NLNG $100,000 Winner Ifowodo: Leah Sharibu Is A Symbol Of Nigeria’s Besieged State

Ogaga Ifowodo, on Friday, won the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature for his poetry collection, ‘Why Does God Need a Gun?’. He was named the winner at Nigeria LNG Limited (NLNG)’s grand award night in Lagos on Friday, beating two other shortlisted poets in a competition with 223 entries. The prize includes a $100,000 award for his work examining religious and political violence. Fresh from recognition of his poetry collection, the acclaimed poet and writer poses questions that extend far beyond literature. At the heart of the collection lies a troubling contradiction: how does faith, so often associated with mercy and humanity, become a justification for violence? Through the voices of victims of terrorism, religious extremism and Nigeria’s unresolved tragedies, Ifowodo confronts a country he believes risks growing accustomed to violence — and forgetting those who have suffered because of it. Leah Sharibu is particularly significant in this conversation. For Ifowodo, she represents much more than an abducted schoolgirl; she becomes a symbol of a nation itself, held captive by forces that threaten freedom, secularism and humanity. In this first interview after winning the award, Ifowodo speaks with Adejoke Alabi-Henry about the ideas behind Why Does God Need a Gun?, Nigeria’s relationship with violence and memory, and why literature must continue to disturb society when silence and complacency become comfortable. The title of Ifowodo’s collection immediately poses a provocative question about religion, power and violence.

If God does not need a gun, why do you think human beings so often need God to justify using one?

By falsely invoking the name of God, they appeal to our innate fear, awe and worship of God, hoping thereby to prevent any rational examination of their motives and their quest for power and domination over the rest of us. If we accept that they are obeying God’s commands, then we can’t question their actions, no matter how vile, murderous and evil.

Your book gives victims of violence a voice. What happens to a country that forgets its victims?

The country then forgets, grossly misunderstands, and mismanages the dangers that confront it and threaten its existence. It can no longer remember where, as the adage goes, the rain began to beat it as a people.

It means it cannot truly reckon with its problems, nor guard against the tragedies that produce its many victims, individual and collective. That country, such as ours, is doomed to flounder and suffer from old and new catastrophes, most often with the new troubles traceable to the old unresolved ones.

Leah Sharibu looms large in the collection. What does her continued captivity say about Nigeria beyond the story of a single girl?

Leah is a composite figure not only of her fellow abducted Dapchi schoolmates and the Chibok girls, whether freed, dead (God rest their souls), or still in captivity, but also of all the direct victims of the terrorists’ war against freedom of thought, secularism, and our humanity. She is, by extension, a symbol of the nation’s besieged state. The nation, experienced through her, is quite literally held captive until she is freed and the religious terrorists are defeated.

Has Nigeria become too comfortable with religious and political violence — and what role can literature play in unsettling that comfort?

We can, sadly, definitely say yes to the first part of the question! As to what role literature can play in disturbing that comfort or complacency, I would say, first, that it bears witness to religious and political violence in a way that ensures we do not fall into catastrophic national amnesia.

By presenting alternative realities and keeping dreams alive, it preserves and reinforces the possibility of positive change. Literature speaks to our minds, induces introspection, reflection and an apprehension of our current being, and compels closer attention to our world and existence in all their dimensions, not just the material or mundane. That is what is needed to keep complacency or amnesia at bay.

Now that this prize has given Why Does God Need a Gun? a much larger audience, what conversation do you most want the book to prompt among Nigerians?

To follow the Leah Sharibu poet-persona to ask the question she poses to her captors, the self-appointed guardians of God. “Your mission is to save God?” she asks. God, who is a “weakling / hiding from His enemies in the skirt / of the sky? / And you cry, ‘God is Great?’ / Then you are greater than God!”

That question, repeated with shifts in emphasis — Why does God need a gun? Why does your God need a gun? Why would God need a gun? — invites constant scrutiny of the claims and tenets of religious belief to ensure they conform to the idea of an Almighty, kind and merciful God.

The role of organised and hegemonic religions in many of the worst atrocities that have menaced humanity, from the inquisitions to slavery, the crusades, the Jewish holocaust, colonialism, apartheid, the current Zionist settler-colonialist war in Palestine, and the terrors of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of West Africa (ISWAP), Boko Haram, the Taliban, etc., invites us, indeed, oblige us, to hold all who claim to speak and act in God’s name to the highest scrutiny.