THERE IS NO ‘CHRISTIAN GENOCIDE’ IN NIGERIA – NSCIA
Being the Text of a Press Conference Addressed by the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) on the recent designation of Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” by the United States of America on Sunday, November 9, 2025
Distinguished gentlemen of the press,
Eminent members of the diplomatic corps,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I say As-salaam ‘alaykum as I welcome you to this important briefing.
1. The Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA), following its Expanded General Purpose Committee (EGPC) meeting held earlier today,convenes this conference on behalf of the Nigerian Muslim Ummah to condemn the recent threat against the sovereignty of our nation. We have not been emphasising the killings of Muslims because we do not see it as a religious war, but a national security issue. The world is aware that some Islamophobic and unpatriotic Nigerians had authored a dangerous script, promoted it in Western circles especially in the United States and got the attention of the highest levels of the United States government, which are erroneouslymade to believe that there is a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria.
2. When the U.S. President, Mr Donald Trump labeled our country “disgraced”, every right-thinking Nigerian was concerned because an ally that is determined to help a sovereign country to “completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities” would offer to assist and collaborate with the country and not use such language to describe a country it aims to partner in wiping out the terrorists.
While a number of countries (e.g., China, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar) have also been designated “Countries of Particular Concern”, the present context of “what Nigeria will not like” suggests that the plan is a pretext to destabilise our country.
3. We reaffirm that there is no “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. Under Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 9 and Article 6 of the Rome Statute 11, the crime is defined by a critical “mental element” known as dolus specialis. This is the specific “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. There is nothing of such in Nigeria.
4. For the avoidance of doubt, what Nigeria faces is a complex and tragic perennial security crisis that brings immeasurable pain to all its citizens, regardless of faith or ethnic persuasion. From Katsina to Borno and from Benue to Plateau, as well as in Kaduna and Kwara, Nigeria bleeds through gruesome savagery against Muslims and Christians, Imams and priests. Non-partisan experts have refuted this blackmail and Amnesty International, which methodically investigated the insecurity in Nigeria, had stated that there is “no evidence of a religious motivation” to characterise it as genocide. According to Isa Sunusi, the Director of Amnesty’s Nigeria programme, “I don’t think President Trump has any facts. I don’t think he has had a very good briefing about the nature of this conflict”. Senior researchers like Samuel Malik of the pan-African think tank, Good Governance Africa, have also stated that “there is no credible evidence of a state-led or coordinated campaign to exterminate Christians, which is what genocide is”.
5. The “genocide” claim completely collapses when confronted with reality, context and verifiable data. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) report of 2022 proves conclusively that the overwhelming driver of violence in Nigeria is not anti-Christian persecution, as Muslims and people of other faiths are also overwhelmingly affected.
6. While President Trump and Senator Cruz name “Radical Islamists” and “Islamist Jihadists” as the culprits, ISWAP and Boko Haram, the fact is that these groups are khawarij (deviants), whose ideology declares Muslims who do not join them as“dissidents”. Muslims are also their victims. As Amnesty International correctly stated, “The jihadist groups kill both Muslims and Christians. They demolish Mosques and Churches. They don’t differentiate”. These terrorists are not our representatives; they are our mortal enemies.
7. The world knows that some of the terrorist groups being paraded as “Islamic” are creations of non-Muslims. For instance, it is publicly acknowledgedthat the United States of America created Al-Qaeda,which is being projected as Islamic. Also, a US Congressman, Scott Perry, testified that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was financing the activities of Boko Haram and other terrorist groups in Nigeria and elsewhere.
8. If the violence in some parts of Nigeria is not religious, what are the real drivers? The first is ecological. As the International Crisis Group has detailed in multiple reports, how relentless desertification and drought, products of climate change, have degraded pastures and dried up water sources in the far-northern Sahelianbelt. This is not an “Islamist invasion”; it is a desperate southward migration of herders seeking survival. This climate-driven migration forces herders into direct, and often violent competition with sedentary farming communities over dwindling resources of land and water. Historic grazing reserves have been lost to expanding settlements, and traditional conflict resolution mechanisms have eroded. This is the flashpoint for the farmer-herder crisis in Plateau, Benue and other middle belt states in Northern Nigeria.
9. The second driver is criminality. In the Northwest, Northeast and Southeast, banditry is fueled by the overlapping factors of grinding poverty, mass youth unemployment, drug abuse, porous borders and the proliferation of small arms and light weapons over the decades. Crucially, as researchers have noted, it is also driven by illicit artisanal mining of solid minerals. Criminal syndicates and bandits sack villages and displace populations, creating an ungoverned space for their illegal mining operations. This is a violent, organised crime racket for resources and there is nothing Islamic about it also. In Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto axis, Muslims have lost more than 1,200 souls to the same bandits who answer to crime, not tribe or faith. The United States Department itself, in its 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom, stated that “banditry and other criminality, not animosity between particular religious groups… were the primary drivers” of intercommunal violence. This is not a religious war.
10. Then, we cannot gloss over how, over a long period,failure of governance has enabled violence in Nigeria. Studies have revealed how endemic corruption, lack of accountability for human rights abuses and failure to provide basic security for citizens have, over time,created a vacuum for impunity. When the state fails to protect anyone, criminals and militias thrive. This is a “massive state failure”, as some have called it, not a state-sponsored “genocide”.
11. Who benefits from this lie? First, there are foreign instigators, especially some American politicians who seek to energise their domestic evangelical base. We name Senator Ted Cruz, who falsely claims Nigeria is “facilitating the mass murder of Christians”. We name Congressman Riley Moore, who pushes wildly unverified claims of “50,000-100,000” Christians murdered. Their concern is not for Nigerians. Their concern is about votes in Texas and West Virginia.These foreign actors are aided and abetted by domestic instigators who have a clear political/ economic, not religious, agenda. We must identify a separatist grouplike “Biafra Republic Government In-Exile”. Regulatory filings in Washington, D.C., have shown that these individuals are outspending the Nigerian government on lobbyists. And what is their core message? The filings show they are “focused on raising the issue of ‘Christian killings’ on Capitol Hill”. This is a political separatist group, weaponising a religious identity to achieve its goal: the balkanisationand fragmentation of Nigeria. These lobbyists who received millions of dollars flood Washington with doctored videos and fake statistics. They quote “52,000 Christians killed since 2009”, a number even Open Doors refuses to endorse.
12. There is also, as we have previously stated, a network of Nigerian citizens at home and abroad who have “found a big business in self-flagellation”. These crisis entrepreneurs “exploit transactions in religious antipathy as easy pathways to global recognition and fame”. They fabricate or decontextualise claims of persecution to gain speaking tours, material gains, or preferential asylum status in the West. The media is awash with evidence of some religious leaders and elite who originated the false claim for non-religious purposes. Some of them ignite and pretend to, at the same time, extinguish fire. We condemn these individuals engaging in falsehood and acts that verge on treason.
This is why the Council is extremely disappointed by the false proclamation of the CAN President, which has now shown clearly that the individuals who were propagating the falsehood were, in reality, playing the scripts of CAN.
13. We commend the principled stance of some patriotic and responsible Christians, including the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)’s Director of National Issues and Social Welfare, who noted thus:
Sometimes, our situation is being takenadvantage of by groups who know what they benefit from foreign interests. Those foreign interests have a right to poke their nose into what’s going on in our system, but we also have a right to report things as they are… Also, the spate of killings does not take any pattern. If they open fire in a marketplace, the bullets don’t look for a Christian or spare a Muslim or even spare a baby.
So, all we must be doing now is adopt an all-of-society action to stop this insurgency and also address issues of groupthink. Why run to America when you have a Senate here where you can file your petition? In the end, when they place Nigeria as a country of particular interest, all of us will suffer. But those who run abroad to look for sympathy know why they do that.
14. For being factual, we also commend individuals like Mr Femi Falana, SAN, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, Reno Omokri and Gov. Charles Chukwuma Soludo, among numerous other Christians for their sincerity, while we denounce irresponsible bigots in religious garbs and ethnic irredentists who fail to realise that you don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. The citizens that falsely concoct a genocide claim, which is capable of igniting divisions and religious war that can turn the country into a battlefield field are neither patriotic nor Godly.
Countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. are worse off today because bombs don’t discriminate destruction.
15. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s re-imposition of the “Country of Particular Concern” (CPC) designation on Nigeria is an act of political cynicism. This is the same designation placed on China and Russia. This designation of Nigeria was lifted by the previous U.S. administration in 2023 when the USA acknowledged the complex reality. Its re-imposition by President Trump is not based on new facts: it is a political tool, wielded by lobbyists, and it cheapens the very idea of “religious freedom.”
16. Since independence, Nigeria has walked within the circle of non-aligned nations, free to choose partners for mutual benefits. As such, Nigeria has always extended a welcome to all, to China as to Africa’s broader family. We have many opportunities to harness from diplomatic diversification, with each relationship moulding a building block in our development project or offering a pathway towards our national interest. It is quite troubling to note that our progressive relationship with China, our economic recovery, and the increase in our domestic oil refining capacity, which has reduced importation of fuel to the barest minimum, have suddenly attracted this unsavory development.
17. So, there is a clear picture: some U.S. politicians seeking domestic votes; U.S. evangelical groups pushing an ideological agenda; Nigerian separatists pushing for fragmentation; and domestic profiteers seeking personal gain are behind this saber-rattling. This is not a human rights campaign; it is a coordinated information operation.
18. To buttress this point, we must ask the most important question: “Why now?” Why this sudden, intense focus on Nigeria? The answer lies in geopolitics. This campaign escalated immediately after Nigeria, at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, reaffirmed its principled and consistent support for a two-state solution and for the solidarity of the Palestinian people.
19. It is important to note that this narrative of genocide is also being driven by “far-right and pro-Israel actors”. The goal is to create a distraction, a cynical, despicable “whataboutism” designed to deflect from the actual genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. They seek to create a false moral equivalence, screaming about an imaginary “Christian genocide” by Muslims in Nigeria to drown out the world’s condemnation of a real, documented genocide of Muslims in Palestine.
Notwithstanding the fact that there are over 1,000 Christians in Gaza, yet, the United States continues to support the globally-condemned genocide against Palestinians. The same USA that is currently planning to invade Venezuela, a country where Christians constitute 80% of its population, has suddenly become the “messiah of the Nigerian Christians.”
20. The ultimate agenda is not just distraction; it is destabilisation. Our own Foreign Minister, Yusuf Tuggar, has warned the world, in plain terms, “We should not create another Sudan” in Nigeria. The United States is well aware that stoking religious division is the fastest and most effective way to destabilise a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation of over 220 million people like Nigeria. They are using these “tools of foreign manipulation” to fragment Nigeria from within, setting the stage for our collapse, just as it is being planned for South Africa.
21. This agenda is not hidden. We refer to a recent op-ed from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a prominent U.S. foreign policy think tank. In this article, the author, Michael Rubin, asks two questions in the same breath. First: “Is there a Christian genocide?” And second: “Just as Somaliland’s independence has become a U.S. national interest, would Biafran independence also augment regional security?” The geopolitical objective is the fragmentation of Nigeria to achieve the avowed mission of the separatists, in line with the IPOB agenda.
While the NSCIA stands for and promotes equity and fairness, let nobody be under illusion that Muslims would allow themselves to be further decimated and further under-represented through a subterfuge aimed at further increasing the Christian representation in federal appointments from the publicly acknowledged 62% (or heads of armed and security forces already predominantly Christian), and where Islamophobicpolicies, such as recently enacted by the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), would be the norm.
22. We turn to our genuine Christian brothers and sisters. You are not our enemies; you are our compatriots, colleagues and neighbours. We are both, over a long period, Muslim and Christian, victims of a failed security architecture and a brutal criminal insurgency that targets us all. We have never denied our collective pain. Do not let foreign political gladiators or domestic separatists use our real pain to destroy our shared home. We are both, as President Bola Ahmed Tinubuhas rightly said, committed to a Nigeria where “religious freedom and tolerance” are the “core tenet of our collective identity”. We, as Muslims, stand with you against all violence, against all criminality, and against all terror.
23. We affirm that there is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. There is no Muslim genocide in Nigeria.There is no religious intolerance in Nigeria. The Nigerian tragedy is that of poverty, climate change, bad governance over time, and armed criminals who kill indiscriminately while a section of the world seeks to exploit the situation for geopolitical profit.
24. We call on the international community and the press gathered here to reject this false, dangerous, and destabilising narrative.
25. We call on the Nigerian government to redouble its efforts to protect all its citizens, regardless of faith, destroy the bandits and terrorists, expose and hold the domestic instigators of this divisive lie accountable,and shame the foreign lobbyists against Nigeria. We commend the resolve of the government to, with dignity and honour, engage the USA and the rest of the international community on how to eliminate terrorism and banditry in Nigeria and, indeed, in the sub-region.
26. We urge President Trump to retract branding Nigeria a “disgraced country” and rather assist the Nation with credible intelligence, critical logistics and human capacity development to enable the country overcome insecurity in different parts of Nigeria. Genuine assistance requires partnership, not unilateral actions, which might, even if inadvertent, fragment the Nigerian Nation.
27. And we state to the world, as a unified Nigerian Muslim Ummah: we will not be defined by this lie andwe will not accept that our country be fragmented by a foreign agenda. As a people of faith, we believe that the truth will prevail and our unity as a nation will endure.
Thank you.
