Nigeria's Slide Into Religious Politics: A Country That Cannot Afford to Play With Fire

Nigeria's first Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, once warned that it would be "the end of happiness in this country when religion is brought into politics". Decades later, and with the 2027 general election gradually entering the national conversation, that warning is once again being tested and Nigeria, a nation nearly evenly split between Christians and Muslims, is a country that cannot take the gamble lightly.

The Muslim-Muslim Ticket That Never Really Went Away
The current chapter of religious politics traces back to 2022, when Bola Tinubu, then the ruling APC's candidate, broke with a decades-old informal convention of "religious balancing" the practice by which a Muslim presidential candidate runs with a Christian deputy, and vice versa by picking fellow Muslim Kashim Shettima as his running mate.

The Christian Association of Nigeria and the Northern Christian Elders Forum publicly cautioned against the pairing before the 2023 election, arguing that concentrating both of Nigeria's highest offices in the hands of one faith community risked deepening the country's sectarian fault lines.

Tinubu insisted religion "was not in his heart" and that he had simply chosen the best-qualified running mate available to him. But the ticket split the country sharply. Some of the APC's own leaders, including Nasir El-Rufai, later declared to a stunned nation that Muslims no longer needed Christian votes to win power, pointing to Tinubu's presidential victory and his own protégé's gubernatorial win in Kaduna as proof.

That boast, more than any policy dispute, hardened the sense among many Christian Nigerians that religious arithmetic, not merit, was now driving the country's most consequential political decisions.

2027 Reopens the Wound
As the next election cycle approached, speculation intensified that Tinubu might finally correct course by dropping Shettima for a northern Christian running mate, addressing years of pressure over religious balancing. Instead, in July 2026, the APC formally renominated the Tinubu-Shettima ticket unchanged, ending months of internal party wrangling and, in the words of one Nigerian columnist, laying to rest "speculations and conspiracy theories" about whether the president would abandon his Muslim-Muslim pairing a second time.

The reaction split predictably along religious lines. The Middle Belt Pentecostal Association welcomed the retention, framing it as continuity and strategic leadership for northern and Middle Belt communities. Elsewhere, the debate has taken a sharper edge: opinion writers have warned that reducing Nigeria's complex governance challenges insecurity, inflation, and unemployment to "questions of religious identity" is "neither new nor helpful," and that agitation for Shettima's removal purely on religious grounds risks reopening a debate the country has not fully recovered from since 2023.

A Pattern Repeating Itself Since Independence
None of this is new to Nigeria. Religion has shaped its politics since Islamic personal law, Sharia, was incorporated into parts of the legal system under British rule in the 1950s, and religious tension featured among the pressures that fed into the Biafra war of 1967–1970, which killed as many as 600,000 people. Since the mid-1980s, Christian-Muslim tension has been an even more consistent feature of political life, with religious violence in the country's middle and northern states growing both more frequent and more lethal since the early 2000s.

Polling data captures how deeply that identity now shapes political expectation on both sides. A large majority of Nigerian Christians say the country's leaders should hold strong Christian beliefs, while an even larger majority of Muslims say the same of Islamic beliefs a divide that persists even as both communities agree, in roughly equal measure, that corrupt leadership is the country's central problem. Nigeria's population of roughly 140 million remains split nearly evenly between the two faiths, which is precisely what makes any perceived tilt toward one community at the top of government so combustible.

Why Nigeria Cannot Play This Lightly
Unlike more religiously homogenous nations, Nigeria has no comfortable majority that can absorb the political cost of perceived exclusion. Predominantly Christian farming communities in the Middle Belt have for years reported being attacked and displaced by predominantly Muslim herders, violence that some Christian rights groups argue carries a religious dimension the federal government has been reluctant to acknowledge. Analysts examining the current election cycle warn plainly that "mixing religion with politics does not bode well for the ongoing tension in many parts of the country," and that unchecked religious intervention in politics can ultimately challenge the legitimacy and authority of the state itself.

Religious leaders, for their part, have not stepped back from the political arena if anything, their influence has become more calculated. Investigations into clergy involvement in Nigerian politics between 2015 and 2026 describe a shift "from cautious distance, to visible influence, and then to a more strategic restraint," with both pulpit and minbar continuing to shape opinion and mobilize millions of voters, often quietly rather than openly.

The Stakes Ahead of 2027
As campaigning intensifies, the central danger is not that religion features in Nigerian public life it always has, and likely always will. The danger is a political class treating religious identity as a substitute for the harder work of governance: fixing an economy where inflation and poverty are rising together, and a security architecture still struggling against banditry, insurgency, and communal violence.

Balewa's warning was not rhetorical flourish; it was a description of what happens when a deeply plural nation allows faith to become the currency of political competition rather than a private matter of conscience. Nigeria, sliding once more toward that terrain ahead of 2027, is a country that has been here before and one that cannot afford to underestimate how quickly religious grievance, once mobilized, can outrun the politicians who summoned it.

Mustapha Bature Sallama.
Medical/ Science Communicator,
Private Investigator, Criminal investigation and Intelligence Analysis.
International Conflict Management and Peace Building.USIP
mustysallama@gmail.com
+233-555-275-880

References
AllAfrica "Nigeria: 2027 and the Danger of Religious Blackmail," https://allafrica.com/stories/202601270262.html

The Conversation "Nigeria's election: six dangers of mixing religion with politics," https://theconversation.com/nigerias-election-six-dangers-of-mixing-religion-with-politics-198928

Substack (Kola King) "Religious Politics: Threat to a Secular Nigeria," https://kolaking.substack.com/p/religious-politics-threat-to-a-secular

AllAfrica "Nigeria: 2027 and the Danger of Religious Blackmail," https://allafrica.com/stories/202601270262.html

The Nation (Nigeria) "Tinubu's renomination of Kashim Shettima," https://thenationonlineng.net/tinubus-renomination-of-kashim-shettima/

The Nation (Nigeria) "Christian group hails Tinubu's renomination of Shettima as running mate," https://thenationonlineng.net/christian-group-hails-tinubus-renomination-of-shettima-as-running-mate/

Pew Research Center "Nigeria's Presidential Election: The Christian-Muslim Divide," https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2007/03/21/nigerias-presidential-election-the-christian-muslim-divide/

Pew Research Center "Nigeria's Presidential Election: The Christian-Muslim Divide," https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2007/03/21/nigerias-presidential-election-the-christian-muslim-divide/

Christian Post "All-Muslim presidential ticket wins Nigerian election amid opposition from Christians," https://www.christianpost.com/news/all-muslim-presidential-ticket-wins-nigerian-election.html

Realnews Magazine "Religious leaders and political developments in Nigeria 2015-2026," https://realnewsmagazine.net/religious-leaders-and-political-developments-in-nigeria-2015-2026/

   Comments0