The Man God Sought—but Did Not Find
By Francis E. Madojemu
There is a difference between an imperfect leader and a wicked one.
That distinction matters.
We have just considered the difficulty of recognising good leadership before posterity has passed its verdict. History is filled with leaders who were resisted, misunderstood or condemned in their own time, only to be celebrated after death. We also considered the uncomfortable truth that some of the people through whom God and history accomplished remarkable things were deeply flawed human beings.
That discussion requires grace, humility and discernment. If we demand perfection from everyone who leads, we will eventually be left with either hypocrites or statues. Every living leader is unfinished. Every leader carries weaknesses. Every leader needs correction, accountability and mercy.
But imperfection is not the same as predation.
A leader may make mistakes while genuinely seeking the welfare of the people. Another person may enter leadership with no intention of serving anyone but himself. One is weak; the other has made the weakness of the people his opportunity. One fails while attempting to build; the other succeeds by keeping the nation broken.
We must not use the language of human imperfection to excuse organised wickedness.
The more I have reflected on leadership in Nigeria and across Africa, the more I have become convinced that our problem cannot be explained only by incompetence. Nor can it be explained only by corruption, if by corruption we mean the occasional diversion of money.
Something deeper happens when people profit from the very problems they were entrusted to solve.
What happens when darkness becomes somebody’s business model?
What happens when the person responsible for ending scarcity earns more while scarcity continues?
What happens when public suffering becomes private opportunity?
What happens when a nation does not merely lose money, infrastructure or opportunity—but loses its heart?
A PERSON WHO DESTROYS PEOPLE TO GAIN POWER
There is a simple but disturbing moral principle.
If a person has killed to acquire power, betrayed people to retain power, financed violence to win an election, destroyed reputations to remove opposition, or treated human beings as disposable instruments of ambition, we should not imagine that attaining office will mysteriously make that person compassionate.
Power usually reveals and enlarges what is already present in the heart.
The methods used to obtain power often tell us what power will be used to protect.
If people were expendable on the journey to office, they are unlikely to become precious after the inauguration.
Jesus said:
“For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
— Matthew 6:21
We usually apply this to money, but it also concerns value. What a person sacrifices to obtain something reveals what he considers treasure. If he sacrifices truth, friendship, conscience and human life for power, then power—not people—has become his treasure.
This is why salvation is not peripheral to leadership. A new policy can restrain behaviour, and a strong institution can make corruption more difficult, but only God can replace a heart of stone with a heart of flesh.
Yet we must also ask an uncomfortable question: if many people who sit in our churches remain untouched by the pain of the poor, has the gospel reached the places in us where it should have reached?
The evidence of salvation is not only that we speak about heaven. It is that we begin to value the people God values.
EZEKIEL’S AUTOPSY OF A NATION
The passage I had been trying to remember was not Ezekiel 37 or 39. It was Ezekiel 22.
It is one of Scripture’s most devastating examinations of national collapse. God does not identify a single bad ruler and place all responsibility upon him. He examines an entire moral system.
The prophets, priests, princes and people had all failed.
The prophets, who should have spoken God’s truth, became predators and propagandists:
“There is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst thereof, like a roaring lion ravening the prey; they have devoured souls; they have taken the treasure and precious things; they have made her many widows in the midst thereof.”
— Ezekiel 22:25
The priests, who should have guarded moral distinctions, erased them:
“Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean.”
— Ezekiel 22:26
The princes, who should have protected life and administered justice, used their authority to acquire wealth:
“Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain.”
— Ezekiel 22:27
The prophets then gave spiritual cover to political and economic violence:
“And her prophets have daubed them with untempered morter, seeing vanity, and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith the Lord God, when the Lord hath not spoken.”
— Ezekiel 22:28
Finally, the people themselves reproduced the same culture:
“The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully.”
— Ezekiel 22:29
This is not a list of isolated sins. It is a description of institutional collapse.
Truth-tellers had become deceivers.
Moral guardians had destroyed moral distinctions.
Public officers had become economic predators.
Religious voices had legitimised the predators.
Ordinary citizens had learned to imitate the powerful.
The corruption had travelled from the palace to the pulpit, from the pulpit to the marketplace, and from the marketplace into ordinary relationships.
That is how a nation loses its heart.
It is not only that bad people lead good people. The whole society gradually learns the logic of exploitation.
WHEN FAILURE BECOMES PROFITABLE
There are at least three kinds of national failure.
The first is incapacity: we do not know how to solve the problem.
The second is indifference: we know that people are suffering, but we cannot be bothered to act.
The third is predation: influential people benefit from the problem and therefore acquire an interest in its continuation.
This third category is the darkest. It is what happens when failure becomes profitable.
Nigerians often say that people who sell diesel do not want “NEPA” to work. NEPA no longer exists as an institution, but the name survives as our shorthand for public electricity. We cannot responsibly accuse every diesel supplier or generator importer of sabotaging electricity. Many are simply meeting a need created by public failure.
But the larger moral and economic question remains.
When a country lives with unreliable electricity for decades, an enormous parallel economy grows around the failure. Generator sales, diesel supply, private power systems and emergency services become necessary. Legitimate businesses develop, jobs are created and large investments are made. The longer the failure continues, the more people acquire assets and income streams built around coping with it.
This does not prove sabotage. It does mean that reform will create losers as well as winners. Some people who prosper within the old disorder may resist a future in which their privileged position disappears.
The scale of the failure is not imaginary. Nigeria generates and distributes only a fraction of its installed electricity capacity, and the World Bank has estimated that unreliable power costs the country about US$29 billion annually.
The electricity regulator has also documented cases of distribution companies overbilling unmetered customers. In an earlier case, the regulator found that funds intended for infrastructure and metering had been used by a distribution company to grant an interest-free loan to its core investor.
These are not merely technical problems. They reveal how suffering can become financially useful to someone.
The same danger appeared in the former foreign-exchange system. Multiple official windows and a wide gap between official and parallel-market rates created opportunities for privileged access, arbitrage and round-tripping. Before reforms unified the official market, the International Monetary Fund recorded four separate multiple-currency practices in Nigeria.
The wickedness is not simply that someone wants the naira to be weak. A weak currency harms many wealthy and connected people too. The deeper moral failure occurs when someone with privileged access becomes richer from a distortion that makes food, medicine, education, travel and production more expensive for millions of other people.
Fuel subsidy provides an even clearer example.
Subsidy is not inherently evil. Properly designed, it can protect vulnerable people from severe economic shocks. But a policy defended in the name of the poor can become a system through which the powerful enrich themselves.
A parliamentary investigation into Nigeria’s subsidy regime covering 2009 to 2011 reported payments for fuel that was not delivered or was diverted elsewhere, estimating fraud and mismanagement of approximately US$6.8 billion over three years.
NEITI subsequently reported that petrol subsidy payments amounted to ₦1.159 trillion in 2021 and approximately ₦8.149 trillion between 2006 and 2021.
The issue is not merely the size of the expenditure. It is the moral inversion:
The suffering of the poor becomes the public argument for preserving a system whose hidden benefits flow upward.
The poor provide the justification.
The connected capture the benefit.
The nation carries the cost.
That is profitable dysfunction.
THE REFINERY QUESTION
For decades, one of the world’s major crude-oil producers imported much of the refined fuel it consumed. Public refineries absorbed repeated rehabilitation expenditure while operating far below their potential or not at all.
Then Aliko Dangote undertook the enormous task of building a private refinery.
We should not turn any businessman into a saint, and the existence of a private refinery does not remove the need for competition, regulation, environmental responsibility, labour justice or public accountability.
Nevertheless, the refinery raises an unavoidable national question:
Why should a country that desperately needs domestic refining make it extraordinarily difficult for a functioning domestic refinery to obtain domestically produced crude?
Dangote Refinery alleged that it could not obtain its full crude requirement directly from Nigerian producers and sometimes had to purchase Nigerian crude through international intermediaries at a premium.
The regulator disputed aspects of that account and said it had facilitated substantial allocations. Dangote’s response was that allocation was not the same as physical delivery. By February 2025, the regulator announced that it would deny export permits to producers who failed to meet legally required domestic refinery quotas.
The facts show serious institutional and commercial conflict. They do not yet prove that every obstacle was a conspiracy to preserve import profits. We should be disciplined enough to distinguish what we suspect from what we can demonstrate.
But the episode illustrates the central question of this article:
Have we developed systems in which too many people earn more from importing solutions than from solving problems?
Do we make more money managing scarcity than creating abundance?
Do our institutions reward the person who keeps the emergency alive?
When the answer is yes, reform is no longer just an administrative exercise. It becomes a moral battle against people whose treasure is buried inside the dysfunction.
SUCCESS DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY PRODUCE COMPASSION
We frequently assume that people who become wealthy will eventually “give back.” But success does not automatically enlarge the heart. Money enlarges capacity. It does not necessarily enlarge compassion.
A person can possess enough resources to transform thousands of lives and remain almost entirely preoccupied with himself.
This is why the example of Tony Elumelu is instructive—not because he is the only wealthy African or the owner of Africa’s largest bank, and not because every detail of his business life is beyond criticism. His significance is that he deliberately built a platform that converts private-sector success into opportunity for other Africans.
Elumelu retired as UBA Group Chairman in August 2026 after completing the tenure permitted for a non-executive bank director. Yet the Tony Elumelu Foundation had already grown far beyond a personal charitable gesture.
According to the Foundation, it has disbursed more than US$100 million in seed capital, supported over 27,000 entrepreneurs, trained more than 2.5 million Africans and attracted partnerships from international institutions that now entrust it with additional resources.
The precise impact numbers are the Foundation’s own reporting and should be understood as such. But the larger lesson is unmistakable:
Compassion can be institutionalised.
It can become a platform.
It can attract partners.
It can outgrow the original giver.
It can move from helping one person to changing the opportunity structure for thousands.
This is important because Africa does not lack successful people. It lacks enough successful people who deliberately convert success into systems that increase the capacity of others.
Charity is not merely giving money to the poor. It includes building hospitals that can treat people who cannot fly abroad. It includes improving public schools rather than only sending our own children overseas. It includes funding research, strengthening institutions, mentoring entrepreneurs, protecting the vulnerable and creating pathways by which ordinary people can become productive.
The compassion test is not whether a leader occasionally gives gifts.
It is whether the systems under that leader’s control leave people stronger or more dependent, more dignified or more disposable, more capable or more vulnerable.
SODOM: PROSPERITY WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY
This brings us to Sodom.
Many Christians have reduced the sin of Sodom to one category. Genesis 19 and Jude 7 make sexual immorality impossible to exclude. Genesis also depicts attempted gang sexual violence, brutal dehumanisation and the violation of the stranger.
But Ezekiel reveals the social conditions in which Sodom’s abominations flourished:
“Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good.”
— Ezekiel 16:49–50
We are wrong if we say Sodom was judged only for homosexual behaviour.
We would also be wrong if we said sexual violence and immorality had nothing to do with its judgment.
Ezekiel shows us the progression beneath the visible abomination:
Abundance without stewardship.
Comfort without responsibility.
Pride without gratitude.
Indifference to the poor.
The dehumanisation of the vulnerable and the stranger.
Then open abomination.
Sodom’s sin was not that it possessed bread. It was that fullness produced haughtiness rather than generosity.
Prosperity became insulation.
The wealthy became so comfortable that the pain of others ceased to make a moral claim upon them.
This is the danger confronting affluent people, churches and nations everywhere. Comfort can slowly rearrange our theology until we interpret our abundance as proof of personal virtue and other people’s poverty as proof of their failure.
We cease to ask what our resources require of us.
We begin to regard need as an intrusion.
Eventually, the poor become invisible—until they are required to serve us, vote for us, praise us, work for us or justify another programme designed in their name.
Sodom is therefore not only a warning about sexual disorder. It is a warning about what prosperous ease can do to the human heart.
HOW GOD DEALS WITH WICKED LEADERS
Scripture does not present one mechanical response to every wicked ruler, but a pattern emerges.
God exposes what power conceals
Ahab and Jezebel used royal authority to seize Naboth’s vineyard. False witnesses, religious ceremony and judicial murder were combined to create the appearance of legality.
But God sent Elijah to name the crime and announce judgment.
Power may control the court, the police, the media and the witnesses. It does not control God’s knowledge.
God warns before He judges
Pharaoh received repeated commands and repeated opportunities:
“Let my people go.”
The warnings became progressively severe, but judgment did not begin without revelation and confrontation.
Nineveh was also warned. The city’s violence had come before God, yet the announcement of judgment opened a window for repentance. When the people turned from their violence, mercy interrupted destruction.
Mercy did not declare violence acceptable.
Mercy created time to abandon it.
God can humble a ruler without immediately destroying him
Nebuchadnezzar was warned about pride and instructed to break off his sins by righteousness and show mercy to the poor.
When he continued in arrogance, he was humiliated until he acknowledged God’s sovereignty.
God’s purpose was not merely punishment. It was the recovery of moral sanity.
Repentance can change the immediate outcome without erasing every consequence
When Ahab humbled himself after Elijah’s confrontation, God delayed part of the announced disaster.
Manasseh, despite extraordinary wickedness, later humbled himself and was restored.
This means no leader is beyond repentance.
It also means repentance is more than emotional language. It requires turning.
God may finally remove what refuses correction
Pharaoh’s persistence ended in destruction.
Jezebel’s violence ended in judgment.
Kingdoms were divided, dynasties terminated and rulers displaced.
God is patient, but divine patience should never be interpreted as divine approval.
THE MAN GOD SOUGHT
After describing the prophets, priests, princes and people, God said:
“And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.”
— Ezekiel 22:30
This is one of the saddest statements in Scripture.
God was not searching for a flawless human being. If perfection were the qualification, the search could never succeed.
He was searching for someone whose heart could still be moved.
Someone who would tell the truth when prophets were lying.
Someone who would restore moral distinctions when priests had erased them.
Someone who would protect life when princes were devouring people.
Someone who would defend the poor and the stranger when ordinary citizens had normalised oppression.
Someone who would build what had been broken and stand where others had withdrawn.
The phrase recalls Moses, who stood before God in the breach after Israel’s rebellion:
“Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them.”
— Psalm 106:23
Standing in the gap is not passive spirituality. The person in the gap places himself between destruction and the vulnerable.
He accepts inconvenience.
He bears misunderstanding.
He gives time, prayer, reputation, resources and strength.
He does not merely announce that the wall is broken. He begins to rebuild it.
The priestly material in my earlier teaching on prayer helped me see this more clearly. A priest is distinguished by sacrifice. Christ offered prayers and supplications, and ultimately offered Himself.
Therefore, intercession is not merely speaking. It is a willingness to be offered in the service of God’s purpose.
The person God sought was not a conductor of religious activity.
He was a repairer prepared to enter the breach.
THE CHURCH CANNOT PRAY AROUND COMPASSION
This is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable for the Church.
We cannot condemn the selfishness of political leaders while building churches that are equally indifferent to the lost, the poor, the weak and the stranger.
We cannot ask God to give leaders hearts of flesh while protecting our own hearts of stone.
We cannot pray for national transformation while refusing every instruction that would make us participants in that transformation.
Isaiah addressed a society filled with religious activity but also with bloodshed:
“And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;
Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”
— Isaiah 1:15–17
Notice that God did not ask them to pray more loudly. He demanded repentance expressed through justice and compassion.
Zechariah gives the same connection:
“Execute true judgment, and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother:
And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor.”
— Zechariah 7:9–10
They refused to hear. Then came the terrifying reversal:
“Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the Lord of hosts.”
— Zechariah 7:13
This begins to answer the question that will occupy the next article:
Everybody prays—but what does God hear?
Sometimes the issue is not whether God has heard our words.
The issue is whether we have heard His.
STRATEGIC INTERCESSION FOR A NATION
How, then, should we pray about national wickedness?
Not merely with impulsive anger.
Not by using prayer to avoid research, responsibility and action.
Not by asking God to destroy everyone we dislike.
Not by reducing a complex institutional problem to a slogan.
Strategic intercession should include at least six movements.
1. Ask God to expose profitable dysfunction
We must pray for hidden incentives, ownership structures, false accounts, regulatory capture, manipulated information and protected beneficiaries to be revealed.
Ephesians 5:13 says that what is exposed by light becomes visible.
2. Pray for repentance and transformed hearts
The first desire of the Church should not be destruction but salvation. God can humble Nebuchadnezzar, arrest Manasseh and turn violent people away from evil.
We should pray that leaders encounter truth before judgment becomes unavoidable.
3. Pray for courageous truth-tellers
Every Ahab needs an Elijah.
Every Pharaoh needs a Moses.
Every corrupt institution needs people who will refuse to rename evil, even when lying is rewarded.
This includes journalists, auditors, judges, civil servants, pastors, professionals, whistle-blowers and citizens.
4. Pray for systems that make compassion durable
We need more than occasional generous personalities.
We need laws, budgets, hospitals, schools, regulatory systems, businesses and churches that protect dignity even when a compassionate founder is no longer present.
Compassion must become architecture.
5. Ask God for instructions—and obey them
In Acts 13, the Church ministered to the Lord and fasted. The Holy Spirit answered with an instruction:
“Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.”
God’s answer to our prayer for Nigeria may come as an assignment.
He may instruct us to educate, organise, mentor, employ, investigate, report, contest, design, build, give, protect or go.
If we refuse the assignment, we should be careful about declaring that God refused the prayer.
6. Measure our obedience and its fruit
We do not measure God as though He were our employee. But we should measure whether we are doing what we said we would do.
How many people were trained?
How many children returned to school?
How many families gained sustainable income?
How many public records became transparent?
How many leaders were discipled?
How many vulnerable people became safer?
Prayer should produce perception.
Perception should produce instruction.
Instruction should produce obedience.
Obedience should produce fruit.
A NATION RECOVERS ITS HEART ONE PERSON AT A TIME
It is tempting to end by asking:
Where is the man God is seeking?
But perhaps the more honest question is:
Am I becoming that person?
The person God seeks may be a president, governor or minister.
He may also be a pastor who refuses to flatter power, a banker who uses capital to create opportunity, a doctor who remains committed to a public hospital, a civil servant who will not alter a figure, a businesswoman who pays people fairly, a teacher who refuses to abandon a child, or a citizen who will not reproduce oppression in the small territory under his control.
National wickedness is reproduced through millions of personal permissions.
National compassion must also be rebuilt through millions of faithful decisions.
We will not recover our heart merely by finding kinder slogans. We must recover the conviction that people are not instruments, statistics, votes, customers, congregants or obstacles.
They bear the image of God.
The true test of leadership is not merely what a leader builds, how long he remains in office, how much wealth he accumulates or how history eventually remembers him.
The compassion test asks:
What happened to the weak while you were strong?
What happened to the poor while you had abundance?
What happened to truth while you possessed influence?
What happened to those who could not reward you?
What happened to the people whose suffering could have made you richer?
Did you solve their problem—or build your prosperity inside it?
God looked across a nation of prophets, priests, princes and people.
He searched for someone who would repair the wall and stand in the breach.
He found no one.
May that never be the final sentence written over our generation.
QUESTIONS FOR PERSONAL, CHURCH AND NATIONAL REFLECTION
- Which problems in our nation have become profitable to the people responsible for solving them?
- Where are we confusing ordinary human imperfection with deliberate predation?
- Have prosperity and comfort made us less sensitive to the poor and vulnerable?
- Does our church’s prayer life produce practical compassion, responsibility and obedience?
- What instruction may God already have given us in answer to a prayer we keep repeating?
- What broken wall is within our actual capacity to begin rebuilding?
- Who becomes stronger because we possess influence, knowledge, money or access?
- If God sought someone to stand in the gap for our community, would He find us available?
Notes and Sources
- Reuters, “Why Nigeria’s power grid is failing,” 11 December 2024, reporting World Bank estimates and power-sector data.
- Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, “NERC Sanctions Eight DisCos for Non-Compliance with Estimated Bill Caps,” 10 April 2025.
- Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, “NERC Fines IBEDC ₦50 Million,” 17 October 2017.
- International Monetary Fund, Nigeria: Staff Report for the 2024 Article IV Consultation—Informational Annex, describing the multiple-currency practices eliminated through the 2023–24 reforms.
- Reuters, “Nigeria Parliament Urges Fuel Subsidy Graft Arrests,” 25 April 2012, reporting the findings and recommendations of the House of Representatives investigation.
- Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Nigeria 2021 EITI Report—Oil and Gas.
- Reuters, “Nigeria to Block Oil Export Permits for Producers Who Do Not Fill Refinery Quotas,” 3 February 2025.
- United Bank for Africa, “Notification of Retirement of Group Chairman of United Bank for Africa and Appointment of Successor,” 8 July 2026.
- Tony Elumelu Foundation, “About Us” and 2026 programme reporting. The impact figures cited are the Foundation’s reported figures.
