Nine months ago, Rita Gendaga was preparing for her late father’s funeral when armed Fulani pastoralists stormed her hometown in Benue state, north central Nigeria, leaving a trail of death and destruction. Terrified, Gendaga fled 40 kilometres away to Makurdi, the state capital, leaving only a few brave uncles behind to organize a hasty burial. ‘To date I haven’t seen my dad’s grave,’ she tells New Internationalist.
Such deadly raids on Christian farming communities, by armed Fulani militants, have become commonplace in Nigeria’s middle belt. Since 2019 clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farming communities have killed hundreds of people and forced 2.2 million to flee their homes.
The blood curdling violence is one reason, aside the equally devastating jihadist insurgency raging in the North East, why US president Donald Trump raised alarm last month about an ‘existential crisis’ facing Christianity in Nigeria.
In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, Trump accused Nigeria’s government of turning a blind eye to the ‘mass slaughter’ of Christians by ‘Radical Islamists’. The US State Department quickly declared Nigeria a ‘Country of Particular Concern’– a label Washington gives to countries engaging in ‘severe violations of religious freedom.’ This was followed by Trump threatening to stop all assistance to Nigeria and to deploy US troops to the country. Despite Trump freezing all US humanitarian aid to recipient countries at the beginning of 2025, Washington and Abuja have continued to co-operate on counter-terrorism issues. In August the US Defence Security Cooperation Agency approved a $346 million arms sale to aid Nigeria’s fight against Islamist terrorists and trafficking in the Gulf of Guinea.
Political vacuum
Trump’s rhetoric of Christian persecution did not fall from the sky. Rather, it has emerged from the vacuum created by Nigeria’s governance gaps, institutional inefficiencies and failures of the country’s army and police that have allowed the violence to continue unchecked.
It is also the result of months of co-ordinated campaigning by US evangelicals like Senator Ted Cruz and pro-Israel lobbyists like Congressman Riley Moore to spin a tale that Islamists are carrying out a Christian genocide in Nigeria. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he would restrict visas for Nigerians as a result. But it’s not just politicians – in September, comedian and television host Bill Maher also claimed that about 100,000 Christians had been killed by jihadists in Nigeria since 2009, citing figures from a misleading report by Nigeria-based civic group, InterSociety. A BBC investigation found that the group was unable to provide itemized data or verifiable sources, suggesting a lack of transparency in its methodology.
Still, many Nigerians have welcomed the global spotlight that Trump has shone on the raging insecurity plaguing the country, and particularly the failure of President Tinubu’s government to stamp it out. In a recent press briefing, the youth wing of the umbrella body for Christians in the country applauded Trump’s comments while urging Nigeria’s government to see them as a wake-up call.
Last year, Christian media outlets and religious freedom groups in the US slammed former president Joe Biden’s administration for not doing enough to protect Christians in the country.
Culture war import?
But not everyone agrees with Trump’s religious characterization of the conflict or his threat of US military intervention. Wale Aderafasin, a senior pastor at Guiding Light Assembly, disputes Washington’s claim of a religious genocide though he admits that Christians are being killed. ‘It’s wrong, yes, but it’s not genocide. The way the West talks about it, you’d think a Christian can’t step outside without being killed,’ he said. Last month, hundreds of people took to the streets in the Muslim-majority Kano state brandishing placards reading ‘There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria,’ and ‘America wants to control our resources’.
‘Trump’s threat is troubling not only because it risks violating Nigeria’s sovereignty, but because it imports American culture wars into an already fragile landscape,’ said Stephen Adewale, a history professor at the Obafemi Awolowo University. He adds that Washington’s narrative presents ‘one group as the singular victims and another as the implied aggressor’.
Nigeria is home to 230 million people almost evenly divided between Islam and Christianity. The landscape cuts across vast geopolitical expanse and a complex tapestry of nationalities and religions. Data from the US thinktank Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) shows that the 52,915 civilians killed in targeted political assassinations across Nigeria since 2009 are people of all faiths.
It is only in the Middle Belt where the Muslim-majority North meets the predominantly Christian South that Christians bear a disproportionate casualty burden. Here, the predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen and the predominantly Christian farmers engage in regular bloody clashes. According to findings from the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, of the 36,056 civilian killings across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, a staggering 47 per cent were directly linked to the Fulani militias. The breakdown of the data shows that ‘three Christians were killed for every Muslim with proportional losses to Christian communities reaching exceptional levels. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to their population size.’
Mutual suspicion
But even in these more dangerous areas, religion is not the primary motivation. Rather, it is the historical grievances over competition for land and water resources between pastoralists and crop farmers, that are worsening with the effects of climate change. The conflict also stems from the failure of Nigeria’s capitalist ruling elite to modernize agriculture; 65 years after independence from British colonial rule, not only are hoes and cutlasses still the primary tools for crop farming, but cattle often roam free for fodder and water.
As farmland pushes deeper into areas that were once seasonal grazing corridors, herders are forced to search for pasture near settled farming communities, whose crops can be destroyed by a single herd in minutes. Farmers respond with community-led vigilante groups who often attack pastoralists and their cattle. Herders arm themselves as means of self-defence.
‘In this climate of mutual suspicion, a single incident of crop destruction or cattle theft can escalate into reprisal attacks often amplified by ethnic and religious narratives that mask the underlying economic problem: two outdated agricultural systems fighting over shrinking space,’ Adewale added.
At the peak of the violence in 2019, the federal government launched a livestock reform plan to modernize the livestock sectors by adopting cattle ranching and enforcing anti-grazing laws. Years later, there is no sign of progress. Those close to the project claim it has floundered, like many government initiatives, due to numerous challenges including funding shortages and a lack of political will.
A crisis of governance
Dispelling this false narrative around the killing of Christians is not the same as denying the reality of the horrific violence. Indeed, more than 10,000 people have been killed and hundreds kidnapped since May 2023 when Tinubu came to power. Around three million people remain displaced. The violence is real, but so must be the solution.
Experts argue that resolving the crisis requires neither foreign military intervention nor a homegrown strategy of emergency security measures. Instead, a holistic suite of actions aimed at stamping out the drivers of the conflict and moving towards structural transformation of the country is what’s needed most.
‘Nigeria’s insecurity is, at its core, a crisis of governance,’ says Adewale. ‘The state struggles to control territory, the justice system is slow and mistrusted, young people lack economic opportunities, and the political elites treat security as a theatre of patronage rather than public good.’
According to the World Bank, at least 139 million, or 62 per cent of Nigerians live below the poverty line with the vast majority of those living in the country’s rural areas. This dreary socio-economic climate helps jihadists, militants and criminal groups recruit and thrive.
‘What the country needs is not the spectacle of American troops but the rebuilding of a capable, accountable state that protects all its citizens equally,’ says Adewale. He urges the US to engage Nigeria on ‘policing reform, justice-sector strengthening, arms-flow monitoring and economic investment in the neglected rural belts where violence takes root’.
Only then perhaps, can people like Gendaga finally return to their homes.
‘I would like to visit sometimes but I am afraid,’ she says.
Obiora Ikoku is a freelance journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria.
This article was originally published in The New Internationalist.
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