APC and the Prayer of Jabez

In the Old Testament is a destiny-changing prayer. Jabez prayed, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested. What makes the verse remarkable is not the request itself, which is fairly ordinary as far as prayers go, but the reason it was prayed in the first place: Jabez, we are told, “was more honourable than his brethren; and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bare him with sorrow.” His very name meant “he causes pain.” He was born into a story of hardship, and rather than accept that story as his permanent identity, he interrupted it with a prayer for the opposite: blessing instead of pain, enlargement instead of confinement, protection instead of grief.

It is difficult to think of a more fitting prayer for Nigeria's ruling party to borrow, because the All Progressives Congress finds itself, more than a decade after its ascension to power in something close to Jabez's condition. It has power, it has the machinery of state and yet it seems, again and again, to cause its people pain rather than relieve it. If ever a political party needed to pray, quite literally, “let it not be so,” it is this one.

The APC's problem is closer to the inverse of a party with the Midas touch: it is not that its touch turns things to gold that then curses them, but that its touch rarely produces gold at all.

The World Bank has recorded poverty climbing from 56 percent of the population in 2023 to 63 percent by 2025, and UN projections suggest tens of millions more Nigerians will fall below the poverty line in 2026 alone.

Government officials insist the picture is turning, they point to real GDP growth of over 4 percent in 2026, inflation easing from its earlier peak to around 15 percent, external reserves rising past $50 billion, and non-oil revenue climbing sharply since 2023. These are not meaningless numbers, and a fair reckoning of the APC's record has to hold them alongside the hardship. But macroeconomic recovery on a spreadsheet is not the same thing as relief in a market stall, and for the ordinary Nigerian still measuring the naira in units of garri and transport fare rather than trillions and reserves, the gap between the government's chart and the citizen's plate remains the whole of the argument. A ruling party that has to keep explaining why the pain is temporary is a party that needs to do self-reflection.

What makes the APC's situation more than ordinary governing difficulty is how often its attempts to manage the narrative through propaganda have consistently failed. PDP with its own shortcomings while in power, did a better job with propaganda while APC's public messaging in recent years has too often bloomeranged. The party's national spokesman has dismissed the country's oldest opposition party as no longer a political party at all, only to be handed back the observation that Nigerians keep rejecting the APC's own message despite its resources and incumbency advantage.

This is propaganda that misfires not occasionally but as a pattern, and the pattern matters, because it suggests the difficulty is not a communications problem waiting on a better spokesperson. It suggests something closer to what Jabez's mother named at his birth: a condition baked in from the start, expressing itself no matter who is speaking.

None of this is to claim the APC is uniquely corrupt or uniquely incompetent among Nigeria's political class. Nigeria's opposition parties carry their own histories of failed promises, internal crises, and unfulfilled reform, and it would be naive to imagine that a change of ruling party alone would summon a different political culture into being. The APC did not invent patronage politics, fuel subsidy fraud, or the habit of treating public office as inheritance rather than service; it largely inherited these along with the presidency.

A party that is merely one among several flawed contenders can afford to point at its rivals. A party that holds the presidency, the National Assembly, and the machinery of federal power cannot. The APC is not one voice shouting into a crowded room; it is the government of Africa's most populous nation, and its decisions, its silences, and its tone of voice toward its own citizens are what actually reach the kitchen table. The APC's sins are not theoretical. They are the high price of goods and services at the market, the price at the pump, and the tone of a presidency that too often meets bad news with denial rather than course correction.

This is why that prayer fits. It was not a prayer for cleverness or for better public relations. It was a prayer for a changed condition, offered by a man who refused to let his name determine his fate. “Bless me indeed” asks not for the appearance of blessing, for GDP charts and reserve figures cited in press statements, but for blessing a hungry household can actually taste. “Enlarge my coast” asks not merely for bigger numbers on a balance sheet but for opportunity that reaches beyond the enclosures of patronage and privilege into the ordinary Nigerian's life and land.

“Let thine hand be with me” asks for a wisdom greater than the party's own strategists have so far displayed, since the strategists' instincts, again and again, have reached for defensiveness when the moment called for humility. And “keep me from evil, that it may not grieve” is, in the end, the whole of the APC's problem stated as a request rather than a diagnosis: that the pain visited upon the electorate would finally, mercifully, stop.

Nigerians have watched a ruling party whose governance for years has all too often, like Jabez before his prayer, caused sorrow rather than relieved it. The APC does not need a new slogan or a sharper spokesperson. It needs to look inwards into its foundation and conduct, decide towards a different outcome than the one its record has so far produced, and then govern as though it actually expected that prayer to be answered.

Emmanuel Akaolisa
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