Nigerian President Bola Tinubu condemned President Donald Trump’s statements acknowledging the ongoing genocide of Christians in his country in remarks on Saturday, claiming they did not reflect “reality,” while a top adviser told local media Tinubu planned to meet Trump “in the coming days.”
“The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality,” Tinubu said in a statement on Saturday, “nor does it take into consideration the consistent and sincere efforts of the government to safeguard freedom of religion and beliefs for all Nigerians.”
The president claimed his administration “maintained an open and active engagement with Christian and Muslim leaders alike.” His statement did not address the top jihadist threats in his country – ethnic Fulani jihadist militias and the terrorist organization Boko Haram – by name.
On Sunday, Tinubu special adviser Daniel Bwala announced on social media that the Nigerian president expected to hold meetings with Trump in person in the near future.
“Both President Bola Tinubu and President Donald Trump have shared interest in the fight against insurgency and all forms of terrorism against humanity,” Bwala wrote, in a much more conciliatory message towards Trump than Tinubu’s initial remarks.
“President Trump has assisted Nigeria a lot by authorizing the sale of arms to Nigeria, and President Tinubu has adequately utilized the opportunity in the fight against terrorism, for which we have massive results to show for it,” Bwala highlighted, adding that the disagreement over the existence of the ongoing Christian genocide “would be discussed and resolved” in the near future.
“As for the differences as to whether terrorists in Nigeria target only Christians or in fact all faiths and no faiths,” Bwala added, “the differences, if they exist, would be discussed and resolved by the two leaders when they meet in the coming days, either in State House or White House.”
Bwala issued a similar statement to Reuters on Sunday, omitting any news of an imminent meeting between Tinubu and Trump but, rather than denying the reality of jihad in Nigeria, embracing the idea of American aid to eradicate the threat.
“We welcome U.S. assistance as long as it recognises our territorial integrity,” Bwala told Reuters. “I am sure by the time these two leaders meet and sit, there would be better outcomes in our joint resolve to fight terrorism.”
President Trump announced on Friday that he would restore Nigeria to the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern for Religious Freedom in response to the government’s failure to act in the face of multiple jihadist threats. In the nation’s northeast, Boko Haram – which the government claimed had been eradicated in 2015 – continues to engage in the mass abduction and killing of local Christians. Throughout Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where the Muslim-majority north meets the Christian-majority south, Fulani jihadists commonly referred to as “bandits” burn down villages, forcibly displace thousands of people, and engage in massacres of entire indigenous communities.
“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 announcing the designation on his website, Truth Social, on Friday.
The designation appeared to be prompted, in part, by Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) requesting in early October that the State Department reconsider restoring Nigeria to the concern list on the grounds that as many as 50,000 Christians have been killed in the country for their faith since 2009. Trump noted in his announcement that he requested Rep. Moore open a Congressional inquiry into the situation in Nigeria.
On Saturday, Trump suggested that he was open to approving military activity in Nigeria.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria,” Trump warned, “and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
“WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” he concluded.
Nigeria had appeared on the Countries of Particular Concern list until 2021, when former President Joe Biden removed it. At the time, religious freedom advocates decried the delistings as “alarming” and “baffling.”
The situation in the Middle Belt is particularly dire, as indigenous Christian groups complain of widespread, coordinated actions to strip them of the right to live on their land.
“We have documented the coordinated and systematic murder of an entire people; therefore we are clearly talking about a Christian genocide,” Emeka Umeagbalasi, director of the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersocial), told the Catholic News Agency (CNA) in September. “Today in northern Nigeria, it’s almost impossible to live as a Christian, and if the trend continues, within half a century we will no longer be a country with religious pluralism.”
“Complicity is part of an expansive policy by the Nigerian government to Islamize the country,” Umeagbalasi added.
Local politicians have condemned the Tinubu government, and that of his late mentor Muhammadu Buhari, as inept at best, and complicit at worst. Following a massacre in April, Governor Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau state called for local “youth leaders” to “revive local vigilante patrols” against the jihadists instead of relying on local police or the military.
Two years prior to that call, Mutfwang denounced in a local media interview that 64 communities had “been displaced and their lands … taken over by these terrorists.” The jihadists, he detailed, force civilians to flee or die, then occupy the affected land permanently.
“Children therefore in those schools have not been able to go to school, they have to relocate, we even have primary health care centres abandoned because of these terrorists which means that our health care system is put in jeopardy,” he lamented.
“Under the last regime [of former President Muhammadu Buhari] the feeling among people in Plateau State, particularly the victims of these terrorist attacks,” Mutfwang lamented at the time, “is that it looks as if the terrorists were given official government backing to be able to terrorise them because little or nothing was done to repel these attacks.”
Many of the reports acknowledging the jihadist attacks omit the perpetrators’ identities. Nigerian media regularly refer to the jihadists as merely “bandits,” diluting the religious facet of the slaughter, and portray the persecution as a “conflict.” Speaking to Breitbart News in 2023, Father Remigius Ihyula, a university chaplain and emergency relief coordinator in the Diocese of Makurdi in Benue state, expressed frustration with the hesitancy to identify the nature of the attacks.
“People were even warned not to say they are Fulani herdsmen who have been causing these atrocities such that when you open the general media they are talking about bandits – bandits or they say ‘unknown gunmen’ or things like that,” Ihyula noted, “so you read about bandits. It’s rubbish: they are Fulani men going about with cattle and with guns and killing people and the government won’t do anything about it.”
“There is an orchestrated design to push especially Christian populations away from these places so that they can occupy those territories,” he added.
Trump’s designation has been welcomed by leaders in victimized Christian communities. Bitrus Pogu, the president of the Middle Belt Forum, said in remarks on Sunday that Trump’s moves were “a welcome development,” according to the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard.
“When some Nigerians say both Muslims and Christians are being killed, the question is by who? It is by Muslims. There is no Christian militia in the North attacking Muslims,” he emphasized. “The Fulani herdsmen militia is just like the jihad. They came to Hausa land, took over their traditional institutions. Now they are killing the Hausa who are predominantly Muslim and they are taking their land.”
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