On the morning of April 28, 2020, police officers knocked on Mubarak Bala’s door in Kaduna.
Bala was a chemical engineer and president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria. He had spent years saying publicly what most people in northern Nigeria do not say at all: that he did not believe in God, and that religion was doing his country harm. Still, the officers took him away without saying where they were headed.
He had been transferred to Kano, a state where Sharia law operates alongside secular law, and where blasphemy can carry the death penalty. His crime? He had written a Facebook post a month earlier calling the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist and comparing him unfavourably to a Christian pastor. A group of lawyers filed a petition with the Kano State Police Commissioner, and the police acted. A Change.org petition calling for Bala’s Facebook account to be permanently closed gathered over 17,000 signatures, and Facebook removed the post.
Bala would spend the next four years in prison before his release in January 2025 and subsequent relocation to Germany. Yes, he knew exactly what he was doing with his post. But there is no compulsion in religion. Whatever one thinks of his conclusions, the method of responding to them is a separate question entirely, and it is the one this piece is concerned with.
Nigeria is one of the most religious countries in the world. Twelve northern states operate Sharia law alongside the secular legal system. Under Sharia, blasphemy is a capital offence. Apostasy, the act of leaving Islam, is punishable by death. A 2010 Pew Research poll found that 51 percent of Nigerian Muslims supported the death penalty for leaving Islam. That is a majority.
The theology behind that stance is not difficult to locate. What is harder to defend is its application: the translation of doctrinal belief into state power, courtrooms, and prison sentences.
Under Nigeria’s secular criminal code, blasphemy carries a maximum sentence of two years in prison. Yet Bala was prosecuted under the laws of Kano State, where he wasn’t resident, for a Facebook post he hadn’t made there. His lawyers challenged the court’s jurisdiction, but the judge dismissed their argument, ultimately sentencing the humanist to 24 years.
These are the rules. What happens to people living outside them is what I plan to examine in this piece. The cost of unbelief in Northern Nigeria is not fixed. Rather, it merely varies with visibility.
Mubarak Bala was the most visible atheist in the country, and for this he paid the price. He came from a family of Islamic scholars in Kano, trained as a chemical process engineer, and made the decision not just to stop believing but to say so loudly, consistently, and under his real name. When he told his family in 2014 that he had left Islam, they did not argue with him. They committed him to a psychiatric ward at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, where one of the doctors who examined him offered the following medical opinion: “My dear, you need a God. Even in Japan, they have a God. No one should live without God. Those that do are all psychologically ill. Denying the biblical account of Adam and Eve is delusion, denial of history.”
The doctor’s claim that atheism signals psychological illness is easy to dismiss as extreme—but I’m not entirely sure it is. I struggle to imagine a life built around the absence of God. Still, there’s a difference between finding such a life pitiable and prescribing a hospital bed to cure it. The doctor erased that distinction completely. Later, so would the court. He was confined for eighteen days, released only when hospital workers went on strike.
What pushed him to go public, he has said, was a 2013 video of a female Christian being beheaded by men his age, speaking his language. “It hit me that the time for silence is over. Either someone speaks, or we all sink.” So he spoke, on Facebook, in interviews, in his capacity as president of the Humanist Association of Nigeria, and in every register available to him. Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka would later describe his arrest as part of a “plague of religious extremism” that has afflicted Nigeria in recent decades. That description did not keep him out of prison.
On April 28, 2020, the police came. He spent over a year in detention without charge, held in solitary confinement, denied access to lawyers, and, according to his legal team, compelled to worship in the Islamic way. In April 2022, in a move that baffled even his own legal team, he pleaded guilty to 18 counts of blasphemy. He has defended the decision since: “I believe what I did saved not only my life, but people in Kano. Especially those attached to my case, because they are also a target.” Whether that reads as practicality or as the system working exactly as designed depends entirely on what you think the system is for. He was sentenced to 24 years, a punishment which was later reduced on appeal. In some measure, his guilty plea and subsequent obeisance had paid off—it had become clear now that defending your rights against the Nigerian state was a futile endeavour. He was only released in January 2025, thereafter relocating to Bavaria, Germany, where a far more liberal government granted him a six-month fellowship. Visibility and independent ideology cost Bala his national identity.
S.S. Umar Petition Against Mubarak Bala To The Commissioner Of Police, Kano. Source: Foundation For Investigative Journalism 
S.S. Umar Petition Against Mubarak Bala To The Commissioner Of Police, Kano. Source: Foundation For Investigative Journalism 
S.S. Umar Petition Against Mubarak Bala To The Commissioner Of Police, Kano. Source: Foundation For Investigative Journalism
At the other end of this scale is a Kano native who spoke to the Associated Press in 2023, withholding his name for fear of retribution. He is a business owner in his thirties, formerly Muslim, and now an atheist. But no one around him knows about that second part. Every day, when the megaphone calls for prayers, he picks up his prayer beads and walks to the mosque with his neighbours, his colleagues, and members of his community. He has been performing this way for years, moving through the rituals of a faith he no longer holds, because the alternative is not simply social embarrassment or family tension.
“To survive as an atheist, you cannot act like one,” he said. In 2015, a mob nearly killed him after word got out that he had left Islam. “If I ever come out in Northern Nigeria to say I am an atheist, it will be an automatic death sentence.”
This man is not in prison, and he has not had cause to flee to Germany. He is in Kano, performing five times a day, at no cost the state can see, and at a cost the state will never actually bother to measure. And his survival depends entirely on sustaining this performance, one that demands he become someone he is not.
Between these two extremes, the man who said everything and paid for it, and the man who says nothing and pays for that too, there are people who have found other arrangements.
Leo Igwe grew up Catholic in southeastern Nigeria and entered the seminary at the age of twelve to train for the priesthood, but the questions he encountered there, and the absence of satisfactory answers, eventually led him away from the faith entirely and into decades of advocacy that have made him one of the most targeted humanist voices on the continent. He has been arrested, beaten by police, and sued for billions of naira by a powerful Pentecostal pastor. Today, he operates through institutions and international networks that offer some protection, albeit partial and uncertain.
When Bala was in prison, Igwe was the one coordinating the legal response—filing petitions, maintaining international pressure, making sure the case did not disappear into the silence that swallows so many others. Last year, he became a certified humanist chaplain specifically to serve atheists in Nigerian prisons, because no such service existed. “Many non-religious people go through existential crises,” he wrote, “but have no one to run to for help.” He continues to operate inside Nigeria, loud enough to be useful, careful enough to persist.
He entered the seminary at twelve, carrying questions that went unanswered. One wonders whether things could have turned out differently. Religious institutions in Nigeria have long resisted doubt—refusing to sit with difficult questions or offer the kind of honest engagement that might have kept people like Igwe within the faith instead of driving them to build alternatives outside it. The refusal to answer is often mistaken for authority, yet a faith secure in its own meaning should have nothing to fear from inquiry. It should welcome as many questions as it can bear. The fact that so many institutions do not is, in itself, worth examining.
Then there is Peter Ade, raised by pastors of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, who attended church from morning to evening every Sunday of his childhood and held on to faith well into adulthood. What broke his faith was a sequence of observations made during the 2020 pandemic: churches demanding tithes while their members lost jobs, pastors preaching prosperity to congregations that could not afford to eat. “I had a crippling existential crisis,” he said. “There were nights I would stay up having fresh questions. I felt robbed, fooled and cheated.”
He’s not wrong to feel that way. The prosperity gospel, which dominates much of Nigerian Christianity and has found softer equivalents in some Islamic circles, made a specific promise: give, and it shall be given unto you. For a generation that gave faithfully and received nothing, that promise has sounded less like theology and more like a scam. When a pastor announces the purchase of a second private jet to a congregation where some members cannot even afford to eat, faith is definitely not what comes to mind.
Peter, unlike Bala, kept his doubts private. He opened a burner account on X and began posting under a pseudonym, but this proved insufficient. In 2021, he launched The Ranting Atheist—a podcast rooted in secrecy that has since grown to more than 120 episodes.
For these four Nigerians who came to the same conclusion regarding faith, the price paid by each member of the quartet was determined almost entirely by how much of themselves they were willing or able to exhibit to the world.
What connects all of them, beyond the obvious, is the administrative weight of living this way in Nigeria: the constant management of information, identity, and exposure. The anonymous Kano man carries prayer beads he does not believe in. Peter Ade records a podcast under a name that is not his. Igwe operates through legal and institutional channels that offer just enough cover to keep working. Even Bala, the most visible of all, eventually made a guilty plea to 18 charges of blasphemy, in exchange for freedom, decidedly worth more to him than the alternative of death or decay.
None of this is accidental. It is the predictable result of a legal and social environment designed, at every single level, to make unbelief expensive. Nigeria’s 2023 national census omitted any question on religion entirely. There is, officially, no data on how many Nigerians are irreligious. Humanist observers have called it a deliberate suppression: the state’s way of ensuring that what it cannot see cannot be counted, and ensuring that what cannot be counted cannot demand to be accommodated.
Nothing in this piece should be read as a defence of irreligion. It is written by someone who believes, precisely because belief should be able to withstand this conversation. Bala’s Facebook post was neither a neutral nor harmless act of expression; it was designed to offend, and it succeeded. Most of their conclusions are wrong, and some of their methods are provocative. That is not the argument.
The argument is this: a society that criminalises their conclusions, psychiatrises their doubts, and builds its census around their invisibility is not as confident in its own faith as it claims to be. A strong belief system shouldn’t require the force of law to protect it from a Facebook post. That sounds like fragility and fear.
Nigerian religious institutions still have time to respond to what is documented here. Not with louder condemnations, aggressive enforcement, psychiatric wards and ridiculous blasphemy charges. But with something far more demanding: honesty. Entertain the questions. Make room for doubt. Be transparent about what you know and what you don’t. Stop compelling people toward a faith they have not chosen, and above all, embody what you preach.
Bala said, before his arrest, that the time for silence was over, and that either someone speaks or everyone sinks. He spoke. He spent four years in prison for it. He is now in Germany, in a country that gave him a fellowship and a place to live, watching Nigeria from a distance that the Nigerian state created.
The man in Kano is still there. Still walking to the mosque. Still carrying the prayer beads. The silence he maintains is more of survival than it is of agreement. And in Northern Nigeria, for now, survival and silence are literally the same thing.
Ayomide Bello
