EDITORIAL: Countering the false, misleading “Christian genocide” narrative

The US Congress is being pressured by some human rights watchers and Christian faith leaders to designate Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) by the Trump administration due to an alleged genocide being committed against Christians in the country. This “Christian genocide” narrative is false, divisive and misleading. It should not be allowed to prevail, as it has baleful diplomatic repercussions.

Countries with the CPC tag are those in which their authorities orchestrate severe violations of citizens’ religious freedom or deny them other personal liberties. But no such authoritarian indulgence exists in Nigeria, to warrant a pariah tar. The official picture is as President Bola Tinubu declared, “No faith is under siege.”

Nevertheless, driving this genocidal account in the US are Mike Arnold, with his “fact-finding report”; comedian Bill Maher; CNN’s Van Jones; Representative Riley Moore; Ted Cruz; and 30 Christian leaders. Mr Cruz, a senator from Texas, had in September put before the US Senate a bill – “Nigeria’s Religious Freedom Accountability 2025, Act” – for consideration and passage. Its goal is to hold public officials who facilitate Islamist Jihadists’ violence and blasphemy laws accountable.

In Mr Moore’s perspective, “Christians are being persecuted and killed for professing their faith in our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” As such, on 5 October, he wrote to the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, requesting that action be taken on the basis of this claim. Thereafter, on 15 October a petition signed by 30 Christian leaders was presented to the House of Representatives for legislative action, towards the realisation of the CPC-designation agenda.

The claim of 20,000 churches being destroyed since 2009, and 7,000 Christians killed so far under the President Bola Tinubu regime, is being bandied about by this coalition of anti-genocide Americans for Nigerian Christians, without evidence and without putting these within their proper contexts.

Mr Trump, who had blacklisted Nigeria among the CPC horde in November 2020, during his first term in office, seems well disposed to restore the country to that status, after President Joe Biden’s administration had delisted it in 2021. Mr Trump’s strong message of the intolerance of the repression of Christians anywhere in the world since January this year, speaks volumes. His Special Adviser on Arab/African Affairs, Mossad Boulus’ recent visit to President Tinubu, left no one in doubt of his intentions.

However, that mission must have turned out to be a disappointment for him, with Mr Boulus’ dismissal of the christian genocide conspiracy theory after meeting with Mr Tinubu. In fact, he declared, though arguably, that more Muslims have been killed than Christians in these mass murders. This is not to say that Christians are not being killed in Nigeria. They are. The reality, however, is that Muslims are also being killed in large numbers. In August, for example, bandits invaded a mosque in Katsina and killed 13 worshippers. In Zamfara, Sokoto and other states in the North-west, this pattern of carnage is routine.

Obviously, Nigeria got enmeshed in this genocide perception under the Muhammadu Buhari regime, when Mr Trump blacklisted the country for its incredible aloofness to the egregious killings by AK-47-bearing Fulani herders, whose rampages barely attracted serious official sanctions. While they strutted across every nook and cranny of the country, the Benue and Plateau communities, which are predominantly Christian, were particularly under their vice-like grip.

These impunities, which helped in framing the genocide narrative, sit within the broader framework of the criminal activities of non-state actors such as Boko Haram, ISWAP, kidnappers, bandits, killer-herders, separatist agitators, and other regional militant groups. Their victims cut across all ethnic and sectarian lines in the country. Moreover, women and children were not spared from their wide-ranging violence either.

As heavily secured as the US society is, countless times gunmen have invaded churches and killed worshippers. The Michigan church attack of 28 September, the Nashville, Tennessee, incident of 27 March 2023 that left seven dead, and the Fort Worth, Texas, massacre of eight persons on 15 September 1999 are pointers in this regard. But the only difference is that there, the law deals decisively with evil-doers.

Here, there are unhidden truths. Nigerian authorities cannot wash their hands clean of the roasting alive of Deborah Samuel, a female student of Shehu Shagari Sokoto College of Education, by her fellow students on campus in 2022. She was pulled out from a security post where she had taken refuge, which was manned by police/soldiers, and lynched. Her sin was the attribution of her success in an examination to Jesus, in a class WhatsApp group. Her killers were let off the hook after their arrests.

Old habits, it is said, die hard. The killings in the Middle-Belt region have not stopped, as evident in recent mass burials. While the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Daniel Okoh, an Archbishop, validates the view that there is targeted killing of Christians, he conceded that the “repeated, organised and brutal attacks” were not isolated cases, but a “continuing pattern of violence that has persisted for years without justice and closure.”

It bears repeating that these atrocities are nevertheless not fundamentally borne of the religious motive. The Governor of Plateau State, Caleb Muftwang, offered insight in April on how 64 communities in his domain had been taken over and even renamed by bandits. Essentially, there are different manifestations of unchecked grand-scale banditism messing up the lives of millions of Nigerians in many regions of the country. Unlike Mr Buhari, Mr Tinubu showed anger and leadership when 200 people were killed in the Yelwata community in Benue State in June. During his visit there, he publicly rebuked the Inspector-General of Police, Kayode Egbetokun, demanding, “How come no arrests have been made?”

Matthew Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto diocese, a respected figure in clerical and human rights circles, has weighed in on the side of caution, drawing attention to the highly nuanced and complex reality across many regions of the country, which shows that a christian genocide narrative as not a proper fit. However, he does not gloss over the reality of recurrent killer-herder rampages in the Middle-Belt, for which Christian communities continue to suffer significant casualties.

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Even at that, he pointed at the untenability of a single narrative in the region, in some recent remarks he delivered: “I live in Sokoto, right in the womb of Islam. If we were dealing with the outright persecution of Christians on the grounds of identity, both myself and my small flock would not exist.”

However, inherent in the so-called Christian genocide narrative is a wake-up call to the Nigerian State to effectively protect lives and property. Decisive responses are imperative when such dastardly acts occur. Without disclosing the identities of conflict entrepreneurs and those who fund terror, more international blackmail, such as the genocide narrative, cannot be ruled out.

Our view is that devolving policing in the country now would help in the response to the barbaric reality that human lives are no longer sacred, which invites all manners of identity-based interpretations. Otherwise, prominent swathes of the national territory would continue to be landscapes of blood spillage by non-state actors, which impacts masses of innocent people, irrespective of the faiths they profess.