By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu- PhD
There is a sentence many people have learned never to say out loud: Show us what became of what we gave.
It hangs in the air of countless sanctuaries, prayer camps, revival grounds, cathedrals, and mosques. It trembles in the minds of market women who tithe before they restock their stalls. It flickers in the thoughts of young graduates who sow “seeds” while unemployed. It visits civil servants who contribute to building funds yet cannot afford decent housing. The question forms and then retreats. To ask it feels dangerous, almost profane.
How did we arrive at a point where scrutiny is treated as sacrilege?
Spiritual longing is not the problem. The human ache for meaning, transcendence, and belonging is real. It has built civilizations, inspired art, restrained cruelty, and comforted the grieving. But somewhere along the line, the institutions and personalities that claim stewardship over this longing acquired an unusual privilege: exemption from ordinary standards of accountability.
In most areas of life, power invites oversight. If a school collects fees, it is expected to educate. If a hospital receives funding, it must treat patients. If a government levies taxes, it must account for expenditure. But when spiritual institutions collect money often in volumes that rival small corporations questions about receipts, audits, or impact are reframed as spiritual immaturity.
The divine is invoked as a protective curtain.
Across many African cities, the contrast is stark. Congregations swell in neighborhoods where infrastructure collapses. Prayer centers rise beside open drains. Leaders mount stages adorned with polished marble while their followers navigate streets without clean water. The optics are no longer subtle.
This is not an argument against prosperity. Wealth, honestly earned and transparently managed, is not a crime. The concern is the imbalance between those who give and those who control what is given. The money flows upward. The explanations flow downward.
When adherents remain trapped in cycles of hardship, they are told their season has not yet come. Their poverty is spiritualized. Their delay is reframed as divine testing. Their questioning is labeled doubt. Meanwhile, visible affluence at the top is interpreted as proof that the formula works just not yet for you.
It is a clever moral arrangement. The system is never wrong. The individual simply hasn’t believed enough.
In many African contexts, spiritual leaders command immense loyalty. They influence voting patterns, public opinion, even national narratives. Politicians court them. Governments hesitate to regulate them. The result is a quiet understanding: some spaces are not to be probed too deeply. Freedom of worship subtly morphs into freedom from scrutiny.
Tax exemptions, originally designed to protect genuine charitable work, are extended without discrimination. Vast sums are collected under various spiritual headings—tithes, offerings, pledges, first fruits, thanksgiving sacrifices, prophetic consultations. Often there are no detailed financial disclosures, no independent oversight bodies, no transparent accounting frameworks accessible to contributors.
It is here that the moral question sharpens. When an institution shapes people’s choices, directs their resources, and claims authority over their fears and hopes, it cannot simultaneously declare itself beyond human evaluation. Reverence does not cancel responsibility.
Is the divine threatened by accountability and transparency? If the sacred is truly sacred, it does not tremble before ledgers. Light does not injure what is pure; it only exposes what is counterfeit. Accountability interrogates human conduct, not heavenly existence. It measures how people manage power, not whether God exists. To suggest that transparency endangers the divine is to confuse God with an organization. It is to imply that eternity depends on concealment. A faith that collapses under audit was never anchored in transcendence; it was anchored in human control.
One of the most painful contradictions appears in the story of the schools and universities built by these same institutions. Congregations are rallied to give sacrificially special building offerings, expansion funds, infrastructure drives. Families take loans. Traders liquidate inventory. Pensioners part with savings. They are told they are investing in the future of their children and the glory of God. Years later, the campuses stand gleaming gated, manicured, marketed as centers of excellence. Yet many of the very parishioners who financed the bricks cannot afford the fees. Their children watch from outside the gates of institutions their parents helped to build. The investment was spiritual; the benefit, commercial. No bitterness is publicly voiced. Gratitude is still preached. But the irony is difficult to miss.
The pattern repeats in hospitals, event centers, housing estates, media networks assets funded by collective sacrifice but priced beyond collective reach.
One of the most troubling habits is the way deprivation itself becomes part of the theology. A widow who donates beyond her means is praised for her faith. A struggling trader who withholds a pledge is warned about blocking her own blessings. Economic vulnerability becomes fertile ground for extraction, dressed as devotion. And yet, the state often watches from a distance.
Some governments lack the capacity to regulate. Others fear backlash. In societies where religious affiliation runs deep, any attempt at oversight is framed as persecution. Leaders who might demand financial transparency from corporations hesitate when the entity in question wears sacred robes.
The cost of this silence is paid quietly by ordinary people.
It is visible in the graduate who believes that employment will come through a prophetic declaration rather than skills development. In the farmer who contributes to a new worship center while his own tools rust. In the family that funds endless “special programs” while medical bills go unpaid.
Spiritual spaces can and often do provide comfort, community, and moral guidance. They can mobilize charity faster than bureaucracies. They can anchor hope where the state fails. But good works do not justify immunity.
Humanizing spirituality does not diminish it. It restores its credibility.
It means acknowledging that once money is collected, it enters the realm of human responsibility. Once leaders assume influence, they assume answerability. Once institutions expand beyond small gatherings into economic powerhouses, they must meet standards commensurate with their reach.
This is not a secular assault on faith. It is a call for moral consistency.
Africa’s deep spiritual energy is one of its defining features. It shapes daily life, public discourse, and personal identity. But energy without accountability can distort. When leaders live in conspicuous comfort while followers sink further into deprivation, something fundamental has been inverted.
In older African traditions, authority carried reciprocal obligation. Elders were respected, but they were also expected to justify decisions. Custodians of sacred knowledge operated within communal norms. Power was rarely absolute. It was embedded in relationships of mutual responsibility.
Modern spiritual empires often operate differently. Charisma replaces community restraint. Loyalty replaces inquiry. Access to the leader becomes a privilege, not a right. Critics are isolated or denounced. Financial details are internal matters, inaccessible to the very people whose sacrifices sustain the system.
This arrangement is unstable.
A younger generation is watching. They are digitally literate, globally exposed, and less impressed by spectacle. They are beginning to ask questions their parents swallowed. Why are we perpetually fundraising? Where do these funds go? Why does the promise of breakthrough repeat every year while our conditions remain unchanged? Why are we discouraged from asking?
These questions do not signal a loss of faith. They signal maturity.
The future of spirituality in Africa—and elsewhere—will not be secured by louder sermons or grander buildings. It will rest on whether spiritual leaders are willing to submit to the same ethical expectations they preach. It will depend on whether civil authorities can distinguish between regulating financial conduct and policing belief. It will hinge on whether adherents rediscover that devotion does not require self-erasure.
There is nothing irreverent about wanting to see how collective sacrifice translates into collective uplift. There is nothing impious about expecting that those who speak for the heavens also answer on earth.
The quiet sentence must eventually be spoken aloud: Show us what became of what we gave.
If spirituality truly serves humanity, it will not flinch at that request. It will respond with clarity, humility, and evidence of lives strengthened not weakened by their trust.
Anything else is not sacred mystery.
It is simply power without witness.
About the Author
Dr Charles Obiajulu Ugwu is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
