There is, I concede, a select category of things Bishop David Oyedepo says that I find myself nodding along to and his warning to young Nigerians that betting is no pathway to financial prosperity sits proudly inside it. It is good advice, the sort your granny would have given you over a plate of eba and Egun fish and ponmo-infested egusi soup. The fact that it has come from a man with a fleet of private jets does not make it any less true.
That bettors or punters lose is not an opinion, but mathematics. The bookmaker’s entire business model depends on several millions around the world never quite grasping it. For every young man in Ojuelegba who wins big on a Saturday accumulator, there are a thousand others quietly transferring their school fees, rents, transport fares and even money kept in their custody into an app. The industry thrives precisely because so few of them have worked out that chasing a jackpot is an unusually expensive way of avoiding the far duller business of acquiring education, knowledge and skill.
What has crept up on the country while everyone was busy laughing at “sports prediction” adverts is that betting is no longer a vice confined to a reckless minority, but an epidemic with its own infrastructure. Its kiosks now outnumber pharmacies on many a street corner and its jingles wedged into every football commentary a young Nigerian is likely to hear. 
So, on this narrow point, Oyedepo is dead right, and I am happy to say so on record, which is more than I expected to be writing about him this week. The trouble starts almost immediately afterward because the very same theology that condemns the betting slip has spent three decades selling Nigerians something remarkably similar, only with a pulpit attached.
If gambling is objectionable because it teaches people to expect wealth without producing anything, then somebody ought to explain what exactly is happening when a congregation is told that lavish and ceaseless giving to a church/preacher will trigger an extravagant financial breakthrough. The stake has changed from a slip to a seed, a covenant offering, a tithe, a “sacrificial” envelope handed over with the same hopeful flutter as a bet placed on a Wednesday night fixture played in Moldova or Poland that nobody watched.
The psychology beneath it is identical, as both are appeals to the idea that a single decisive transaction rather than years of grinding, unglamorous effort is what separates the poor from the prosperous. The one meaningful difference, and it is not a small one, is that the man running the betting shop does not claim God is personally underwriting your winnings.
Prosperity preachers have made that claim for a very long time and the evidence for it remains exactly where it has always been, which is nowhere. There is no serious body of proof that faithful tithing produces financial prosperity and there is certainly nothing of the sort in Scripture, which contains not a single follower of Christ, who did not teach it, or even anyone under Mosaic law, who became an Oyedepo off the back of tithing, let alone a Dangote or Elon Musk.
What can be shown, quite easily and without recourse to testimony, is that the institutions collecting the money grow richer with impressive reliability. Their buildings multiply, their fleets expand, their aircraft become, in the movement’s peculiar vocabulary, evidence of “kingdom prosperity” or “covenant principles,” while the woman who has tithed faithfully every month for 15 years is still trying to work out how to pay her child’s school fees.
That imbalance is not a mystery requiring divine explanation, but simply where the money went.
I am not arguing against generosity, which remains one of the more decent human instincts and one that churches, charities and community groups genuinely depend on. My complaint is narrower and, I think, entirely reasonable, which is that generosity has been rebranded as an investment product carrying a guaranteed divine return, a return that has never once been delivered on schedule.
Oyedepo has been especially inventive on this front, having at one point linked Job’s suffering to a supposed failure to tithe, a claim the Book of Job declines to support in any verse I have been able to find. Job’s calamities, as the text plainly states, arose from a wager between God and Satan and the same book goes out of its way to describe Job as blameless throughout, which makes the tithing theory less an interpretation and more an invention deployed to scare congregations shitless into giving not out of conviction but fear. I watched a video only last week in which the same man announced that giving to the poor without also tithing would leave the giver poor. Wow! Just wow!
Fear raises money efficiently, I will grant it that. However, it makes for dire theology and it is more of a tool used in Cosa Nostra shakedowns and protection rackets. None of this undermines the one sound thing Oyedepo has said on the subject of betting. If anything, it sharpens the point.
Young Nigerians deserve to be told, clearly and without exception, that every promise of effortless wealth is the same con wearing a different hat. It does not matter whether it is sold from a kiosk with a betting slip or from an altar.
Real prosperity, the sort that survives contact with an actual bank statement, is built slowly out of education, enterprise, value creation, disciplined saving and productive work and with luck occasionally playing a supporting role. There are no shortcuts around that, not through a bet slip and not through a bigger envelope in the collection tray.
The real tragedy is that millions of Nigerians are being worked from both ends by industries that have discovered the same commercial secret, which is that hope sells better than honesty. One operates out of dim kiosks, often wreathed in sachet liquor brands that NAFDAC has been trying to ban. The other operates from auditoriums the size of small airports and calls its product prophecy. Both are selling the same escape route and both are, in the end, selling nothing at all.
Young people deserve a version of the truth that does not flatter either industry, which is that character and productivity beat chance and promises every single time and that anyone offering a supernatural shortcut to wealth should be met with precisely the scepticism Oyedepo reserves for the man selling bet slips or hawking lottery numbers somewhere off Acme Road in Ogba.
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