Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe of the Diocese of Makurdi, Nigeria, during an interview with ACI Africa on 4 June, denounced the complicity of his government in the systematic genocide of Nigerian Christians after the latest attacks by the Fulani militias.

Bishop Anagbe stressed that the recent incursions of Fulani terrorist attacks, which began on 25 May, have resulted thus far in the slaughter of at least 85 Christians, adding that the Nigerian government has altogether failed to protect his brethren against the continued attacks.

History of Faluni Jihad

Christians in northern Nigeria continue to find themselves in such a precarious situation as a result of the British colonialism that was instituted after conquering the century-old Caliphate, established by the jihadist Usman dan Fodio (1804–1903), who created a new Islamic state, the Fulani empire, in what is now northern Nigeria.

The colonialists saw Christian missionaries as intruders into the Dar al-Islam (Islamic place of peace). At the same time, the educated Catholic laity were seen as irritants who challenged the racism and injustice embedded in colonial rule, thereby slowing the English Crown’s exploitation and trade. When the British vacated Nigeria on 1 October 1960, they left behind a feudal architecture of power—one that has since been exploited by the country’s corrupt and incompetent ruling Islamic elite, for example, by imposing taxes on non-Muslim populations.

In the north of the country, where Muslims are an overwhelming majority of the population, Islamists have continued to manipulate the deep religiosity of their members by presenting themselves as defenders of the faith. This strategy has been employed for political mobilization. Most Nigerian Muslims, inspired by the militant Group of the People of Sunnah for Dawah and Jihad, infamously known as Boko Haram, have continued to view education as a Western ploy to corrode their religion and terrain.

‘Most Nigerian Muslims, inspired by…Boko Haram have continued to view education as a Western ploy to corrode their religion and terrain’

Christians indeed continue to be targeted by the aforementioned Boko Haram and the so-called Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), but the Fulani militants have had government support since Muhammadu Buhari was elected president in 2015. As explained by human rights lawyer Emmanuel Ogebe some years ago:

‘Buhari, who is himself from the jihadists’ Fulani tribe, ha[d] filled his security council with his kinsmen. He infamously refused to visit Benue State after the New Year’s Day Massacre [of 2018] that claimed over 70 lives, then commanded the state governor to go and “accommodate” the Fulani Herdsmen who had killed his people. The Minister of Defense justified the killings, and General Buhari’s Government condones and sometimes outright supports the Herdsmen. Worse still, General Buhari is a life patron of one of the Herdsmen associations that has claimed some of the attacks.’

‘General Buhari’s Government condones and sometimes outright supports the Herdsmen’

In 2001, at an Islamic seminar in Kaduna, then-General Buhari proclaimed: ‘I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria. God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country.’

In the 2023 presidential election, the All Progressives Congress, to which the incumbent president Bola Tinubu belongs, ran a Muslim–Muslim ticket for the first time.

The Actual Situation

While the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip are a point of global concern, and rightfully so—some analysts even referring to the latter as a genocide of the Palestinian population at the hands of the Israelis—the world continues to be silent, willful or not, on the decades-long holocaust of Christians in Nigeria.

The Fulani jihadists initiated their recent wave of attacks on Sunday, 25 May, massacring 20 lay Christians, as well as abducting a priest and several nuns. A week later, in another major attack, also on a Sunday, 1 June, the Fulani murdered at least 43 Christians in Gwer West and Apa counties.

‘Nigeria has the capacity to handle this. It’s just the will that is not there,’ Bishop Anagbe said. ‘The government is involved. The government is aiding, supporting, and abetting these people to continue to kill our people. Period.’

According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past 14 years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria.  In addition, approximately 18,000 churches and 2,500 Christian schools have been attacked, not to mention the dislocation of more than four million refugees, mostly Christian farmers, which makes the Biden administration’s removal of Nigeria from the U.S. list of violators of religious freedom in 2021 unfathomable. In the 2025 Global Christian Relief Red List report, Nigeria was named the most dangerous region for Christians in the world.

‘The Fulani jihadists initiated their recent wave of attacks on 25 May, massacring 20 lay Christians, as well as abducting a priest and several nuns’

I think of the courage of the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, in his public opposition to the National Socialists, had his moral convictions tested when he saw the silence of his church during the rise and rule of Adolf Hitler. His outspokenness was not just limited to the Nazi regime, but against his own Lutheran clergymen who had gone along with Hitler’s racial policies. He put his life at risk as he tried to save Jews from genocide, simultaneously being drawn into the epicenter of a plot to assassinate the Führer. When the plot failed, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in the Gestapo basement on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße and was thereafter sent to the Flossenbürg Camp, where he met his death by hanging.

Pastor Martin Niemöller, who survived eight years in the concentration camps, confessed: ‘Through us, and the church, infinite wrong was done. We accuse ourselves of not standing by our beliefs more courageously, not praying more faithfully, not believing more joyously, and not loving more completely.’

Let us not do the same by remaining silent on the genocide of our brethren in Nigeria.

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