Abuja, Nigeria: There is a particular kind of hypocrisy that only becomes visible when someone holds a mirror to the past. That is exactly what social media activist VeryDarkMan did last week — and the reflection is making a lot of powerful people deeply uncomfortable.
The target is Pastor Enoch Adeboye, General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of the most influential religious figures in Africa. The charge is straightforward: double standards. And the evidence, as VDM presented it, is not opinion. It is newspaper print.
Here is what happened. Pastor Adeboye recently made public comments expressing support for President Bola Tinubu’s handling of Nigeria’s security crisis — or more precisely, discouraging Nigerians from criticizing the president over it. His position, as he articulated it, was constitutional in framing: once a Commander-in-Chief has issued directives to the nation’s security apparatus, he has fulfilled his duty. Nigerians, the pastor suggested, should ease up.
VeryDarkMan’s response was not a rebuttal. It was a history lesson.
Reaching back to 2010, VDM produced physical copies of Vanguard newspaper editions — dated May 5 and October 11 of that year — documenting a very different posture from the same Pastor Adeboye and the same Redeemed Christian Church of God during the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan. According to those reports, Adeboye personally petitioned President Jonathan over a rising tide of kidnappings sweeping the country. Five months later, the RCCG went further — launching a nationwide signature campaign to mobilize its vast membership for a planned one-million-man protest against the deteriorating security situation.
The church’s language at the time was unambiguous. Kidnapping, the RCCG declared, had become “the latest Nigerian nightmare.” No Nigerian was safe. Religious organizations must speak up.
VDM’s question is therefore simple: if petitions were appropriate in 2010, why are protests discouraged in 2026? If Jonathan’s security failures warranted a one-million-man mobilization, what does the current administration’s record warrant, given that, by multiple documented accounts, the scale of killings and abductions under the present government has surpassed what Nigeria experienced during Jonathan’s tenure?
The activist’s broader argument cuts deeper than a single pastor or a single presidency. It goes to the heart of a phenomenon that has long distorted Nigeria’s public discourse — the tendency of influential voices, particularly religious ones, to calibrate their moral outrage according to who occupies Aso Rock rather than what is actually happening to ordinary Nigerians. When your party’s man is in power, constitutional patience becomes a virtue. When the other side governs, silence becomes complicity and protest becomes righteousness. The metrics shift. The threshold moves. And the people bearing the actual cost of insecurity, the kidnapped, the displaced, the bereaved — watch the same voices that once championed their cause quietly change the subject.
Adeboye’s defenders have pushed back, arguing his recent remarks were taken out of context — that he was making a constitutional point about executive responsibility, not issuing a blanket endorsement of the government’s security record. That is a fair reading. But it does not resolve the tension VDM has surfaced. Because in 2010, the RCCG did not accept “the president has issued directives” as a sufficient response to a kidnapping crisis. They petitioned. They organized. They prepared to march. Constitutional arguments about executive responsibility did not appear to satisfy them then.
The video has divided Nigerians sharply — as VDM’s content reliably does. Some see him as a courageous truth-teller holding power to account without fear or favor. Others view him as a provocateur exploiting religious sentiment for clicks and controversy. Both readings exist, and neither is entirely wrong.
But the core question he has raised does not go away when the debate dies down. Nigeria’s insecurity crisis is not a partisan issue. It is a human one. And the moral authority of those who speak on it, whether from pulpits, political platforms, or phone cameras — depends entirely on whether that authority is applied consistently, regardless of who signed the presidency’s lease.
God, as the saying goes, has no favorite presidents. Whether Nigeria’s most powerful religious voices can say the same is a question VeryDarkMan has placed squarely, and uncomfortably, on the table.
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