There is a point where prophecy begins to look suspiciously like betting.
Nigeria may be approaching that point.
A recent example has reignited the conversation. Apostle Joshua Selman was reported to have said that he saw a high-ranking Nigerian politician approaching death, with people gathering for the person's burial. But the politician was not named, no office was identified and no date or timeframe was supplied.
That creates an interesting problem.
If God specifically reveals that a particular politician will die on a particular date, why not identify the person?
If the revelation is genuinely intended as a warning, why not privately approach that person first?
And if the private approach fails, why not make the public declaration specific enough that Nigerians can actually determine whether the prophecy was accurate?
Instead, we increasingly get statements that sound like:
A politician will die.
A businessman will face trouble.
A prominent person will be disgraced.
Someone important will leave office.
Eventually, something will happen.
The question is whether that should be considered extraordinary prophecy or simply an extraordinarily broad prediction.
Welcome to the Dice Prophecy
Imagine a normal six-sided die.
It contains six possible numbers:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
You throw it.
One of those numbers must appear.
Now imagine six people each choose one number.
You throw the die.
One person will inevitably be correct.
That person can then say:
"I knew it. God revealed my number to me."
But the successful prediction does not automatically demonstrate supernatural knowledge.
The same principle applies when somebody predicts that a politician will die in Nigeria.
Nigeria has thousands of politicians.
People die every day.
Politicians eventually die.
So saying that some politician will die is not remotely equivalent to identifying a specific politician and correctly predicting the circumstances.
The larger the category, the easier the prediction becomes.
And that is why I call it the Dice Prophecy.
The Bet9ja problem
This is where the analogy becomes uncomfortable.
Betting companies offer multiple possible outcomes.
You choose one.
Something happens.
If you picked correctly, you celebrate.
But the bookmaker does not need supernatural knowledge.
Probability does the work.
A prophecy containing sufficiently broad possibilities can operate in a similar fashion.
Predict that something will happen to a politician, and you have thousands of potential candidates.
Predict something involving a businessman, and the pool becomes enormous.
Predict that someone prominent will die, and you are effectively betting against mortality itself.
That is not a particularly difficult prediction.
As one Nigerian Christian leader, Bishop Tunde Adegbite, was quoted by Punch in 2025 questioning this very style of prophecy: he asked whether there has ever been a year when a politician or rich person did not die.
That is the uncomfortable question.
Specificity is what separates a testable prophecy from a vague prediction
Suppose a prophet says:
"A high-ranking politician will die."
Who exactly?
Nigeria has governors, senators, ministers, legislators, former presidents, former governors, party leaders and countless other political figures.
When one eventually dies, the prophecy can be claimed as fulfilled.
But what about all the politicians who did not die?
There is no obvious falsification mechanism.
Now make the prediction specific:
"Senator X will die on 15 November 2026."
That can be tested.
It can be wrong.
And if the date passes, everybody knows what happened.
Specificity creates accountability.
Vagueness creates escape routes.
That is why the standard should not simply be:
"Did something vaguely resembling the prophecy eventually happen?"
It should be:
"What exactly was predicted, when was it predicted, and how precisely did reality correspond to it?"
What would God supposedly know that the prophet doesn't?
There is another problem with the increasingly broad prophetic format.
If the claim is that God revealed something extraordinary, then the revelation should contain information that the prophet could not reasonably derive from ordinary circumstances.
If I tell you that one of six numbers will appear when a die is thrown, I haven't demonstrated supernatural knowledge.
If I tell you 7 will appear on a six-sided die, and 7 actually appears, now we have something genuinely extraordinary.
That is the distinction.
A supernatural claim should not become less demanding simply because the subject matter is religious.
If someone claims divine revelation, the interesting part should be the information that ordinary human reasoning could not have supplied.
Otherwise, we risk turning God into a participant in a probability game.
But there is an important theological caveat
This argument does not prove that prophecy is impossible.
A Christian can reasonably believe that God can reveal future events.
The argument is narrower:
A vague prediction is not automatically evidence of divine revelation.
Those are two different propositions.
Someone can believe in prophecy while still demanding specificity, accountability and evidence from people who claim to be prophets.
In fact, the Christian tradition itself contains a strong emphasis on testing prophetic claims rather than accepting every spiritual declaration uncritically.
So the question isn't whether Nigerians should stop believing in God.
It is whether every person who says "God told me" should automatically be treated as having established that God actually told them.
Those are not the same thing.
Nigeria has already seen the consequences of prophecy without accountability
This isn't an entirely new phenomenon.
Nigeria has a long history of public political and social prophecies.
Some have been presented as warnings.
Some have failed.
Some have subsequently been reinterpreted.
Some old prophecies have even been recycled online and presented as new ones.
In June 2026, Premium Times and TheCable independently fact-checked a viral video attributed to Chris Oyakhilome and found that comments being circulated as a prophecy about the 2027 election actually came from the 2023 election period.
That episode demonstrates another problem:
The prophecy ecosystem has a memory problem.
People remember the hits.
They forget the misses.
Old predictions are repackaged.
Ambiguous statements acquire new meanings after events occur.
And social media can transform a five-year-old sermon into a "fresh prophecy" overnight.
So what should a serious prophet do?
If a prophet genuinely believes God has revealed that a particular person will die on a particular date, the responsible procedure should be obvious.
First:
Identify the person privately.
Tell them what you claim to have received.
Give them the alleged date or timeframe.
Allow them to make their own decisions.
If there is a legitimate reason to make the matter public, provide enough information for the public to evaluate the claim afterward.
That creates accountability.
Instead of:
"A prominent Nigerian politician will die."
Imagine:
"I believe I received a revelation concerning Senator X, concerning a specific period. I have privately informed the individual and will leave the matter there."
That is a completely different proposition.
It is specific.
It carries consequences for the person making the claim.
And it can eventually be evaluated.
Public prophecy also has consequences
This is particularly important when the subject is a politician.
An unnamed death prophecy does not remain unnamed for long.
Nigerians immediately begin guessing.
Is it the president?
A governor?
A senator?
A minister?
A former leader?
Social media starts manufacturing candidates.
Family members can become frightened.
Political supporters can become suspicious.
Opponents can weaponise the prediction.
A statement supposedly intended to "prepare a family" can instead generate national speculation.
That is why responsibility matters.
The person making the prophecy may know exactly who they mean.
The public does not.
So the public fills the vacuum.
And there is an incentive problem
There is also a commercial and reputational incentive surrounding prophecy.
A dramatic prophecy generates attention.
Attention generates followers.
Followers generate influence.
Influence can generate books, conferences, donations, media appearances and political access.
That does not mean every prophet is deliberately fabricating predictions.
It means incentives exist, and where incentives exist, claims deserve scrutiny.
We apply this principle everywhere else.
If a politician makes a claim, we ask for evidence.
If a scientist makes a claim, we ask for data.
If a businessman makes a claim, we ask for accounts.
If a betting company makes a prediction, we ask about its odds.
Perhaps people who claim direct messages from God should not be exempt from every standard of accountability.
The prophet should be willing to lose
This is the real test.
A genuine prediction should contain enough specificity that the person making it can be wrong.
If there is no possible outcome under which the prophet can be shown to have made a false prediction, then the prediction has very little evidentiary value.
"Someone will die."
Someone dies.
Prophecy fulfilled.
"Someone will face difficulties."
Someone has difficulties.
Prophecy fulfilled.
"A politician will experience political turbulence."
Politics becomes turbulent.
Prophecy fulfilled.
At some point we have to ask:
What prediction would actually count as a failure?
If the answer is "none," then we are not dealing with a testable claim.
Stop reducing God to a probability game
This is ultimately the heart of the argument.
If God exists and genuinely communicates supernatural knowledge to a prophet, then the claim should contain information that meaningfully distinguishes divine revelation from ordinary probability, inference and educated guessing.
Otherwise, the prophet is not demonstrating that they know something impossible.
They are simply selecting one of the many things that are already highly likely to happen.
Nigeria is a country of more than 200 million people.
People will become sick.
People will die.
Businesses will fail.
Politicians will lose power.
Politicians will change parties.
Lecturers will retire.
Banks will have problems.
Markets will rise and fall.
Relationships will collapse.
Somebody will always fit the prediction.
That is not necessarily prophecy.
Sometimes it is simply statistics wearing a clerical robe.
And Nigerians should be able to distinguish the two.
Because if six people each pick a number on a die, one of them will eventually shout:
"I told you!"
The interesting question is not who shouted.
The interesting question is whether they knew before the die was thrown.
If the prophecy is genuinely from God, give us something probability cannot easily manufacture.
Otherwise, Nigeria's prophets may soon be entering Bet9ja territory — where everybody remembers the winning ticket and nobody talks about the losing ones.
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