Nigeria’s Christians Under Siege: Why The CPC Designation Was Long Overdue
(ANALYSIS) President Trump designated Nigeria as a "Country of Particular Concern” on October 31 under the International Religious Freedom Act. Like most of his acts, this ignited major controversy, much of it reflecting longstanding and now renewed disputes about what is really happening in that country. I argue that this designation is both correct and long overdue.
The Nigerian army often describes the continuing violence in the country's north and middle belts simply as “ethnic militias” clashing over land. This depiction is rejected vehemently by Rev. Ezekiel Dachomo.
He has buried hundreds of his church members, including children killed in late-night raids. On October 15, standing beside a shallow grave containing the corpses of 11 members of his congregation, he shouted: “I am tired of mass burials!”
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“They are killing Christians, massacring Christians. … Our lives are endangered. …”
“The Nigerian government recently came out and denied the killings of Christians. Look at these bodies — are there any Muslims here?” he shouted, pointing to the bodies of the 11 victims.
A pastor in Plateau state warned government officials about "Fulani militants who are amassing right near villages" in his area. He told the Nigerian army that an attack was imminent.
The army responded that the “pastor was causing disunity [and] misinformation and we’re watching him.” This October 14 statement — still posted to the Nigerian army’s X account — condemned his warning as part of “a growing pattern of unsubstantiated claims by certain religious figures …”
Shortly thereafter, more than a dozen Christians were murdered. Witnesses reported that gunmen invaded their compound at night and opened fire on residents. Following the attack, the pastor said about the army, that there was “no apology, no action taken, nothing.”
Such reports appear almost daily but are commonly disputed, ignored or forgotten. Some readers might recall that in 2014, Boko Haram extremists kidnapped 276 predominantly Christian schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. This received major international attention and many social media postings with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But this too has faded from memory.
There is also a massive refugee crisis, with probably 3.5 million internally displaced people. There are probably 180,000 IDPs in Benue state alone. There are nearly a million in the northeast. Bishop Mark Maigida Nzekwain of the Wukari Catholic Diocese told TruthNigeria that over 300,000 Christians—including Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists — have been displaced in Southern Taraba state. “Our churches are empty, our villages burnt, and our members scattered. This is not random violence — it is a deliberate attempt to erase Christian presence from Southern Taraba. … Families are homeless, without food or medicine. The world cannot look away.”
Across Nigeria’s North and Middle belts, Christians and Muslims are brutally attacked by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of West Africa, Boko Haram and many other loosely affiliated terror groups who seek religious and political domination.
Probably the greatest carnage is being wrought by ethnic Fulani militias. In October, they carried out mass killings in Taraba, Benue, Plateau and Southern Kaduna states. Wielding AK-47s, they massacre families, burning homes and harvests, and drive millions from their ancestral lands in a coordinated effort to seize land and forcibly Islamize these areas. During these attacks, the army is too often absent or arrives much too late.
American response to the violence
Because of these tens of thousands of deaths, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has since 2009 consistently called for the U.S. State Department to list Nigeria as a "Country of Particular Concern" (CPC) under the International Religious Freedom Act. These recommendations continued under the Bush, Obama, and the first Trump administration.
CPC is an official designation that a country is engaged in or tolerating "systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom." Despite these repeated USCIRF recommendations, it was not until 2020, under the Trump administration, that the designation was officially accepted.
However, despite the daily killings and despite the pleas of human rights and Christian organizations, in 2021, the Biden administration removed Nigeria from the CPC list. It contended that the country did not meet the necessary criteria for inclusion but gave no justification for the change.
Many major media outlets have ignored or downplayed the carnage in Nigeria, and indeed, Africa as a whole. Ironically, one major reason for the recent growing attention is that, on his September 25 HBO show, comedian Bill Maher emphasized the killing of Nigerian Christians. This reached an audience larger than and distinct from the usual advocates for Nigeria, and thankfully has led to increased attention to the issue.
Finally, on October 31, the Trump administration reinstated Nigeria's CPC designation. This requires, among other things, that he notify Congress about the designation and the concrete actions that he would take.
Why it has been largely ignored
The deaths of Africans by massacre or starvation, including in Sudan and Congo, currently the world's two largest and bloodiest conflicts, are often ignored or downplayed. But there are two additional reasons for the neglect of Nigeria.
One is a tendency to portray it as a partisan issue.
The BBC claimed that reports on deaths of "Nigeria's Christians have been circulating in recent weeks and months in some right-wing U.S. circles" and added "Groups monitoring violence say there is no evidence to suggest that Christians are being killed more than Muslims …”
Certainly, many of the writers of an important Oct. 15 letter to Trump on the CPC issue were conservative Christians. But Bill Maher is neither Christian nor right-wing, and famous rapper Nicki Minaj, who has also raised the issue, is no conservative.
Events in Nigeria have been diligently reported by USCIRF for the last sixteen years under different administrations, and for the last four years, most Commissioners have been Democrat appointees. The commission has welcomed President Trump's CPC designation — a bipartisan step doubly refreshing in our polarized political climate.
Distinguished observers — such as Gregory Stanton, founder and president of Genocide Watch; Lord Alton of the House of Lords; and the authors of the U.K. All Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion or Belief’s report “Nigeria: Unfolding Genocide?" have even gone so far as to describe the current carnage in central Nigeria in terms as dire as genocide or impending genocide, descriptions that I think go too far but show the urgency of the situation. At the same time, Pope Leo XIV has prayed for the “rural Christian communities of the Benue State who have been relentless victims of violence.”
The BBC has also said: "Deadly cycles of tit-for-tat attacks have also seen thousands killed, but atrocities have been committed on both sides and human rights groups say there is no evidence that Christians have been disproportionately targeted.”
Regarding the proportion of Muslims and Christians killed, certainly ISWAP, Al Qaeda, and their extremist kin also kill Muslims who oppose their agenda, which is most Muslims. As documented by the late great Lamin Sanneh, West African Islam has traditionally drawn on longstanding traditions of non-violence and even of pacifism. Muslim terrorists may also be killed by those seeking to defend their villages and families, and who may then launch retaliatory attacks. Clashes with the Nigerian army also claim Muslim lives. There is no doubt that thousands of Muslims are being killed, including by Islamist terrorists.
But the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa's detailed book-length report "Countering the myth of religious indifference in Nigerian terror (10/2019-9/2023)” found that significantly more Christians than Muslims have been killed or abducted, especially when considering their relative size in the proportion of the population in the most violence-prone areas.
Also, there is little sign of Christian equivalents to ISWAP or Al Qaeda. Nor are there reports of mass kidnappings and attempted forced conversions of Muslim girls parallel to the Chibok girls. This is not some tit-for-tat "clash" but an ongoing assault by radical groups on those, Christian or Muslim, who do not share their agenda.
Downplaying the role of religion
Another reason that the violence has been downplayed is that there is reluctance among many more secular elites, especially Western ones, to recognize the important religious element of the terrorist and Fulani attacks.
Mary Beth Leonard, until 2023 the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, said the conflicts were " fundamentally a resource issue." She referred to the carnage in the Middle Belt of Nigeria as “banditry and inter-communal conflict” and “escalating farmer-herder and inter-communal conflict frequently based in resource competition.”
The State Department’s 2023 religious freedom report stressed that climate change was causing “clashes” between two rural socioeconomic groups over scarce natural resources. The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has posted an article to its website titled, “Climate change fuels deadly conflict in Nigeria’s Middle Belt.” The New York Times' Dionne Searcey wrote that the conflicts “mirror the 20th-century range wars in the American West" with "violence between farmers and herders...."
Of course, climate change in the Sahel threatens herders’ livelihood and creates conditions for conflict over resources. This is a vital part of Nigeria's very complex human dynamics. But there is no simple line between “I need land for my cattle” and the need to “kill infidels.”
No grazing limits lead automatically to a self-declared jihad. No person facing drought necessarily decides to behead local pastors. Conditions themselves do not determine actions; people's responses to desperate situations are unavoidably shaped by their basic beliefs, including their religious beliefs.
The religious dimension is not the only one, but it is a central and essential one. If we neglect religion, then we will not understand Nigeria.
Nigeria as a CPC?
President Trump's call for Nigeria to be recognized as a CPC is welcome — although his rhetorical overkill might jeopardize a fruitful response. But, hopefully, the center and left will not reject this designation simply because Trump has endorsed it. It can be a bipartisan effort, as USCIRF has modeled.
His suggestion of possible violent US military action in a fractured Nigeria of almost a quarter of a billion people is dangerous. But American military trainers would be useful in shaping Nigeria's army, especially on tactics and human rights, something they have done before, not only in Nigeria, but throughout West Africa.
Intelligence could also be vital. All of these were major reasons that the U.S. military established its Africa Command in 2007. This can be revitalized and used now. Irrigation and preserving grazing lands are also vital.
The current calls for a national and international focus on the religion-related mayhem in Nigeria are long overdue, as is the call for intense pressure on the Nigerian state to address seriously the mass killings in its midst. Millions of lives depend on it.
Paul Marshall is Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, director of the Religious Freedom Institute’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and author of over 20 books on religion and politics. In 2002 he wrote for Freedom House a book-length report The Talibanization of Nigeria that cautioned about what might lie ahead. His latest book is “Called to be Friends: Called to Serve.”