Who Owns the House of God?
The Building Fund
Who Decided, Who Gave, and Who Owns It — the Most Common Sacred Transaction in Nigeria, Examined as a Transaction
More Nigerians have given to a building fund than have ever bought a share, opened a pension, or signed an insurance policy.
Paul Magaji · 18 min
It is, by a considerable distance, the most widely subscribed financial undertaking in the country. It raises very large sums from very ordinary people, over long periods, without prospectus, contract, security, regulator or receipt. It builds real things — buildings that stand for generations and serve communities the state has not reached. And almost none of its terms have ever been written down.
This essay examines it as a transaction. Not because it is only a transaction — the giving means something, and the meaning is not this publication's business — but because the part that goes wrong is the transactional part, and that part is examinable.
A word on tone before beginning. Nothing here suggests that people who give to building funds are foolish, or that the giving is a mistake. Sacrificial giving toward a shared building is among the oldest and most defensible things human communities do. The object of criticism throughout is the structure that receives the money, never the person who gave it.
Act One
What Kind of Transaction Is It?
Start by ruling out what it is not, because most of the confusion comes from people privately assuming one of these.
It is not an investment. No return is promised in money and none is owed. It is not a loan; nothing is repayable. It is not a purchase; the giver acquires no share of the building, no right to use it beyond that of any other member, and nothing that can be sold or left to a child. And it is not a subscription creating membership rights, since — as an earlier essay in this sub-cluster set out — giving does not confer proprietary standing however large or sustained it has been.
What it is, in ordinary legal terms, is a gift made for a stated purpose. The giver parts with money absolutely. What they receive is not a thing but an assurance: that the money will be applied to the purpose for which it was sought.
Which locates the whole subject precisely. Since the giver gets no asset, the only thing capable of going wrong is the assurance — and the only protection available is a record of what the purpose was and what was done with the money. Everything that follows is about that record and its absence.
The giver takes nothing away but a promise. The institution's entire obligation is to make the promise checkable.
Act Two
Six Terms Nobody Writes
Every building fund has terms. In most cases they exist only as shared assumptions, and shared assumptions diverge quietly over the years in which a building is raised.
Term 1
The purpose
How specific it was, and therefore how far it may lawfully stretch.
An appeal is made for something: a church building, a mosque, a hall, a hospital wing, a roof. The narrower and more specific the stated purpose, the stronger the giver's assurance — and the tighter the institution's hands become if circumstances change.
Most appeals are, in practice, stated broadly and remembered narrowly. The announcement said the work of the house; the giver heard the new building; five years later the money has gone into a bus, a generator and a land purchase, all of them defensible, none of them the thing the giver had in mind.
The design point
An institution that states the purpose broadly keeps flexibility and loses trust. One that states it narrowly earns trust and must then honour it or return to the givers. Both are respectable choices. Making no choice is not.
Term 2
The timeline
When the thing was to be built, and what the silence after year three means.
Almost no appeal states a period. The building begins, progresses, slows, and enters the long condition familiar across this country: structurally complete, unusable, and no longer mentioned.
A stated horizon — even an honest one saying that this will take between five and eight years — protects the institution more than the giver. Without it, every year of slow progress is read as evidence of something, and the readings vary with the reader's disposition.
Term 3
The accounting
Whether anyone will ever be told what came in and where it went.
The building fund is the transaction that most demands separate accounting and least often receives it. It has a defined purpose, a defined period and a defined output, which makes it the easiest thing in a religious body's finances to account for cleanly — a fund with its own account, its own ledger and its own periodic statement.
Where it is instead received into general funds, three things become impossible at once: showing that the money was applied to the purpose, showing that it was not applied elsewhere, and answering the question that will eventually be asked by someone who is not hostile.
The test
Is there a separate account for this fund? If not, no statement issued about it can be verified, including a true one.
Term 4
The surplus
What happens if more is raised than the building costs.
Rarely anticipated and genuinely difficult. A fund that over-raises holds money given for a purpose that has been fulfilled, and the institution now has an unstated discretion it never asked for.
The clean answer is to say at the outset what a surplus will be used for — a stated related purpose, or a stated general application. Said in advance it is a term. Decided afterwards it is a discretion, and discretions exercised over other people's designated money are where trust is lost even when the decision is good.
Term 5
The failure case
What happens if the building is never built.
Nobody wants to raise this at the launch of an appeal, which is precisely why it should be raised there. Projects are abandoned for reasons nobody is at fault for: the land title fails, the community moves, the currency collapses, the leadership changes and the vision with it.
Where money was given for a specific purpose that has become impossible, the question of what may be done with it is a real legal question and not merely a moral one. The traditions have long-standing machinery for exactly this — the near-purpose doctrine in charitable trusts, substitution in the law of endowments, both examined in the previous essay — and both share a feature worth repeating: the redirection is not for the holder to decide alone.
Handled elsewhere
The escape mechanisms and why the holder should not carry the key are the subject of the essay on inalienable endowment.
Term 6
The ownership of the finished thing
Whose name goes on the title of the building everyone paid for.
This is where the sub-cluster's opening subject returns. A building fund produces a building, and a building sits on land, and land in this country is held by whoever the document names.
The failure sequence is depressingly common and entirely avoidable. Money is raised from thousands of people. A building goes up. The land beneath it stands in the name of a founder, an elder, or nobody at all, because the fund was about construction and nobody treated title as part of the project. Two decades later the givers' children discover that what their parents built belongs, on paper, to a family.
The rule
Title before foundation. A body that has not resolved the ownership of the land should not be receiving money to build on it.
Act Three
The Pledge, and the Household
One aspect of the building fund belongs to a different treasury altogether, and this sub-cluster would be incomplete without it.
The pledge made standing up, in front of a room of people who are also standing up, is a financial commitment created by a social mechanism. It is not enforceable and does not need to be. It is honoured because the person who made it will see the same people next week.
For most givers this is unremarkable and fine. They pledge what they intended, pay it over the year, and are glad. But the mechanism does not distinguish between the person who can afford it and the person who cannot, and the same social pressure that makes the pledge reliable makes it very hard to revise when a household's circumstances change — a job lost, an illness, a term's school fees now impossible.
Two things are worth saying plainly, and they are not in tension.
The first is that sacrificial giving is not a scandal and should not be described as one. People give beyond comfort toward things they believe in, and that is a settled feature of religious life across every tradition. A person who gave more than was easy and is glad they did has not been wronged and does not need rescuing.
The second is that an institution which creates a public commitment mechanism has taken on a duty to make revision private and unremarkable — a stated way for a person to reduce or withdraw a pledge without explaining themselves to anyone, mentioned when the pledges are taken rather than buried in a policy. Where no such route exists, the body has built a commitment device it cannot release, and the cost of that falls entirely on the households least able to bear it.
A commitment that is easy to make in public and impossible to revise in private is not a pledge. It is a trap nobody meant to set.
Act Four
Running a Building Fund Well
Step 1
Resolve the title first
Before the first naira, know who owns the land and get it into the body's name.
Step 2
State the purpose in writing, at the level of specificity you intend to be held to, and put it in the appeal itself rather than in someone's memory of the appeal
Step 3
Open a separate account and keep a separate ledger
This single step answers most of what will ever be asked.
Step 4
Report on a schedule, unprompted: received, spent, remaining, and what stage the work has reached. A short statement at a fixed interval, whether or not anything good has happened that quarter
Step 5
State the surplus rule and the failure rule at the outset
Both are uncomfortable at a launch and both are far worse afterwards.
Step 6
Give pledging a quiet exit
A named way to revise, requiring no explanation, announced at the same moment the pledges are taken.
Step 7
Record the decisions, not just the receipts
Who approved the contractor, on what basis, and who was in the room — because in ten years the question will be about the decision, not the amount.
The whole list costs a body almost nothing and buys it the only thing that matters in this transaction: the ability to answer. A building fund that can be accounted for is a building fund that can be run again in twenty years by people who were not there the first time, for a community that trusts them because the last one was.
The building outlasts everyone who paid for it. Whether their trust outlasts them depends on what was written down.
Where this leads
This essay completes the sub-cluster. Term Six returns to the essay on religious land, where the four positions were first set out; Term Five draws on the essay on inalienable endowment; Term Three is the accounting question raised in the essay on what members may lawfully ask, arriving here as a specific and unusually tractable case. The pledge in Act Three sits on the border between the sacred and private treasuries — a subject the interpretive limb of The Sacred Treasury takes up in its own terms.
A note on how this series is written
This publication does not adjudicate theology and takes no position on any body's practice of giving. Nothing here suggests that any person who has given to a building fund acted unwisely; the object of criticism throughout is the structure that received the money, never the person who gave it. No institution, leader or family is named unless the fact stated is drawn from a public court record, a public register, the institution's own published statement, or a matter of public record so notorious that omitting it would be evasive.