Ogaga Ifowodo: The Poet Who Asked Why God Needs A Gun — And Won $100,000

By Adejoke Alabi-Henry

There is something unsettling about the question Ogaga Ifowodo chose for the title of his sixth poetry collection: Why Does God Need a Gun?

It sounds simple. Almost like the innocent question of a child. But behind it are some of Nigeria’s most painful stories — terrorism, religious extremism, murdered citizens, abducted schoolgirls and a country that has sometimes appeared to move on before properly mourning its dead.

Now, that question has earned Ifowodo one of Africa’s biggest literary honours.

The poet, lawyer and human rights activist was announced winner of the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature at the Nigeria LNG Limited Grand Award Night in Lagos on Friday. His collection, Why Does God Need a Gun?, beat 222 other entries to claim the $100,000 prize.

But Ifowodo did not arrive at this moment suddenly. His life has long sat at the intersection of literature, law, politics and resistance. Born in Oleh, Delta State, in 1966, Ifowodo studied law at the University of Benin before working with the Civil Liberties Organisation during some of Nigeria’s most difficult military years. His human rights work would come at a personal cost.

In November 1997, under the regime of General Sani Abacha, Ifowodo was arrested after returning from the Commonwealth Summit in Edinburgh, where he and other activists had pushed for stronger international action against the dictatorship. He was detained in solitary confinement without access to his family or lawyers and released in 1998. That same year, he received the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.

So when Ifowodo writes about power, violence and the human beings caught beneath them, he is not approaching these subjects entirely from a distance. Poetry has accompanied that journey for decades.

His Homeland and Other Poems won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 1993. Madiba won the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 2003, while The Oil Lamp took the ANA/Gabriel Okara Poetry Prize in 2005. He later earned an MFA and PhD from Cornell University and taught poetry and literature at Texas State University. His A Good Mourning was shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2017.

This latest victory therefore carries the weight of a long journey.

At the emotional centre of Why Does God Need a Gun? is Leah Sharibu, one of the schoolgirls abducted from Dapchi, Yobe State, in 2018.

For Ifowodo, however, Leah becomes larger than the story of one girl.

Speaking exclusively to LEADERSHIP, he describes her as a figure representing not only the Dapchi and Chibok schoolgirls, but victims of the wider assault by terrorists on freedom, secularism and humanity.

His conclusion is stark: through Leah, Nigeria itself can be seen as a country held captive.

That idea runs through the collection. If God is almighty, kind and merciful, why should anyone need a weapon to defend Him? And when people claim divine authority for violence, should society accept their claims without interrogation?

For Ifowodo, the answer is clearly no.

The book also asks another uncomfortable question of Nigerians: what happens when a country becomes used to its tragedies?

It is a particularly Nigerian question.

Over years of insurgency, kidnappings and killings, names become headlines, headlines become statistics and, eventually, yesterday’s news. Ifowodo worries about that forgetting. In his conversation with LEADERSHIP, he argues that a country that forgets its victims also loses the ability to understand where its problems began — and risks repeating them.

That is where he believes literature has a job to do: remember.

The 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature was devoted to poetry. From 223 entries, the field was reduced to 11 books and eventually three finalists: Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun?, James Ngwu Eze’s Unbind Me Now and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony.

For Ifowodo, it was also another encounter with a prize that had previously come close. A Good Mourning made the shortlist in 2017, while Augusta’s Poodle was previously longlisted.

This time, he crossed the line.

And the $100,000 that comes with the honour may carry a particularly personal meaning. Before the winner was announced, Ifowodo said that if he won, he wanted to establish a poetry prize at Federal Government College, Warri, where he wrote his first poem as a schoolboy in 1982.

There is a certain symmetry to that: a schoolboy discovers poetry, a poet spends decades writing about his country, and years later, one of the country’s biggest literary prizes gives him an opportunity to reach back towards where it began.

But perhaps the more important prize for Why Does God Need a Gun? is that its question will now travel further.

Because Ifowodo is not really asking whether God needs a gun.

He is asking why we keep putting one in His hands.

In an exclusive interview with LEADERSHIP, Ogaga Ifowodo goes deeper into the questions behind his award-winning collection — from Leah Sharibu and Nigeria’s forgotten victims to religious violence, national memory and what literature can do when a society becomes comfortable with tragedy.

Read the full exclusive interview in tomorrow’s edition of LEADERSHIP.