rather than at a market price, because nobody buys a sermon at one.
A church’s contribution to measured GDP is therefore approximately what it pays its staff. Illustratively, 18,000 employees at an average ₦150,000 a month, above the ₦70,000 minimum wage (about $53) and well below the reported national average figure that circulates on salary websites of about ₦339,000, produce a wage bill near ₦32.4 billion a year, roughly $24 million, and that is essentially the whole of the measured contribution.
A tyre plant does something different to the same statistic. Its value added is only the start: it substitutes for imports and saves foreign exchange, pays company income tax and value added tax (VAT) on a taxable trade, creates upstream demand for rubber, carbon black, steel cord and power, supports distributors, fitters and haulage downstream, trains technicians, and can raise output per worker over time, which is the only mechanism by which wages rise sustainably anywhere.
A wage bill cannot grow faster than the donations funding it in an explainable manner. Both appear in GDP. Only one compounds.
The aggregate picture confirms the challenge. Manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from 9.57% in the first quarter of 2026 to 7.72% in the second, even as output grew by 3.24% year-on-year. MAN’s 10.2% contribution target for 2026 now looks increasingly difficult to achieve, while the Federal Government’s ambition of 20%-25% by 2030 remains a very distant prospect.
The rebased accounts put 2024 nominal GDP at ₦372.82 trillion, 35.4% above the previous estimate. Yet the 2019 baseline reveals an economy dominated by services, which accounted for 53.1% of GDP, against industry’s 21.1%. Nigeria trades, farms and rents far more than it manufactures.
The labour market explains why church jobs are prized. The National Bureau of Statistics finds 85.6% of working Nigerians self-employed and only 14.4% employees, with informal employment at about 93%: fewer than one in seven employed Nigerians is classified as an employee.
An institution that issues an appointment letter, pays on a fixed date and deducts pension is offering something genuinely scarce. The minimum wage has not moved since July 2024, labour has tabled demands from ₦154,000 to ₦500,000, and the next statutory review is not due until 2027.
Religious bodies are not pure consumption either. They are among Nigeria’s most significant private providers of tertiary education, through Covenant, Redeemer’s, Babcock, Bowen, Madonna and Al-Hikmah, which is human capital formation, the input Nigeria is shortest of.
The Redemption City, the headquarters of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, covers 2,500 hectares, described as the largest church-owned single property in the world and was estimated in 2023 to house about 200,000 residents with its own roads, schools, clinics, security and power, supplying privately what the state did not deliver. The objection is not that none of this is production. It is that almost none of it is tradable: it earns no foreign exchange and substitutes for no imports.
The Nigeria Tax Act 2025, effective 1 January 2026, preserves income-tax exemption for qualifying public-character religious activities but excludes profits derived from trade or business. Churches’ commercial ventures may therefore be taxable, while VAT obligations, including self-accounting, where directed by the tax authority, apply under the Act’s general rules. In essence, the sanctuary is exempt; the bookshop attached to it is not. Enforcing that evenly is now the test.
What should be done? Firstly, protect industrial land by use classification, with a change-of-use levy pricing the loss where conversion is allowed, because downturns are cyclical and reclassification is not. Secondly, treat the 2006 tariff collapse as a standing lesson, since a duty cut without a matching fall in local costs transfers an industry abroad rather than liberalising trade.
Thirdly, contract firm electricity supply to the industrial estates at Ikeja, Agbara, Ikorodu, Aba and Kano and resolve the sector’s liquidity, because manufacturers price reliability, not installed megawatts. Fourthly, publish employer-level employment statistics through a national employer register, which would settle the churches claim and transform labour policy.
Fifthly, invite accumulated religious capital into production through church-anchored industrial parks, single-digit SME funds and equity participation, since institutions that can raise ₦30 billion for an auditorium can raise it for a plant. Sixthly, report the non-profit sector separately in satellite accounts, so the size of this phenomenon stops being a matter of folklore.
Hands that clap in the morning must still find a hoe by noon. The congregation on Oba Akran is not the problem; those worshippers are sheltering inside the institutions that still function.
The problem is a bargain Nigeria accepted quietly, in which buildings that used to pay wages now house people praying for wages, and in which nothing looked lost because measured output did not fall. What was lost was the part of the economy that compounds, earns dollars and raises productivity. Recovering it is a matter of tariffs, power, land and credit, which is to say a matter of decisions.
Akinola Morakinyo (Ph. D) writes on MINT economies from the Department of Economics, Finance & Quantitative Analysis, Kennesaw State University, GA, USA.