The violence of ‘empty threats’
Trump’s rhetoric on Nigeria puts a bullseye on the backs of Christians.
Last November, Trump declared Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, a designation reserved for nations where religious persecution happens. This gave the president power to impose sanctions on Nigerian officials. But Trump didn’t stop there. On social media, he threatened to stop aid and to “go into that now-disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
In the weeks following Trump’s threat, armed groups attacked a school in a Muslim town, a Catholic school and a church. In one attack, 303 schoolchildren and 12 teachers were abducted. 100 students have since been returned home. Amnesty International reported last month that 20,468 schools across seven Nigerian states closed indefinitely in response to the recent kidnappings.
Christian Courier asked Sa’eed Husaini, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria, whether he sees a correlation between Trump’s threats and an increase in attacks. “There certainly has been an uptick since Trump’s announcement,” he agreed. “I don’t think it’s going too far to say it’s sort of put a bullseye on the backs of Christians who live not too far from those areas where conflict is most intense.”
Recruitment into armed groups is on an upswing, on TikTok, of all places. “One really strange and annoying and worrisome element about this militancy, especially in northwest Nigeria, is that a lot of the bandit groups are on TikTok. They have Starlink, and they can post stuff online. I mean, it’s just the surreal direction that things are going around the world,” added Husaini.
Religiously motivated?
Although there is some truth to the latest headlines in Western media about violence in Nigeria, they are also misleading. “It’s worth pointing out that there are multiple armed groups operating in the country and very few of them seem concerned with the religious affiliation of the people they attack,” Husaini said. Boko Haram, Nigeria’s most infamous militant group, is just one group among many. And Boko Haram itself has splintered into groups who step away from jihadist ideals to appeal to a broader base.
A 2022 study by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project analyzed two years of attacks on civilians in Nigeria and found that only five percent were related to religious issues.
“Insecurity in Nigeria has always increased with economic hardship,” Sarah Aderemi said.
Aderemi and her husband Dami have been Resonate missionaries in Lagos, Nigeria, since 2017. She explained: “In the last few years, the economic situation of the country has really hit people hard, particularly in more rural areas. Kidnapping and banditry has become a lucrative way to make quick money.”
Rural and hungry
Trying to get a sense of the scope of the crisis, I asked Husaini how many Nigerians live with the threat of armed groups.
About a fifth to a third of the population lives in northwest Nigeria, Husaini said, where bandit groups operate. These are populated areas but sparsely settled.
In these regions, “bandit groups” engage in conflict with civilians and each other over scarce resources like water or land. These groups will do what they need to, to survive – cattle rustling, illegal gold mining, drug and gun smuggling and, most lucratively, kidnapping.
The northeast, by contrast, has fewer bandit groups. That’s where Boko Haram operates: “After a decade of fighting this war against Boko Haram, Boko Haram itself has kind of monopolized non-state militancy. Whereas in the northwest, it’s a bit more of a free-for-all.”
The one thing that all armed groups have in common is that the conflict is primarily rural. There aren’t even voting units in a lot of these communities, Husaini said. “If they deny you even that, you’re basically a forgotten people.”
With armed groups destabilizing rural populations, the United Nations Food Programme has estimated that 35 million Nigerians could go hungry this year.
The cost of rhetoric
Weeks after his first threat, Trump posted that Nigeria’s government had “done nothing” and “what’s happening in Nigeria is a disgrace.” Husaini doesn’t believe the Nigerian government is to blame, other than for their passivity. “They seem to be following, as a matter of fact, the U.S.’s kind of approach to countering violent extremism, which has often involved militarized responses” without addressing the root causes.
Husaini doesn’t think Trump’s rhetoric will translate into an invasion – the conflicts are far too scattered, the groups too fractured and small. Still, there is a cost: “the divide between rhetoric and actual policies just seems to have grown.”
Husaini has seen some Nigerians on social media say they’d welcome America. “It’s increased distrust between groups, you know, because there are some people on the Christian side who, understandably, were quite pleased that the issue of violence against Christians had been raised.”
I spoke to Resonate missionary Sarah Aderemi three weeks after Trump’s initial threat. She lives in Lagos, southwestern Nigeria, far away from the conflict. Aderemi sees the increasing distrust Husaini mentioned playing out in classist ways – southern Nigeria is primarily Christian and wealthier than northern, Muslim Nigeria. Northerners hired in Lagos as guards or workers are getting the brunt of newly aroused suspicions.
“It’s been interesting to see people’s reactions here,” said Aderemi. “When Western media is making this big deal about it, everybody’s talking about it. Social media, WhatsApp statuses, people sharing people’s stories and you honestly just don’t know what’s real and what’s not.”
Aderemi lamented that the church has fueled the divisiveness: “As a Christian, if you actually had a close Muslim friend, you would be more sensitive to how you speak about the growing insecurities. Muslims, too, want peace.”
Nigeria is many things to
many people
Throughout the African continent and the world, Nigeria is celebrated as the centre of Nollywood cinema, site of lavish music videos, internationally-acclaimed literature and a cuisine to rival any other West African country. Nigeria is estimated to have a population of around 200 million people and is projected to be the world’s third most populous country by 2050. This population is divided almost equally between Muslims and Christians.
“Nigeria is a nation with a rich and diverse population representing numerous cultural perspectives. As expected, interfaith relationships between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria are also diverse,” David Tyokighir, World Renew’s former Country Director of Nigeria, told Christian Courier.
(Photo credit: Burmesedays & SelfieCity | Wikimedia Commons).
Interfaith work
Husaini noted that reconciliation efforts are happening on the citizen-to-citizen level. “But at the scale of the nation, which is what would be required if you wanted to do a North-South kind of reconciliation, that certainly has not happened.”
David Tyokighir, World Renew’s former Country Director for Nigeria, told CC that the violence hinders “grassroots community interfaith efforts.” “Some religious leaders and development agencies have been working together to de-escalate tensions and promote mutual understanding and tolerance between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. But these efforts are often overwhelmed with widespread and high-level violence and skirmishes.”
Aderemi knows of localized reconciliation efforts in conflict zones, including work by World Renew. Personally, she says, “the growing religious tensions have prompted me to be more intentional in building relationships with Muslim neighbours.” But on a national level, Christian institutions are jumping on the religious persecution narrative. She wishes there were stronger relationships and dialogue being built between national Muslim leaders and Christian leaders.
Argak Kwashi.
Anglican archbishop Dr. Benjamin Argak Kwashi, who lives in Jos, northern Nigeria, and has personally faced persecution, came to speak at Aderemi’s church in Lagos once. He has “an incredible story” of bringing children orphaned by conflict into his home. Hearing him speak gave Aderemi’s church a personal connection, “humanizing the conflicts and break[ing] down some of those barriers to living together in harmony and peace. I think there needs to be more of that.”
“Pray for Nigerian Christians placed in leadership positions or in active politics to be Christ’s representatives in being part of the solution to the insecurity situation and bad governance,” Tyokighir said. “This is not the time to play with words.”
Colonial legacy
Aderemi pointed out that Nigeria hasn’t had a real chance at unity in the 65 years since independence: “A lot of the tension that comes from Nigeria has been rooted in what the colonial powers did, how they demarcated and divided the country up in independence. The goal after independence was to try and unify everybody. And that just didn’t happen.”
“In Nigeria today, ethnicity, religion, and language – not nationality – remain the benchmarks of identity for the country’s highly diverse population,” said Oge Onubogu, Director and Senior Fellow of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a U.S. congressional testimony on November 20.
Northern and Southern Nigeria were under separate colonial administrations, and seeds of distrust were sown between them.
But also, Husaini said, Nigerians essentially have “a two-tier citizenship of sorts,” where they are Nigerian citizens but belong to the local government they’re “supposed to have originated from.” This means that access to services, rights to land, “the rights of settlers versus the indigenous” comes down to the colonial interpretation of who was indigenous and who was not.
This was set up by colonial administrators who assumed African tribes “kind of sprout from the ground in particular places” and it has caused “huge repercussions for land use and dispute.” “This is an element,” Husaini said, “that also can sometimes be written out of the narrative when we discuss conflict in Nigeria.”
‘Genocidal Fulani’
In early December, Trump sent lawmakers led by Congressman Riley Moore to Nigeria to tour IDP camps. “These Christians should be able to live in their ancestral homeland without fear of genocidal Fulani,” Moore wrote, after his visit. Next to Boko Haram, we most often hear about Fulani herdsmen in Western media.
But “Fulani” is a misleading phrase, Sa’eed said: “it’s based on the presumption that the ethnicity of the attackers has been identified and that it’s even relevant.”
Husaini prefaced this with the explanation that Nigerian media and Nigerian NGOs are primarily based in the south, and therefore a lot of what is published as “the truth of what’s happening in Nigeria” has a “slight southern tilt.” “It’s also a consequence of the fact that the North is much poorer and much less Western-oriented historically, and partially because of colonial legacy.”
“It’s true that historically . . . the Southern distrust was often framed in terms of distrust for a kind of Fulani ruling class or sort of Fulani project or agenda,” said Husaini. But if you go back in history, pre-colonization, the Sokoto Caliphate was expanding under Fulani leadership and encroaching on the South. “It actually was a multi-ethnic government, multi-linguistic empire, actually, but it gets remembered as a Fulani empire. So, that sort of deep history continues to skew the way we talk about conflict.”
I appreciate the interviews and research that went into this article. I wonder what schools (including Christian and Catholic schools) teach about Nigeria and other African countries. I wonder if they encourage students to get what used to be called pen pals. In B.C., some Christian schools have a partner/friendship relationship with groups in Sierra Leone.
In the 1970s or thereabouts, the CRC (then through World Missions) worked in Jos and had an Institute for Church and Society, which stressed social justice principles. What happened to it? (I sort of know the answer.) I found this https://socialtheology.com/docs/boer-article-050081-2.pdf to be helpful in seeing what this Institute was doing.
A missionary named Bill Evenhouse worked in music ministry to try to bring Muslim and Christian Nigerians together. When he was laid off/fired, what happened to that work?
I only hear a partial explanation of these things, so every article like yours helps me get a fuller picture and perhaps an opportunity to contribute to understanding. Thank you for addressing the situation.