Nigerian Minister of Information Mohammed Idris reportedly declared on Thursday that the country’s advertising and marketing executives have a “crucial responsibility” to make Nigeria look good, particularly given recent global attention on the ongoing genocide of Christians in the Middle Belt region.
President Donald Trump added Nigeria to the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom on October 31, citing massacres and displacement of indigenous Christian communities in the center of the country by roving Fulani jihadist gangs. The government of President Bola Tinubu, experts agree, has taken minimal action to protect the nation’s Christians; Tinubu himself denied that any religious discrimination existed in the country at all following the designation.
Since Nigeria returned to the CPC list, reports in Nigerian newspapers have revealed the government threatening Christians with arrest if they report attacks by Islamic terrorists and opening fire on Christians on at least one occasion during a peaceful protest calling for government support.
Idris, attending the National Advertising Conference in the capital of Abuja on Thursday, called marketers and advertising firms “custodians of national perception and image.”
“You are not only storytellers for brands and businesses; you are also custodians of national perception and image. We need a communication renaissance, one that emphasises facts over fear, unity over division, and truth over propaganda,” the Nigerian Daily Trust quoted Idris as saying. “We are retooling our public information machinery to align with the realities of the digital age, where truth must travel faster than falsehood, and where the Nigerian story must be told by Nigerians themselves.”
Another Nigerian newspaper, Vanguard, reported that Idris described evidence of widespread persecution of Christians in the country as “false and damaging … misinformation.”
“Let me state clearly and emphatically that this narrative is false. It is a distortion of our reality as a nation of diverse peoples and faiths who have lived together peacefully for generations,” he claimed. “Yes, Nigeria has faced security challenges, especially from terrorists and violent extremists, but these are not targeted at any religion or ethnic group.”
In reality, both eyewitnesses on the ground and Christian persecution experts around the globe have documented targeted campaigns, particularly in the Middle Belt of the country, where mostly Fulani jihadist terrorists invade and destroy Christian villages to exterminate the local Christian populations and steal their land.
“The evidence of targeted violence against Christians in Nigeria is well documented,” Ryan Brown, the CEO of the Christian human rights organization Open Doors told Breitbart News in remarks published Monday. “In October, the Islamist group connected with ISIS sent a clear message about their intention to target Christians in Africa, declaring they must convert or die. Last year alone, 3,100 of the 4,476 Christians killed worldwide for their faith were in Nigeria. Nigeria also leads globally in Christians abducted for faith reasons.”
Open Doors estimates that Christians in Nigeria face an average of eight targeted acts of violence a day.
While Muslim advocacy groups have supported the Nigerian government’s false claims that Christian persecution does not exist in the country. Tinubu has faced some pushback even from his own party on denying jihadist terrorism.
“There are jihadists who just want to destroy Nigeria. We should blacklist them without pity so that they will be smoked out,” Nigerian Senator Orji Uzor Kalu of Tinubu’s All Progressives Party (APC) said on Tuesday. Kalu affirmed that Trump’s comments about the poor state of the Christian population of Nigeria was correct.
“If it’s a lie, then the answer is that it’s not a lie because he said the truth,” Kalu said, according to the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard, referring to Trump’s comments. “Nigerians are being killed, whether they are Christians or Muslims.”
Peter Obi, a former governor who lost the 2023 presidential election to Tinubu, also commented on the situation on Thursday, defending Trump’s sentiments toward the country as reflective of the disappointment that many Nigerians feel about their government.
“He singled out the killings in our land without compunction, but in truth, he was merely echoing what many Nigerians of good conscience have been saying for years,” Obi noted, “often at the risk of being accused of de-marketing their own country. The reality is stark: Nigeria is facing existential challenges that demand our sober reflection.”
“Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria. Thousands of Christians are being killed. Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter,” President Trump wrote in a message published to his website Truth Social on October 31, declaring that the United States stood “ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian population around the World!”
Tinubu responded to the declaration by claiming in a statement the next day that “the characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality.” Tinubu’s office also alleged that he and Trump would meet in person soon, either in the White House or in Abuja, but Trump’s administration has not made any public declarations regarding such a meeting.
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