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The dominant public narrative on religious extremism is as convenient as it is intellectually dishonest. It locates the pathology within the walls of religious institutions — in their doctrines, their pulpits, their adherents and invites us to treat the problem as one of faith gone wrong. This framing is not only reductive; it is a distraction that shields the primary culprit from accountability. A more rigorous examination of the evidence reveals a sturdier and more discomforting truth: religious extremism is, in its most consequential expressions, a product of governance failure.

We have seen overtime how clerics from different religions in Nigeria failed to see the limitations of their “callings” and the extent of their religion and freedom of expression. They seem to have constituted themselves into unbridled authority at the expense of the legally constituted authority and the sovereignty of Nigeria. They most often get away with atrocities committed in the name of protecting the “sacredness” of their religions and in defence of their Gods. We have seen a cleric putting a bounty on another cleric’s head because the latter desecrated the name of their prophet. This is not to forget extrajudicial killings on this basis.

The State as Incubator: Why Religious Extremism Is First a Governance Failure Where the state retreats, extremism advances. This is not a theological proposition — it is a governance diagnosis.

The Price of Darkness

Darkness is one of the recurring legacies that each preceding government bequeaths upon hapless Nigerians. It is becoming almost foreign, almost strange to know what stable and enduring electricity feels like. Nigerians appear to have made an uneasy peace with the darkness, groaning under pains that have long defied articulation.

Between 2015 and 2026 alone, Nigeria's national grid has collapsed no fewer than 100 times — a staggering indictment of systemic failure that spans administrations, parties, and promises.
This is not a crisis of recent origin: a Covenant University study documented 564 grid collapses between 2000 and 2022, nearly two every month for over two decades. Yet the nation continues to hemorrhage on a backdrop of less than 4,000 megawatts of power actually delivered to consumers on any given day against a minimum requirement of 30,000 megawatts for a country of over 220 million people. Herein lies the monstrous affliction that eats away at the very roots of the Nigerian economy: a nation held hostage by a power sector that has resisted every attempted reform, survived every administration, and outlasted every promise.

The economic toll is nothing short of catastrophic. The World Bank estimates that power outages cost Nigeria approximately $29 billion every year nearly 10 percent of the country's GDP. Nigerian manufacturers alone lose an estimated ₦10.1 trillion annually, including over ₦1.2 trillion in unsold goods, due to repeated disruptions to production. Small businesses, which constitute the backbone of the Nigerian economy, are bled dry by the suffocating burden of alternative energy costs, with Nigerians having created a parallel generator economy accounting for nearly 14,000 megawatts of privately-sourced electricity, a national absurdity born entirely of state failure.

Beyond its destructive consequences on the economy, the cost is deeply human. Lives are lost in hospitals where generators fail mid-surgery, in homes where oxygen machines go silent, on roads made treacherous by absent streetlights. Dreams are placed on indefinite hold. Creativity is slowly strangled. And our collective corporate existence as a productive, competitive, and forward-looking nation is held perpetually in jeopardy.

The darkness is not merely an inconvenience. It is a policy failure with a body count and the bill, measured in blood and billions, is one that no Nigerian consented to pay.