Over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of narratives about the alleged genocide against Christians that is said to be on-going in Nigeria. The current wave of the narrative is essentially from the United States, generated recently by the comedian, Bill Maher and CNN’s Van Jones who have both accused Nigeria of indulging in “Christian genocide.” In addition, Senator Ted Cruz, amongst other American legislators has accused Nigeria of the same and said that he was introducing a Bill in the Senate to do “something about it” and “protect Christians in Nigeria.”
The Canadian Parliament has also described Nigeria as one of the most dangerous places in the world for Christians to live and that Christians are targeted and slaughtered all over the country on a daily basis. I am a Christian and of course I know that it is true that Christians are being killed all the time in Nigeria. It is also true that Muslims are being killed all the time in Nigeria and the complete truth is that Nigeria has tens of thousands of terrorists, bandits, insurrectionists and criminals that are killing Nigerians all the time.
Certain evangelical groups have however decided to see only the killing of Christians based on a conspiracy theory of a plan to wipe out the country’s Christian community. Part of the problem is that these narratives have been circulating for decades without systematic response from the Nigerian government. I first encountered the narrative in the US Congress in 2017. Some of us, including Cardinal Onaiyekan, Dr Usman Bugaje, Prof Chris Kwaja etc were attending a conference at the United States Institute for Peace on peacebuilding in Nigeria when we were informed that there was a congressional committee hearing on the massacre of Christians in Nigeria and we decided to attend.
An American missionary who had visited Benue State made the presentation of organised and systematic massacre of Christians in Benue State and called for sanctions against Nigeria. No one countered the narrative and we were not registered to speak. We raised the matter with diplomats of the Nigerian Embassy attending the conference pointing out that the Embassy was not there to speak for and defend Nigeria. Their response was that such hearings were routine and take place all the time. In my own civil society career, I have over the years received many visits from commissioners of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom coming to investigate crimes against Christians in Nigeria.
I have always argued that terrorists in Nigeria are equal opportunity offenders and act against everybody outside their group. What I got from these conversations is that they come to investigate because they have a large number of petitions listing crimes against Christians and there are virtually no responses countering them. As there are no alternative arguments they believe what they have. Many of the American legislators leading the campaign about “Christian genocide” in Nigeria are currently actively engaged in the real campaign of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and they find it convenient to distract attention from that real genocide to focus on Christians in Nigeria. What is important to realise however is that these narratives are deep and are very much part of the divisive foreign policy agenda of the West.In 2020, I attended a workshop at Wilton Part in Sussex on the theme of fostering social cohesion in Nigeria. It was organized by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The workshop title was framed rather diplomatically as the focus of discussions was the Bishop of Truro’s 2019 independent review into the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s work to support persecuted Christians in Nigeria and globally. The assumption was that Nigeria’s multiple and complex security challenges including Islamist violence in the North East, worsening violent criminality and insecurity in the North West and ethno-religious violence, and farmer-herder conflict across large parts of central Nigeria are all directed at targeting Christians for persecution.
The Bishop’s report says there was widespread evidence showing that Christianity constitutes by far the most widely persecuted religion in the world. They cite the Pew Research Center report that in 2016 Christians were targeted in 144 countries, a rise from 125 in 2015. The Bishop affirmed that the most serious threat to Christian communities came from the militant Islamist group Boko Haram in Nigeria, where direct targeting of Christian believers on a comprehensive scale set out to “eliminate Christianity and pave the way for the total Islamisation of the country”. They cite an investigation that claimed that in 2018 far more Christians in Nigeria were killed in violence in which religious faith was a critical factor than anywhere else in the world; Nigeria accounted for 3,731 of the 4,136 fatalities: 90 percent of the total.
The other area of focus of the report was what they call the new and growing threat to mainly Christian farming communities had emerged from nomadic Fulani herdsmen. The Fulani, says the report, carry out attacks against Christian communities especially in Nigeria’s ‘Middle Belt’, the border territory between the Hausa-speaking Muslim areas in northern Nigeria and land further south mainly populated by Christians. The report also showed mostly retaliatory attacks against Fulani by “predominantly” Christian farmers, such as the November 2016 killing of about 50 mainly Fulani pastoralists by ethnic Bachama local residents in Numan district, Adamawa state. The causes of this inter-communal conflict are complex and “attributed to many factors”. That said whilst the conflict cannot simply be seen in terms of religion, it is equally simplistic not to see the religious dimension as a significantly exacerbating factor, and the Fulani attacks have repeatedly demonstrated a clear intent to target Christians and potent symbols of Christian identity.
The general view of the workshop participants, in my understanding, was that the Bishop of Truro, by his terms of reference, worked from the answer to the question and therefore found what he was asked to look for. Many participants pointed out that there is indeed evidence of targeting of Christians in Nigeria’s growing culture of violence but also evidence of the targeting of Muslims by the same forces. It is therefore important to have some comparative perspective and balance in assessing the situation. In addition, the multiple conflicts and rapid growth of criminal gangs targeting all sectors of society and community should guide us into developing a more complex evaluation of what is going on.
The workshop was attended by major faith leaders in the country, inter-faith advocacy groups, academics and human rights campaigners. There was a lot of useful discussion on expanding the domain of inter-faith dialogue between Muslim and Christian groups to address the continuous flow of inter-faith conflicts and misunderstanding that emerge on a daily basis. Each religious group was also encouraged to counter conflict entrepreneurs from within that are more interested in generating and exacerbating rather than ending the conflicts. Some of the faith leaders complained bitterly that politicians and governments will cause conflict and then call on religious leaders to pray and resolve the conflicts. the positive spirit that developed was that we must work together if we are to build peace. The problem has been that over the years in which these narratives have spread, the Nigerian government has not invested in countering the false narratives and framing a response that would work for all Nigerians, Christians and Muslims.
The real harm to Nigeria is caused by the growing sense of injustice in the country, from virtually all quarters. When people believe that they are victims of injustice, it’s difficult for them to embrace peace. There can be little progress in peace building unless State actors take up the issue of addressing concerns on the massive injustice in the country. The objective must be for all stakeholders to continue to discuss the challenges of inter-communal violence in Nigeria and examine how collectively government, civil society, faith-based and community organisations and others can work together to build solutions. Nigeria is in a dangerous phase in its development where each community now believes that the State is not ready to address its problems and that it has to procure arms to engage in self-help.
Clearly, the massive growth of poverty in Nigeria over the past decade makes peace building a very difficult enterprise. The youth bulge and unemployment for both the educated and uneducated young person’s makes interlocutors for peace scarce. These are all elements about building a more inclusive State and society that we have to take on board. The challenge here is the dominance of a self-serving political class whose only objective appears to be the primitive accumulation of capital and self-aggrandisement.
