The Cost of Silence: When Explanations Become More Damning Than the Accusation.
Ukatta Oganvo once observed that; “A lie is a costly possession. Like luxury, it must constantly be maintained, defended, and adorned, lest it collapse under its own weight.”
Nothing illustrates this better than the recent attempts to justify Pastor Enoch Adeboye’s conspicuous silence on the failures of governance, worsening insecurity, and economic hardship under President Bola Tinubu.
The tragedy of the church’s response is that it appears to prove the very point it seeks to refute.
When President Goodluck Jonathan occupied Aso Rock, many prominent Christian leaders, including Pastor Adeboye, found both the voice and the urgency to speak. They marched, protested, prayed publicly against insecurity and poor governance. They were not told that spiritual leaders should avoid politics, or reminded that pastors should remain above partisan disputes, neither were they cautioned against criticizing those in authority.
Today, however, when millions of Nigerians face crushing inflation, widespread hunger, kidnappings, violent attacks, and deepening insecurity, a different standard suddenly emerges. Silence is presented as wisdom and restraint rebranded as spirituality. The absence of public rebuke becomes evidence of higher understanding.
But principles are only principles when they survive a change of occupants in power.
The question Nigerians are asking is not whether Pastor Adeboye has the right to remain silent, every citizen possesses that right. The question is why silence is now being elevated into a virtue when activism was previously celebrated as a moral duty.
A principle that condemns one government but excuses another is not a principle, it is a preference. A standard that applies only when convenient is not conviction. It is accommodation.
And when an institution must issue lengthy epistles to explain why conduct that was once considered righteous has now become inappropriate, it inevitably invites the suspicion that it is defending a conclusion rather than explaining a principle.
The difficulty with selective silence is that it creates a burden that grows heavier with time. Every new kidnapping, every fresh massacre, every family pushed deeper into poverty demands another explanation. Every worsening indicator requires another justification and comparison with the past demands another distinction.
That is why Oganvo’s warning remains relevant centuries later. Truth is remarkably economical, it requires no elaborate maintenance, does not need constant decoration. It simply survives scrutiny because it rests on consistency.
But contradictions are expensive. They require endless explanations, qualifications, and reinterpretations.
The church would have been better served by a simple admission: that leaders, like all human beings, are sometimes inconsistent.
Instead, it has chosen a more difficult path, the path of defending inconsistency as consistency.
And that is always the costlier possession.
