THE GATHERER

Tourists to Nigeria’s popular cities -- Lagos, Abuja, and Port-Harcourt -- may query statistics that suggests Islam to be the peoples’ major faith. Arguably, there are twelve churches to every mosque in each local government area, in, say, Lagos. Majority of these churches are privately owned organisations, e.g. Winners Chapel: formerly world’s largest church capacity, with fifty thousand seats, until recently upstaged by the Apostolic Church of Nigeria’s one hundred thousand seats church auditorium, also in Lagos. Approximately 160 million people, individually affected by two or more of the following: Tribal racism; Post-trauma of a civil-war (Biafra); Societal under-development stemming from thirty-two-years of oppressive military rule; Poverty; and now Terrorism. Taking a social science approach, expected loss of human dignity and social cohesion in such society, especially having evolved through slavery and colonialism, prior, it’s understandable why the world’s larges