It was late night talk show host Bill Maher who brought the issue to the American public on 26 September 2025 when he spoke of the systematic killing of Christians in Nigeria. More 100,000 Christians have been killed, and 18,000 churches have been churches burnt by Boko Haram since 2009, he stated. It did not take long for the Christian political right to start mobilising.
US Republican Senator Ted Cruz claimed a “Christian mass murder” was occurring in Nigeria. This morphed into talk of a Christian genocide. Senator Cruz went further accusing Abuja of ignoring and enabling the mass murder of Christians, and introduced a bill aiming to sanction Nigeria.
Echoing Senator Cruz, President Donald Trump has accused the Nigerian government of not doing enough to halt the murder of Christians and has ordered the US military to prepare for an attack on Nigeria.
Read more: Trump’s outburst about a ‘Christian genocide’ in Nigeria is as dangerous as it is absurd
Without doubt, militant Islamists have been killing Christians and burning churches. This violence predated the formation of Boko Haram. Between 1999 and 2008 there were 28 religious conflicts pitting Muslims and Christians against each other. Religions, however, do not exist in a vacuum.
Context matters and religion is intricately intertwined with issues of politics, economics, the environment and migration. The inability of the post-colonial Nigerian state to build an inclusive Nigerian citizenship further fuelled the embers of hate.
Ethnic dimension
The ethnic dimension of this hatred may well be stronger than the religious element. Vanda Felbab-Brown and James Forest argue that the conflict in northern Nigeria emanates from the migration of Hausa-Fulani into Yoruba lands. They argue that “the fact that the Yoruba are predominantly Christians and the Hausa-Fulani Muslims, matters only secondarily. Rather the Hausa-Fulani Boko Haram is infusing religion into a long-churning brew of grievances about wealth and power distribution.”
Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, following extensive research on the victims of Boko Haram violence, concluded that their victims were targeted not only because of their religion but their ethnicity. Here it is important to note how affected Christian communities frame this violence.
James Ortese Iorzua Ayatse, a Christian and traditional leader of the Tiv in Benue State, viewed the attacks on his community as a land-grab by herders and bandits. Christian Igbos living in the north also framed these attacks in ethnic terms — referring to Boko Haram not as Muslim or Islamist but as Hausa. This urges us to be wary of labelling a conflict as religious merely on the basis of its religious overtones.
Perhaps, the biggest challenge to this Christian genocide myth emanates from the words of Gimba Kakanda, who is the senior special assistant to Nigeria’s President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. While acknowledging that Christians are being targeted by Boko Haram he questioned Bill Maher’s figures, stating that the figures were fabricated and relied on unverified outlets.
Moreover, absent from this is the fact that more Muslims have been killed by Boko Haram than Christians. The Salafist jihadists do not regard Muslims who do not follow their creed, like Sufi Muslims, to be Muslims and therefore consider them as legitimate targets to be killed.
This is an important point since if one persists with this false narrative of a Christian genocide we will have returned to the mythical clash of civilisations thesis that was all the rage following 9/11.
Such a misguided thesis prevents the formation of alliances between people of different faiths to confront the Islamists. Rather, it merely reinforces existing polarisation. This is a position endorsed by the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto — Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah.
He has argued that coexistence is possible between Muslims and Christians, pointing out that in Sokoto a Christian minority has been living in peace and enjoying cordial relations with the majority Muslim population. Bishop Kukah has vehemently argued that Salafi jihadist violence threatens all Nigerians, and that Muslims and Christians should unite against Boko Haram and its ilk.
No evidence
As to the US accusation that the Nigerian authorities are either ignoring or abetting the genocide of Christians, there is absolutely no evidence for it. Good Governance Africa’s Malik Samuel has stated that “there is no credible evidence of a state-led or coordinated campaign to exterminate Christians, which is what genocide is”.
Furthermore, Gimba Kikanda points out that many Christians occupy the top positions in Nigeria’s security establishment. These include the Chief of Defence Staff, the Chief of Army Staff, the Chief of Navy Staff, the Chief of Defence Intelligence and the Director-General of the State Security Service.
It is absurd to contemplate that these Christian senior officers would partake in the killing of fellow Christians. President Tinubu himself is married to a Christian pastor of a Pentecostal Church.
Nigeria’s 237.5 million citizens make it the most populous on the African continent and the sixth most populous in the world. Beyond mere numbers is the complexity of this vast behemoth. There are 350 ethnic groups speaking 400 languages. Half of this populace is Muslim; 40% Christian and 10% adhere to indigenous faith traditions.
The military instrument that Trump threatens to wield cannot hope to resolve the violence that is wrongly characterised as a Christian genocide.
Ignorance on Nigeria, and Africa more generally, has been the bane of Washington for decades. In 2004, US Ambassador Princeton Lyman and J Stephen Morrison, writing in Foreign Affairs, bemoaned that the “US embassy [in Nigeria] lacks a single speaker of Hausa, the main language of northern Nigeria; has no consulate or permanent representation in the north”.
Far from taking the lead from late-night talk show hosts and social media influencers, Washington should do its own homework and listen to what Nigerians are saying themselves about the jihadist violence. DM