March 2025: Following hearings on the persecution of Christians, members of the United States Congress call on President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on Nigeria. They accuse the authorities in Abuja of failing to sufficiently uphold religious freedom in a country often portrayed as a textbook case of a ‘clash of civilisations’, with a fault line dividing a ‘Muslim’ Sahelian North and a ‘Christian’ tropical South. Despite President Bola Tinubu himself being a Muslim, American neoconservatives point to the number of Christians killed by jihadist groups or Fulani militias as supposed evidence of anti-Christian persecution. Some claim that the regional giant is experiencing more religious conflicts than the rest of Africa combined.
Undeniably, Nigeria has experienced high levels of violence. Since the Biafran Civil War of 1967–1970, accusations of genocide have been a recurring feature. These have fuelled conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s, from the Ogoni uprising against oil exploitation in the Niger Delta, on the southern Atlantic coast, to the confrontations between migrants and indigenous people in the Middle Belt, at the intersection of the Islamic and Christian cultural regions. Thus, the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, and traditional Fulani leaders from the North have repeatedly condemned an alleged genocide of Muslims residing in Jos, Plateau State’s administrative and symbolic capital, in the central belt of the country.
Christian lobbies, on the other hand, have accused Hausa and Fulani migrants of massacring the region’s indigenous minorities with the complicity of the military. A Fulani Muslim from the northern Katsina State, President Muhammadu Buhari, who was in power from 2015 to 2023, was notably suspected by the most extreme Pentecostal churches of having covered up, or even coordinated, a campaign of persecution against Christians in the Middle Belt. These claims were sometimes echoed in Europe and the United States by evangelical groups, right-wing parliamentarians, or essayists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy.
Prioritising mediation, the Catholic Church in Nigeria has, for its part, been careful to distance itself from the more far-fetched allegations. In 2014, it suspended its participation in the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to distance itself from the belligerent statements made by its Pentecostal president, Ayo Oritsejafor. In 2019, the U.S.-based NGO Jubilee Campaign approached the International Criminal Court in The Hague to file a complaint against Boko Haram jihadists for genocide. In a report titled The Genocide is Loading (which was not published online), the organisation claimed that 4,194 Christians were killed in Nigeria between 2014 and 2016.
Long-Standing Accusations
None of this is entirely new. During the Biafran secession, the rebels had already framed their struggle in religious terms and sought to win the support of Western countries by portraying themselves as victims of genocide perpetrated by the Hausa and Fulani Muslims of the North against the Christian Igbo of the South-east. The insurgents put forward a figure of 1 to 2 million deaths, mainly as a result of a military blockade that caused a devastating famine, but which did not lead to the extermination of survivors after the ‘federal’ forces’ victory in 1970. Once defeated and removed from power, the Igbo continued to present themselves as victims of a silent genocide in order to denounce their political and economic marginalisation. One of them, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, argued in Biafra Revisited (African Renaissance, 2007) that they accounted for nearly 18,000 of the 20,000 people allegedly killed by Nigerian security forces between 1999 and 2006, without providing either sources or an explanation of his methodology.
Today, accusations and counter-accusations of genocide continue to rely on unverifiable claims. On the Christian side, they focus not only on the clashes in Plateau State, but also on Fulani banditry in the North-west and jihadist insurgencies in the Northeast, which often target them – even though the vast majority of victims of Boko Haram-affiliated factions are Muslim. Without citing any sources, representatives of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) claimed that ‘radicalised’ Fulani had murdered approximately 6,000 Christians from the Middle Belt during the first six months of 2018. During the same period, an obscure Igbo NGO from Onitsha, the International Society for Civil Liberties & the Rule of Law (Intersociety), claimed that 2,400 Christian farmers had been killed by Fulani herders and ‘extremists’ in an article published by the Christian Post.
Nigerian researchers themselves have not necessarily been more discerning when they have used figures ‘pulled out of thin air’ in a country where there are no police records or official statistics on homicides. According to one of them, Charles Abiodun Alao, author of the article “Islamic Radicalisation and Violence in Nigeria” published by Routledge in 2013, the ‘radicalisation of Islam’ is said to have caused the deaths of 50,000 people between 1980 and 2012.
The Arbitrary Figures of Open Doors
In general, evangelical organisations from Western countries do make sure to cite sources when they use quantitative arguments to demonstrate the extent of genocidal killings. But their references are highly debatable from a scientific standpoint. For example, let us mention Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), a British lobby led by a figure from the Conservative Party who was knighted by the Margaret Thatcher government, or the Global Terrorism Index and World Watch Monitor: the former is an Australian think tank that uniquely designates all Fulani herders ’militants as a terrorist group; the latter is a collective that defends the rights of Christians worldwide. Statistical distortions are sometimes glaring. In a report published in 2019, a Protestant NGO, Open Doors, estimated that Nigeria was the country where the highest number of Christians were killed in the world, with 3,731 deaths recorded in 2018. Subsequently, the ranking was not expected to change much, with around 3,100 murders out of a total of nearly 4,500 worldwide in 2024.
However, it is not clear that all the victims counted by Open Doors were targeted because of their faith. In its report for 2024, the NGO admitted that Fulani herders were killing Christians ‘to prevent them from raising livestock,’ thus within the context of rivalries driven by economic competition rather than religious disputes.
In 2017, discussions initiated by the author of this article with the researchers at Open Doors also revealed a strong tendency to interpret data from a database, NigeriaWatch, which tracks violent deaths and is updated by researchers at the University of Ibadan, in a biased manner. To support its argument, the NGO had indeed applied a uniform rate of 30% of Christians in the predominantly Muslim North of the country. This proportion was at the very least arbitrary, given that there has been no public or official data on the religious affiliations of the population since the 1963 census. By extrapolation, the NGO nonetheless estimated that 30% of those killed in the twelve northern states of the Nigerian federation must necessarily have been Christian.
Even more so, Open Doors considered that a significant portion of these victims had died because of their beliefs, even though they could just as well have fallen victim to attacks related to common criminal activities: for their wallets, not their faith.
Victims who must necessarily have been Christian
Undoubtedly, there are discrimination and anti-Christian persecutions in northern Nigeria. On occasion, Christians are also killed because of their faith, particularly during attacks on places of worship by jihadists from the Boko Haram movement, by criminal gangs, or, very rarely, by members of rival churches. But it is important not to exaggerate the demographic scale of these incidents and to put them into perspective in a country, the most populous on the continent, with over 200 million inhabitants. According to data from NigeriaWatch, victims of violence involving at least one religious organisation currently represent a tiny fraction of homicides, while interfaith confrontations remain exceptional.
Methodologically, the allegations made by a committee called the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) prove just as shaky. In a report published in the United States in 2020, the group denounces the genocide of Christians by Boko Haram jihadists. According to the group, Boko Haram has killed 27,000 civilians since 2009, more than the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The sources cited include the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a conflict data aggregation initiative; the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST), an initiative led by a former U.S. diplomat once posted in Lagos; and the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), an offshoot of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. These sources are allegedly verified and cross-checked by field investigations conducted by a network of Christian activists in Nigeria.
However, the list of incidents provided in the appendix by ICON only covers a two-month period, from December 2019 to January 2020. It contains many blank pages and presents numerous issues. First, there are sometimes duplicates: the same event is listed multiple times when reported by different sources whether journalistic or police. Moreover, the totals do not always match the figures announced, and some incidents are mentioned in the main text but not included in the appendix directory. Most importantly, the ICON committee itself acknowledges that it is “very difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly how many people have been killed or displaced by Boko Haram and Fulani militias” since 2009.
As with Open Doors, the arguments put forward to mathematically prove the existence of genocide are not convincing either. The 27,000 victims attributed to Boko Haram are described as civilians, but there is no indication that they were Christians. Moreover, ICON mixes in its count the deadly attacks carried out by jihadist groups and those by Fulani bandits, even going so far as to include deaths resulting from land disputes between communities that are not fighting for religious reasons, even if they sometimes belong to different faiths.
Donald Trump Drawn Into the Debate
Supporters of the theory of a religious genocide thus reveal serious scientific shortcomings. Eager to defend their argument, they are careful not to cite sources that might contradict their claims. As for those who base their data on press articles, they likewise fail to analyse the political leanings and confessional biases of Nigerian journalists – journalists who are mostly concentrated in the southern cities and, due to historical and colonial legacies, are predominantly Christian, given the limited access to modern education historically available to northern Muslims. The lack of critical scrutiny regarding the quality, reliability, and consistency of the sources used is particularly revealing in this respect.
This is illustrated by the report published in 2024 by the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA). This report is particularly interesting because, among other things, it helped to support the arguments of U.S. lawmakers who, in March 2025, accused Nigeria of allowing the persecution of Christians and called on President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on the country.
At first glance, the ORFA study appears to be of much higher quality than the usual outbursts from Pentecostal advocacy organisation 8. To demonstrate that Christians are more frequently targeted than Muslims, it provides impressive lists of statistical tables in the appendix. Supervised by a political scientist from the University of Costa Rica, the study claims to take no sides, states that it merely collects facts, and does not refer to the existence of genocide.
A Medley of Sources and Data
Its methodology is not without issues. Indeed, it relies on very diverse sources: social media, local partners in Nigeria, NGO reports, press articles, ACLED, and the NST. However, it is unclear how, concretely, the ORFA proceeds to merge, weight, and assess the reliability of data collected from such heterogeneous sources. Furthermore, the sources are not consistent throughout the period covered by the study, from October 2019 to September 2023. The ORFA began to expand its corpus in October 2021 and started integrating ACLED data in October 2022, while discontinuing the use of NST data, which had been unavailable since July 2023. These discontinuities represent distortions that could skew the results. In its report, the ORFA acknowledges that the proportion of victims whose religious affiliation could not be determined was much higher in 2020 and 2021, before the organisation decided to expand and refine its corpus.
In the absence of fieldwork in a country without a civil registry, one may also question how the Observatory distinguishes between civilians and combatants, and between Christians and Muslims. Regarding the latter, the authors of the 2024 report claim to have cross-referenced their information with local partners who cannot be named “for security reasons,” but who are most likely Christian activists, since the ORFA actually originates from a Dutch foundation established in 2010 and funded by evangelical churches from Latin America, Platform for Social Transformation. Under the pretext of protecting their anonymity, the Observatory thus deviates from a fundamental principle of science – namely, the ability to verify, test, and triangulate the sources used, the facts collected, and the results obtained. Only the figures are made public, with 16,769 Christians killed out of a total of 30,880 civilian deaths over four years, including 6,235 Muslims and 7,722 unidentified victims.
Moreover, according to ORFA data, Muslims appear to be more targeted than Christians in certain districts of north-western Nigeria. From a scientific perspective, it would have been interesting to explore why this is the case, even though the geography of the killings does not perfectly overlap with that of the abductions. It would also have been useful to refine the analysis by examining more closely the religious composition of the various regions affected by violence. However, ORFA shows little interest in venturing into this area, and once again, the methodology it employs is rather surprising. Indeed, the anonymous authors of the 2024 report apply fixed percentages of Muslims and Christians for each state of the country, year after year. No source is cited to explain the origin of these rather mysterious figures, in a country that has lacked public statistics on the religious breakdown of its population for more than sixty years.
Blurred Categorisations
The approximations do not stop there. The authors of the ORFA claim that Christians in Nigeria are mainly killed by Fulani herders and terrorist groups other than Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa. This category of ‘other terrorists’ is particularly intriguing. According to ORFA’s methodological note, this refers to various groups that could not be identified, are said to be highly decentralised, and include bandits involved in ethnic militias alongside Fulani herders. The lines of distinction seem even more blurred given that, at the same time, Fulani herders are also classified as a “terrorist group”, described as “the deadliest” of all, according to the previously cited ORFA report. Following this reasoning, there would be no bandits in Nigeria, only “terrorists”—a narrative that clearly highlights the shortcomings of an Observatory that appears largely unaware of the academic community’s caution regarding the indiscriminate use of such a disqualifying label.
Like Open Doors and the ICON Committee, ORFA struggles to demonstrate that Christians are being killed because of their faith. The two anonymous testimonies cited in support of its claims do highlight instances of religious discrimination. In some instances, Muslim hostages who could recite Quranic verses to prove their faith were indeed released without having to pay a ransom, while Christians were brutalised – with men executed and women subjected to rape. But in other cases, the situation was reversed. Muslim captives held by Boko Haram-affiliated jihadists were killed or forcibly recruited to carry out suicide bombings, while Christian hostages were spared, as their captors hoped to fetch a high ransom for them.
In general, one might question the relevance of the two testimonies cited by ORFA in a country as vast as Nigeria. The approximations and methodological biases of those supporting the genocide thesis actually undermine the cause of Christians. On the substance, there is no need to exaggerate the scale of human tragedies to be concerned about endemic violence and discrimination, which are just as much rooted in issues of religious affiliation as in social status, within a political system that gives strong regional preference to the indigenous people of each of the country’s thirty-six states.
To ensure its credibility, a balanced and scientific analysis of religious persecution should also focus on Muslims who, in southern Nigeria, are targeted by popular outrage and sometimes lynched because they are seen as foreigners, easily identifiable by their clothing and tribal scarification. The causes of the violence are highly complex. Beyond the macabre debates over the number of victims, the issue is primarily political. Whether concerning the fate of Christians or Muslims, narratives about a “religious” genocide must therefore be understood in a secular context. The current controversies surrounding Nigeria would certainly benefit, in this regard, from learning lessons from the disputes that once fuelled tensions during the Biafra War.
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