Nigeria’s Premium Times newspaper reported on Thursday, in the context of the federal government claiming to release over 500 hostages from “bandit” captivity, that the government has threatened locals plagued by jihadist violence with arrest if they speak publicly on the slaughter.
The witnesses cited by the newspaper did not speak on the record but were identified as a “community leader” and “youth leader” in central Kaduna state. Nigeria is currently facing two Islamist insurgencies: the Boko Haram/Islamic State violence largely centered in northeastern Borno state, and the systematic extermination of Christian communities in the “Middle Belt” of states spanning the center of the country and defining the border between the majority-Muslim north and majority-Christian south. The Middle Belt genocide campaign is largely taking place at the hands of groups of Fulani jihadists, sometimes identified as “herdsmen,” who target entire Christian communities for abductions, arson, murder, and displacement.
International Christian aid groups have identified Nigeria for years as the deadliest place in the world to be a Christian. The nation is rare on the list of countries facing jihadist persecution, as its Christian and Muslim populations are almost equal: about 53 percent of the nation identifies as Muslim, while about 45 percent identify as Christian.
In recognition of the ongoing genocide, President Donald Trump announced on Friday that he would designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom, which signals Congress to sanction or otherwise engaging in actions to mitigate the persecution. Lawmakers have proposed introducing sanctions targeting Fulani lobbying groups and others who enable the violence.
The Nigerian government, under President Bola Tinubu, has adamantly denied the genocide, claiming that the persecution of Christians is a general “instability” that harms Muslims and Christians alike. Tinubu and his administration have accused Washington of spreading “misinformation,” and its armed forces held an emergency meeting after Trump suggested the U.S. could take kinetic action to protect Christians in the country.
The nation’s top news outlets typically report attacks on Christian communities by jihadists as “bandit” or “unknown gunmen” attacks, to the extent that news of the slaughters comes to light at all. Reporting on local reports from Kaduna, a central Nigerian state, the Premium Times quoted anonymous locals stating that the government actively discourages reporting on jihadist attacks.
“The village people are afraid to report publicly,” one such local “leader” said anonymously. “The government has warned everyone to keep such information confidential.”
“Many of these attacks are underreported,” another unidentified “youth leader” in Kaduna told the newspaper, adding that the government “is threatening us with arrests if we dare speak out.”
This report is consistent with the testimony that Father Remigius Ihyula of central Benue state gave to Breitbart News in 2023.
“People were even warned not to say they are Fulani herdsmen who have been causing these atrocities such that when you open the general media they are talking about bandits — bandits or they say ‘unknown gunmen’ or things like that,” Father Ihyula, a Catholic priest, told Breitbart News at the time. “So you read about bandits. It’s rubbish: They are Fulani men going about with cattle and with guns and killing people and the government won’t do anything about it.”
“There is an orchestrated design to push especially Christian populations away from these places so that they can occupy those territories,” he explained at the time, noting that the government enables this genocidal behavior by allowing the imposition of sharia, or the Islamic law, on Christians.
“Imagine that, in a country where we are supposed to have a secular constitution, some parts of our constitution is Sharia,” he noted. “Just imagine that in the United States… there should be elements of the Sharia like someone can marry four wives or somebody’s hand should be cut if they steal something.”
Abuja has insisted since President Trump returned Nigeria to the CPC list — which Trump had placed it on initially in 2020, before former President Joe Biden controversially removed it — that “misinformation” is behind the designation. Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris declared on Thursday that mysterious “foreign lobbyists” were lying to the Trump administration.
“The Nigerian government has been able to see a correlation between some of the lobbyists operating, especially in the U.S., and the activities here,” Idris said, according to the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard. “We have seen that some of the influencers of these criminal activities have a direct relationship with lobbyists in the U.S., who have a direct relationship with some of these people who are shouting about this issue outside this country.”
“Nigeria faces long-standing security challenges that have impacted Christians and Muslims alike,” he insisted. “Any narrative suggesting that the Nigerian state is failing to take action against religious attacks is based on misinformation or faulty data.”
Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar held a meeting with foreign diplomats on Wednesday to press the government’s position, which is that the unchallenged genocide of Christians in the heart of the country was a conglomeration of “multifaceted security challenges.”
“Recent external claims suggesting systemic religious persecution in Nigeria are unfounded,” Tuggar claimed. “The recent designation of Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) based on speculations on religious persecution is fundamentally misinformed. It misrepresents Nigeria’s secular constitutional order and its record in protecting religious freedom.”
In reality, human rights organizations regularly document thousands of killings of Christians by jihadis on an annual basis, despite evidence the government attempts to suppress this information.
“Sadly, Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs,” the aid organization Global Christian Relief notes in its profile of the country. “In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000 — often more than in the rest of the world combined.”
“With more than 50,000 Christians killed, Central Nigeria has seen an increase in attacks, spreading beyond the northern regions. The Christian community faces relentless violence from extremist groups that target them for their faith,” the profile adds.
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