On Moral Ecologies, Risk and Religiosity

 In 2025, I had gone to Newport for the RCPsych International Congress. I had lodged in my modest hotel accommodation. Thankfully, I had found a Tesco a few yards away. I had gone there to buy a few conference-week staples: bread, milk, bananas.

Just before I entered the shop, someone went in, stole a couple of crisps, beers, and a few other items, then ran out. That was my first experience of witnessing shoplifting. What struck me as uncanny was not the shoplifting itself, but the fact that none of the staff or other shoppers seemed to care — no one ran after the thief, tried to accost him, or called the police.

I have often returned to that scene in my mind and wondered at what I would have done — or indeed should have done — had I been inside the shop and witnessed the theft directly. What unsettled me was not merely the theft itself, but what the collective indifference revealed about moral ecology: the fragile network of habits, expectations, risks, and reciprocal obligations that sustain public ethics.

Here is perhaps a homeless person, hard done by society, who needs a bite and a drink. Is it such a bad thing that he gets it from a Tesco? This big conglomerate that makes so much money? Besides, they are insured anyway.

But regardless, stealing is bad, and a society where thieves have the time of day to waltz into shops and cart off goods without anyone caring or noticing is a society that will soon go to the dogs. So, upstanding member of society that I am, I try to stop that.

What happens if he punches me and knocks me out? Or worse still, plunges a knife into my chest? What happens then to my ageing mother in Nigeria, my little boys, my wife?

Just yesterday, I heard about a Nigerian woman in the USA who did exactly that — ran after a thief who had come into the shop where she worked. Unfortunately, she was shot and killed.

So every time I think about this, I am struck by the twin realities of moral ecology and personal risk — a real-life chicken-and-egg dilemma.

How can I act with courage in confronting wrong if that act is not reciprocated in a society that is broadly moral and coherent? How do I act with civic responsibility if, in putting myself at risk, my sacrifice for the common good will simply be exploited, mocked as naïve, or promptly forgotten? And how can anyone bear personal cost for the public good when institutions are hollowed out, when right is punished and wrong tolerated — even celebrated?

Yet it is precisely by risking life and limb in the service of an ethical society that, as a people, we develop moral sensibility. A moral ecology is formed when people are willing to take risks and resist tolerating wrong, even when there is a cost.

Growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, kidnapping was mostly associated with children — and occasionally adults who travelled for job interviews and never returned, their bodies never found — particularly during the ember months, election periods, and times when new notes were released. At the time, consistent with Yoruba cultural sensibilities, kidnapping was often tied to rituals: money rituals, political rituals, and so forth.

Around the same period in the Niger Delta, kidnapping functioned somewhat differently. It was a way for indigenes to extract money from oil companies and to protest the destruction of their communities and livelihoods while multinational corporations continued to profit amid pollution and devastation.

In April 2014, close to 300 teenage schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram from the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Chibok.

Around two years later, my own family became intimately entangled in this whole business when my brother was kidnapped in the heart of Yorubaland on the Ilesha–Akure expressway.

It was his wedding day. I was his best man, and I had travelled with him from the ceremony to Ilesha. I had just arrived at my flat in the House Officers’ Lodge at Wesley Guild Hospital, removed my jacket, and was about to take off my waistcoat when I received a call from my mother informing me that he had been kidnapped.

At first, I thought it was a bad joke. I subsequently made my way by okada to the nearest police station, only to be rather unceremoniously informed that the site of the incident fell under another jurisdiction. I called another bike man and raced to that station, where the desk sergeant casually informed me that my brother’s newly wedded wife was the prime suspect and that I should go and bring her in to write a statement.

Eventually, we wrote our statements and were informed by the police that we should simply wait for the kidnappers to contact us and then pay whatever ransom they demanded.

The next morning, I attended the daily Grand Rounds of the Pediatrics Department. I told the team what had happened, after which I was allowed to skip work for the day while the consultants engaged in some bland discussion about the general insecurity in the nation.

Eventually, we crowdfunded, paid up as instructed, and thankfully my brother was released to us.

That was ten years ago.

What kind of nation sustains a kidnapping industry for ten years?

What sort of moral ecology develops in such a place? What sort of pedagogy does that teach?

Who dares refuse to pay the ransom for their loved one?

How can people be willing to sacrifice for the public good when their societies lack moral coherence — when courage is rendered futile, sacrifice punished, and wrongdoing accommodated as ordinary life?

And in such a climate, is it really far-fetched that teachers and primary school children are kidnapped in broad daylight within their own schools in Oyo State?

And that ní ìlú tó lọ́ba tó ní’jòyè!

And perhaps that is the crux of the problem. A leadership devoid of honour cannot sustain any responsible moral ecology. People reflect their leaders, and leaders are themselves a reflection of broad swathes of society. Institutions shape moral habits, but they are also shaped by the moral expectations of the people who inhabit them. When moral seriousness is lacking among the rank and file, and moral decadence is celebrated in the upper echelons of power, then, as Yeats noted over a century ago:

“…The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

I found the response of the Nigeria Union of Teachers chapter in Oyo State particularly interesting. In response to the kidnapping crisis, they had called for a three-day fasting and prayer programme, with prayer sessions to be held in schools at noon.

I found this deeply revealing — not necessarily because prayer itself is wrong, but because of what such a response says about the pedagogical character of a helpless society.

In societies where institutions function and public morality retains some coherence, crises often provoke organisation, protest, policy demands, strategic action, or collective civic pressure. But in societies long habituated to impotence, corruption, and institutional failure, there develops a communal sense of helplessness.

Courage is socially learnt through repeated cycles of crisis, courageous action, and communal commendation. People learn bravery when courageous acts are seen to matter — when sacrifice is honoured, when institutions respond, and when moral action produces visible consequences. But where courageous leaders are absent, and courageous action is mocked, punished, or rendered futile, people gradually give up. A learned helplessness develops.

That helplessness, however, eventually finds an outlet.

Sometimes, religiosity can begin to function as a cultural language for resignation, helplessness, powerlessness, and a whimper for change when it ought instead to be a source of moral courage stimulating boldness and conviction.

In such a climate, corrupt leaders can tap into the existential anxieties of people and encourage them to project their agency onto a higher power while presenting prayer as a panacea for social, political, and practical problems. Being largely irreligious themselves, they scarcely care that this distorts prayer into less an act of spiritual conviction than a socially acceptable expression of powerlessness and a temporary salve.

And this is the final tragedy: that prayer which seeks to honour God may itself end up mocking Him. For prayer divorced from moral seriousness, courage, sacrifice, responsibility, and justice is not a sacramental act of faith but a religious cop-out. It asks of God what we are unwilling — and yet ought — to demand of ourselves.

Yet moral ecologies do not emerge spontaneously. They are formed slowly, when ordinary people in ordinary situations repeatedly choose costly ethical action over resignation or empty “sacramentation.” They grow when courage is practised, sacrifice honoured, wrongdoing disavowed, and moral seriousness communally affirmed. But in a morally ambivalent society, someone, at some point, must be willing to act ethically before guarantees exist.

And that is the risk with which we are all confronted: that we must sometimes hazard life, comfort, or safety in the hope that such action, reciprocated and remembered, might gradually cultivate a people incapable of casually tolerating evil.

Because if no one is willing to take such a risk, then Yeats’ slouching demon may yet find in our people, our institutions, and our instincts a natural home, until moral deformity no longer shocks but instead becomes the ordinary texture of daily life.